By Joe Guzzardi
March 11, 2016
With the Disney IT scandal still percolating,
another egregious case of American worker abuse has
hit the headlines, this time at health care giant
Abbott Laboratories.
A few months ago, Disney fired 500 of its IT
employees, and then forced them to train their
foreign-born replacements or lose their severance.
One former Disney worker with twenty years of
experience and who had earned glowing corporate
evaluations, Leo Perrero, described the experience
of training his less qualified replacements as
humiliating.
Much to Illinois Senator Richard Durbin’s
displeasure, the identical script—fire Americans and
replace them H-1B visa holders—is playing out at
Abbott, headquartered in suburban Chicago. Durbin
sent off a blistering letter to Abbott’s Chief
Executive Officer Miles White urging him to cancel
the estimated 180 layoffs. During a recent Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing, Durbin learned that the
targeted employees had been told that they would be
terminated on April 22 after training their
replacements who will come mostly from India.
Rubbing salt into the wounds, the new overseas
employees will be sent back to India after being
trained, and will therefore not be able to
contribute tax revenues to the local economy.
In his letter, Durbin called out White for “harsh
and insensitive conduct” that cannot be justified
“by whatever marginal financial benefit might accrue
to your company which is already making billions of
dollars in profits every year.” Abbott reported 2015
net earnings of $2.59 billion on $20.4 billion in
sales. The crass corporate behavior offends even
pro-immigration Durbin, a leading Democrat on the
failed Gang of Eight amnesty legislation.
Perrero ended his testimony with a question that
many Americans are asking: How can our law makers
allow this to happen? By “this,” Perrero means
putting qualified Americans on unemployment
insurance, creating great family anxiety, and
eventually even take low-paying jobs that may end
plans to send their children to college.
The H-1B visa has an ugly 25 year history. H-1B
visas were introduced in 1990, and the annual cap
has reached as high as 195,000. Today, the maximum
level is 85,000 including 20,000 who have earned
American university master’s degrees. President
Obama and the Silicon Valley lobby have exerted
intense pressure on Congress to lift or even
eliminate the cap.
Under the law, visa users must have specialized
training or a bachelor's degree in the subject for
which they are being hired; they must be offered the
prevailing wage for that work, and they can take
only jobs for which the employers could not find a
qualified American worker. But employers have
consistently broken the law, and gotten away with
their violations. Countless studies from bipartisan
think tanks have exposed the fraud and abuse. The
Center for Investigative Reporting, the New England
Public Policy Center for the Federal Reserve Bank of
Boston, and the Economic Policy Institute have
spotlighted the flagrant deception and abuse common
in the H1-B program. A 2011 General Accounting
Office report concluded that the departments of
Labor and Homeland Security have ignored their
oversight and enforcement responsibilities as they
apply to visa workers' qualifications and wages.
To date, despite numerous congressional hearings,
the visa’s flaws and its inherent dangers to
American workers remain. But several presidential
candidates have made visas and their deleterious
effect on Americans an essential part of their
campaigns, and created an uptick in the general
public’s awareness, a long overdue step in the right
direction.
U.S.
v. Texas: a Primer
By Joe
Guzzardi
April 6, 2014
Senate Republicans filed an amicus brief to the U.S.
Supreme Court against President Obama’s deferred
action for parents of American citizens and lawful
permanent residents, the so-called DAPA program. Of
the 54-member GOP conference, 43 signed the brief
including Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and
whip John Cornyn (R-TX). McConnell and his
colleagues called Obama’s immigration action a
“brazen challenge” to Congress’ lawmaking powers.
Last month, the House filed a similar brief which
read, in part, that "neither any immigration law now
on the books nor the Constitution empowers [Obama]
to authorize – let alone facilitate – the
prospective violation of those laws on a massive
class-wide scale.”
The amicus briefs are the latest development in the
simmering immigration debate that will come to a
head on April 18 when the Supreme Court hears U.S.
v. Texas, the year’s most important case. When the
court hands down its decision before the June
recess, historians will forever refer to it as a
legal landmark.
The immigration conflict that pits Obama against
Congress dates back at least to 2010. In October of
that year, Obama said on more than 20 separate
occasions that he’s neither a king nor an emperor
and that, therefore, he “just can’t make up laws by
myself."
Yet despite Obama’s comforting words – comforting at
least to Americans who feared that he would
overreach his executive powers to enact an amnesty –
the President soon contradicted himself and ordered
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh
Johnson to draft the DAPA memo which would grant
temporary legal status to about five million illegal
immigrants, and would protect them from deportation.
In so doing, Obama violated the Take Care clause
which orders the president to faithfully execute the
nation’s laws, a key element which the court will
also consider.
Basically, the President couldn’t sell his program
to Congress, so he acted independently and bypassed
the legislative branch. In the eyes of the GOP and
other legal scholars, Obama proceeded
unconstitutionally. Obama and Johnson cannot simply
will new federal programs into existence on a whim,
with a wholesale suspension of immigration law.
Existing immigration laws provide for asylum,
adjustment of status, various visas, removal and
cancellation of removal. But nowhere do they provide
a path for affirmative benefits for illegal
immigrants.
Deportation is not at the heart of the Supreme Court
case. Two lower courts ruled earlier that the
President can continue to exercise discretion on
which aliens the administration chooses to deport or
allows to remain. At issue and for the court to
decide is whether the President can confer
employment authorization documents, Social Security
numbers, disability payments, Medicare and earned
income tax credits. Beyond the federal benefits,
DAPA would inflict costs on state taxpayers, too, in
the form of driver’s licenses and unemployment
insurance.
And there’s still more that the Supreme Court can
fault the administration for. The congressional
Administrative Procedures Act (APA) requires federal
agencies to use notice-and-comment rulemaking when
they promulgate new substantive rules. During the
comment period, Americans can express their opinions
about the proposed laws. This mandatory procedure
was unheeded this time, an indisputable fact.
Based on incontrovertible facts, the court must rule
for Texas. With only eight justices, however, four
seemingly predisposed to Obama’s views and four
opposed, the likely outcome is a 4-4 tie which would
affirm the appeals court’s earlier decision against
DAPA. |