Sold Out

How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers

Michelle Malkin, John Miano

• Publisher: Mercury Ink
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501115967
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The #1 New York Times bestselling author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and selling out America's best and brightest workers. In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly told myths spread in the media like these: Lie #1: America is suffering from an apocalyptic "shortage" of science, technology, engineering, and math workers. Lie #2: US companies cannot function without an unlimited injection of the "highly skilled" and "highly educated" foreign workers, who offer capital and energy that American workers can't match. Lie #3: America's best and brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate that they've made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to foreign labor. For too long, open-borders tech billionaires and their political enablers have escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and motives. It's time to trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers deserve better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.

PART I: THE H-1B BETRAYAL

1

When Barry Met Jennifer

A Texas Mom’s Epic Reality Check for the White House

Jennifer Wedel describes herself as a “YouTuber” with “a sassy mouth.”

The thirty-two-year-old Fort Worth resident has a Texas-sized personality to match. She’s wild about her family, Schlotzky’s sandwiches, and fart jokes. Jennifer is also a self-described “big, dorky nerd” about technology and social media. Her YouTube channel, “Momma Wedel,” documents her family’s “crazy Texas life” with home videos titled “TICKLED TO DEATH,” “LITTLE GIRL PICKING HER BOOGERS,” “NINJA MOM SNOOPS,” “SILLY STRING PRANK,” and “WEIGHT LOSS FAIL.”¹

On January 24, 2012, Jennifer departed from her usual wisecracking family fare. The vivacious online denizen had spotted a “little red telephone” symbol on her YouTube account dashboard.

“What the heck is that?” she thought.²

When she clicked on the icon, she was directed to a solicitation for citizen videos as part of a special event tied to President Obama’s State of the Union Address. YouTube’s parent company, Google, launched the public contest in cooperation with the White House—a high-visibility opportunity for the social media giant to promote its online video chat service, Google+ Hangout.

Jennifer read the invitation:

If you could hang out with President Obama, what would you ask him? Would your question be about jobs or unemployment? The threat of nuclear weapons? Immigration reform? Whatever your question is, submit it on YouTube for the opportunity to ask the President directly in a special interview over a Google+ Hangout from the White House.³

Momma Wedel marched to her dimly lit bedroom and recorded a twenty-second video. With minimal makeup and noticeable bags under her eyes, the busy wife and mom of two young daughters pointed a wobbly camera toward herself, licked her lips, and began:

“Mr. President, my husband was laid off three years ago. He has an electrical engineering degree and has yet to find a job,” she divulged, shaking her head.

“My question to you,” Jennifer addressed the commander-in-chief bluntly with a slight southern drawl, “is how are you preventing foreigners with H-1B visas from getting American citizens’ jobs?”

• • •

Foreign nationals who enter the U.S. legally are admitted as immigrants (aliens seeking permanent residence), nonimmigrants (such as students, diplomats, tourists, and workers), or refugees/asylees. The H-1B is a nonimmigrant guest worker visa created in 1990.⁴ The employer—not the foreigner or a family sponsor—makes the visa application to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of the Department of Homeland Security. An initial H-1B visa is issued for three years. It can be renewed for another three years. If the H-1B worker’s employer sponsors him or her for legal permanent residency, the H-1B visa can be extended in one-year increments until a green card is granted.

H-1B visas are restricted to “specialty” occupations that normally require a college degree or equivalent professional experience—plus, believe it or not, fashion models.⁵ About three-fifths of H-1B visas go to workers in computer-related occupations. Most of the rest go to engineers, scientists, mathematicians, architects, surveyors, elementary and secondary school teachers, nurses, physical therapists, accountants, physicians, and those Beautiful People.

There are three steps required to get an H-1B visa. First, the employer files a Labor Condition Application (LCA) with the Department of Labor. The LCA certifies that an employer will comply with all the labor protection requirements of the H-1B program. Filing an LCA is a simple process that can be done online and costs nothing. Congress requires the Department of Labor to approval all LCAs within seven days as long as the form is filled out correctly. The Department of Labor is also prohibited from subsequently reviewing approved LCAs. As we’ll explain in more detail later, the LCA process is nothing more than a meaningless paper-shuffling exercise. Next, the employer files an I-129 “Petition for Non-Immigrant Worker Form.” This complex and costly process usually requires hiring a lawyer. If the petition is approved, the last step is for the worker to obtain the visa from the State Department. Consular offices may require an in-person visit, interview, fingerprinting, and document review. The successful applicant receives a visa stamp in his passport and can now enter the U.S.

