The Editorial Board actually makes a good point, which then takes an insane Leftist World turn in the last paragraph
Workers Betrayed by Visa Loopholes
It hardly needs saying that immigration policy should not undermine Americans’ jobs, wages or working conditions. The problem is that what some companies want — cheap, exploitable, disposable labor — is exactly what the system can be twisted into giving them.
Former workers at Walt Disney World in Orlando or at Southern California Edison, the power utility, can tell the story. Those two companies recently laid off hundreds of tech employees, who were replaced by temporary workers recruited by outsourcing firms based in India.
These are only two of many troubling episodes involving the H-1B program, which provides up to 85,000 visas a year to foreigners, mainly highly skilled technical workers. The program was created to allow companies to fill gaps in their work force with specialized employees they cannot find in the United States. But the law has loopholes, and companies here and overseas ruthlessly exploit them. A huge industry has risen to meet labor demand in the information-technology sector, with the imported workers being employees of the outsourcing firms.
The Disney story is all the rage, as it should be. It’s beyond disgraceful what they did, and it will be interesting to see if the park’s attendance suffers. The Magic Kingdom saw attendance surge in 2014, while Orlando’s Sea World say their figures decline by 8 percent, which is blamed on the movie “Blackfish”, about the supposed poor treatment of the Orca’s, which Sea World disputes. Might the reports of Disney forcing employees to train their imported replacements cause a similar decline? Not much people can do about Edison.
And, the NY Times is correct about the problems with the H-1B program and the need for reform. They’re further correct regarding the first paragraph, that immigration policy should not undermine American jobs, wages, nor working conditions. That said, the NY Times, including the Editorial Board, has long fought for not only treating illegal aliens, with supposedly 35-40% being people who overstayed visas, with kid gloves, but legalizing them in some manner, both conditions which negatively affect American jobs, wages, and working conditions.
A mass influx of foreigners doing the jobs of the workers they displace is clearly not what the law intended. Congress surely did not want to give companies a more efficient means of slashing payroll costs while pushing more people to the curb. But despite common perceptions about the H-1B law, it does not require companies to recruit American workers before looking overseas.
Yet, we have a mass influx of illegals who create problematic working conditions for legal American citizens.
The program badly needs reforming, which even members of Congress who are otherwise far apart on immigration issues agree on. Senators Durbin and Charles Grassley of Iowa have proposed tightening the rules to require companies to work harder to find people in this country to fill jobs, to post job openings on the Labor Department website and to pay fairer wages. They would also give the government more authority to investigate fraud, and added protections for H-1B workers, who themselves are vulnerable to exploitation because of their dependency on their employers.
Yes, the program should be overhauled. It would be a simple matter to pass these types of rules. But, of course, illegal immigration
Many of these good ideas were contained in a Senate bill to overhaul the immigration system. That bill died, killed by hard-liners in the House who objected to its provisions for unauthorized immigrants.
That was a tragedy, because worker protection has always been a core ideal of comprehensive immigration reform, which would include allowing 11 million unauthorized immigrants to seek legal status and work without fear. With no immediate possibility of such an immigration overhaul, opportunistic tech companies are pursuing their own narrow agenda, pushing for vast increases in H-1B visas. That might help their recruiting problems, but leave much of the system as dysfunctional as ever. Better to fix immigration with the right goals in mind: a fair deal for all workers and their families.
So, on one hand, the Times’s EB wants a program that brings in people legally (though despicably) to be fixed. On the other, they want mostly low skilled, often illiterate, often unable to speak English, often low or un-educated, to be legalized, who can then be used to replace legal citizen jobs.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
Read: NY Times Very Upset Over Legal Immigration Program That Replaces Citizen Workers »
