It’s nearly 8 p.m., and inside a state office building two dozen computer experts design and troubleshoot a system that will take and process millions of unemployment claims each year.
It’s a $200 million Employment Development Department project, but with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B.
Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook say they need hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs here because American colleges can’t crank out computer science grads fast enough. In 2013, the industry lobbied Congress on the issue to the tune of almost $14 million.
Those companies, who need workers with highly specialized knowledge like computer expertise, are awarded the visas through a lottery process. It’s allowed under the Immigration and Nationality Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The visas can be valid as long as six years.
News10 reached out to several H-1B workers over the past three months, and they all declined to comment for this story.
“The program is going unfettered, unchecked, without bounds, and it’s all in the interest of profit,” Computer Database Administrator Chris Brown said. He said was displaced by one of the special visa workers in 1996, and he has been following the issue for the past 18 years.
Hewlett Packard laid off Brown from its Roseville plant during the height of the H-1B program, when as many as 300,000 of the workers were allowed to take jobs in the U.S. The cap for H-1B visas today is 85,000 after federal audits showed there were abuses in the program. There’s an effort on Capitol Hill to raise the ceiling again to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. And, during a recent presidential trip to India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked President Obama to help loosen the restrictions on the H-1B program. India’s tech outsourcing industry makes billions of dollars every year sending programmers and engineers overseas to work for U.S. companies.
Brown is watching those new developments with interest. When he lost his job in 1996, it was just two weeks before Christmas. He says he’s afraid more Americans will be replaced by foreign-born workers.
“I’m a single income, so on that particular day, as a direct result of this program, we were unable to provide Christmas presents and I kept telling my kids that day that Santa might not show up,” Brown said.
A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said he would not comment on layoffs that happened 18 years and three CEOs ago, but he defended the visas as a needed resource for HP and the industry as a whole.
U.S. Department of Labor data shows more than 1,100 H-1B visas were certified for workers in the Sacramento area in 2014. The largest number was for Accenture, an IT company that is currently holding state contracts totaling more than $1 billion. It has 125 H-1B visa holders in Sacramento. Deloitte has another 28, and there are four dozen of them filling positions in state offices in the Capital City.
There’s no way to say exactly how many of the visa holders are doing work directly or indirectly with the state. Hundreds of the local H-1B visa holders were awarded to third-party contractors known as “body shops.” Body shops apply for the visas and then farm them out to larger IT companies looking to hire more foreign workers.
Accenture spokesman Mark Bonacci said while the company doesn’t disclose the number of employees it has by city, state or region within the U.S., “the vast majority of our people working in the U.S. are U.S. citizens and residents.”
“Only a very small percentage of Accenture’s employees in the U.S. are H-1B visa holders,” he said.
In an email, Deloitte spokesperson Courtney Flaherty said, “Our primary focus is hiring U.S. workers, including experienced California professionals and graduates.
“Our use of U.S. work permits is entirely consistent with the intent of the Federal Government’s immigration program to complement our domestic workforce with highly-skilled professionals,” she added.
Does anyone really believe there’s a shortage of willing workers in California to do this work? We’re not talking about gene-splicing or physics. California has a 12.3% unemployment rate. They are bringing in low-skilled IT people because they are cheaper than domestic versions. In most cases, they avoid paying health insurance for these people. They also get to work them like slaves. If they complain, the service that brings them over just sends them back and brings in someone who does not complain.
But, this is just the beginning. Once Jeb is installed in the White House, it is open season on Americans.
I am amused, and forgive me for this, that the US has conflicting royal families. The Bush clan vs the Clintons is a bit like the Wars Of The Roses was over here, with the winners getting to slaughter tens of thousands of troops who thought, wrongly, they might end up on the winning side.
Seriously, the war against ordinary people is never ending. The mistake was getting rid of the original concept of slavery, because employing ‘workers’ under more glamourous titles is the new slavery. Curious how all leaders and bosses still employ slaves.
A Rose By Any Other Name. Seems relevant here.
Perhaps some things never change, other than a name or title.
By the way, would this war between the Bush and the Clinton be joined by a third claimant of black, female pretenders? The future looks interesting if chaotic.
We can only hope the loser of this war ends up under a car park.
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