H-1B Visa Architect: Program ‘Hijacked’ to ‘Displace Americans’
Former Rep. Bruce Morrison (D-Conn.) said the 1990 H-1B visa program he helped craft has been “hijacked” to routinely replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. He made his comments during a special that aired Sunday on CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”
CBS Evening News journalist Bill Whitaker explored the controversy surrounding the H-1B visa program that allows American corporations to hire foreign workers. Morrison insisted the bill he helped create was intended to help companies fill scientific jobs with difficult-to-find qualified candidates. He accused companies of shamelessly outsourcing thousands of jobs to younger, cheaper and temporary foreign workers through a loophole that allows companies to hire the foreign workers for jobs paying over $60,000.
“I’m outraged. The H-1B has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans,” Morrison told Whitaker. “It’s really a travesty that should never have been allowed to happen.”
Morrison noted that these types of scientific jobs often earn American workers $120,000 to $140,000 per year. But because foreign workers will take those jobs for far less, American companies often choose outsourcing over valuing their American workers.
“This is not about skills. It is about costs,” Morrison said. “The workers being brought in don’t know anything more than the workers they are replacing. They know less, and that’s why they have to be retrained or trained by the American workers who are being laid off.”
Robert Harrison, a former senior telecom engineer at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, had been called into a meeting in October 2016 along with 80 other employees to learn that their company was outsourcing them for Indian workers. Harrison was told he could stay on the job for four months, receive his salary and even earn a bonus if he trained his foreign replacement.
“Now I’m being told that I am not only going to lose my job, but that I also need to train the people to take my place my job,” Harrison said. “That exceeds angry. I’m really not a violent guy — I love people, but I’ve envisioned myself just back-handing the guy as he’s sitting next to me trying to learn what I know.”
When Whitaker asked Harrison if he felt like he had been “digging his own grave,” Harrison replied that “it feels worse than that.”
“I can’t wrap my mind around training somebody to take my position. You know — that’s my livelihood. How am I supposed to feel?” Harrison said. “It feels like not only am I digging the grave, but I’m going to be stabbing myself in the gut and fall into the grave.”
Harrison’s former coworker, Kurt Ho, also lost his job to outsourcing and was forced to train his replacement.
“I think for once, we need to stand up as Americans and say, ‘Enough is enough. We’re not going to take it any more,'” Ho said.
