H-1B Workers Barred from Being Hired by Banks

Staff Writer, Feb 16, 2009

Federal law enforcement agents across the country, in their first attempt to enforce the H-1B amendment to the $789 billion stimulus package; have arrested 11 people in their first crackdown on abuses of this amendment. The H-1B program is a visa program run by the United States government that imposes a 65,000 visa quota on an annual basis and these visas are issued to non-immigrant workers from China, the Philippines, and India to work in the United States in the technology sector of the business world. A program that works in association with the H-1B visa rule is the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which is aimed at rescuing the financial sector of the United States.

Two United States senators, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, feel that the Troubled Asset Relief Program should give priority to American workers before foreign technology workers. Grassley quotes the 7.2 percent unemployment rate in the United States and feels that American workers should be given the priority to work in these jobs before they are given to foreign workers since there are plenty of Americans out of work these days. The H-1B program was created to fill technology jobs in the United States as a temporary measure to supplement a company’s need for hi-tech workers when there aren’t any available in the country.

Senator Grassley made the request when stats were released that the banking industry of the United States requested 21,000 visas for foreign guest workers over the past six years. Grassley and Sanders argue that since the banks will be receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program money, which comes from taxed Americans, than the banks should be hiring American workers. Recently, Microsoft said it was going to cut close to 5,000 jobs, and Grassley wants the company to cut its temporary foreign workers before they cut American workers from their jobs.

The amendment, which was proposed by Grassley and Sanders, has been approved by the House and the Senate conference committee. Within the coming days, the restriction on immigrant tech workers should become law. The H-1B law is supposed to only provide companies with foreign workers when there are no American workers available for certain technological jobs. Workers that are hired with the H-1B law perform the same technological jobs that Americans can perform but for 35 percent less in the salary department. Information Technology companies hire H-1B workers to cut costs in their IT departments when it comes to paying out salaries.

The list of companies that are not supposed to hire H-1B workers include companies such as the Bank of America Corporation, Citigroup, JP Morgan, SunTrust Banks, Wilmington Trust Corporation, Horizon Bancorp, Citizens Commerce Bancshares Inc and Magna Bank. Staffing companies that tend to fill IT jobs for larger corporations continue to publish job opening ads for tech jobs and then ignore all of the responses to the ads to claim that they could not find any eligible American workers so they had to hire an H-1B worker.