The media often use inflated terms such as “best and brightest” and “highly-skilled” to describe H-1B workers. In reality the standards are low. A bachelor’s degree, even a mail-order one from an Indian diploma mill, is all it takes to qualify.⁶ As tech journalist Robert X. Cringely points out, “when Bill Gates complained about not being able to import enough top technical people for Microsoft, he wasn’t talking about geniuses, just normal coders.”⁷

There is a visa for the world’s truly talented high achievers called the O visa, which is uncapped and available only to “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement” in the fields of “sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements” who seek “to enter the United States to continue work in the area of extraordinary ability.”⁸ Google, Apple, and other top tech companies “will take as many of the O visa candidates as they can get, but there just aren’t that many who qualify, which is why quotas aren’t required,” Cringely explained. “So when Microsoft—or Boeing, for that matter—says a limitation on H-1B visas is keeping them from getting top talent, they don’t mean it in the way that they imply. If a prospective employee is really top talent—the kind of engineer who can truly do things others simply can’t—there isn’t much keeping the company from hiring that person under the O visa program. H-1B visas are about journeyman techies and nothing else.”⁹

• • •

Darin Wedel’s LinkedIn page is impressive.¹⁰ Damned impressive. He’s an American tech company’s ideal job candidate. Or rather, he should be.

The science whiz graduated from Texas A&M in 1995 with a BS in electrical engineering. He worked as a process engineer for Hitachi Semiconductor and Dominion Conductor. In 2000, he joined Texas Instruments, the renowned chipmaker whose products range from your high school kid’s graphing calculator to microcontrollers, data converters, processors, and integrated circuits used in touch screens, medical devices, surveillance cameras, tablets, and cars. He is “skilled in complex Electro-Mechanical, vacuum, gas delivery, materials, and quality control systems,” “adept at learning complex hardware and software,” and “skilled in leading edge manufacturing techniques: Six Sigma, SPC, DOE, ISO, FMEA, Predictive Maintenance, defect controls, material inspection, process optimization, capital equipment installation, and equipment development.”

Wedel co-led a cutting-edge development project evaluating a “liquid chemical process precursor” for “next generation silicone nitride film.”¹¹ Silicone nitride film, which resists moisture and oxygen, protects the surface of semiconductors. Wedel’s work resulted in a valuable patented process for his company. Scaling the corporate ladder, he spearheaded development of more than forty complex electromechanical systems and manufacturing improvements.

The Texas Instruments electrical engineer prospered. He bought a nice home and lived the middle-class American dream, which talking heads in both political parties bloviate about every election cycle.

But after nine years of working hard and playing by the rules, Darin got laid off.

To the newspapers, he was just another bloodless statistic. “Layoffs spread to more sectors of the economy,” the New York Times blandly reported in January 2009.¹² “Tech layoff parade continues: TI cuts 12 percent of workforce,” ZDNet.com wrote.¹³ The company slashed some thirty-four hundred positions through direct pink slips or “voluntary retirement” offers to “older” workers.

To his own company, he was a faceless liability. After nine successful years in the heart of the Dallas–Fort Worth tech corridor, the Lone Star State’s own Silicon Valley, TI tossed forty-three-year-old Darin into the swirling currents of the highly skilled unemployed—and threw his family into financial and emotional chaos.

• • •

To fully appreciate the political fraud and continuing bureaucratic molestation of America’s nonimmigrant visa programs, we must first travel back to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (known as the McCarran-Walter Act). Congress enacted the Democratic-sponsored bill over President Truman’s veto to manage the flow of foreigners into America. With the Cold War and communist threat foremost on the nation’s mind, an overwhelming majority of lawmakers approved McCarran-Walter’s continuation of a national origins quota system (in place since 1924), combined with an orderly process to handle immigrants based on humanitarian reasons and a new set of visa preferences based on family reunification or skills.¹⁴

The law created two main guest worker visas: H-1 for guest workers with distinguished ability and H-2 for ordinary guest workers. (A third category was created for trainees.) The H-1 and H-2 visas had one feature in common and one major difference. Both visas were strictly guest worker programs. The alien had to maintain a foreign residence to qualify. The H-1 visa differed from the H-2 visa in that it did not require showing that Americans were not available for the job. It is clear from the legislative history¹⁵ that Congress originally intended that the H-1 visa would be restricted to truly extraordinary people, such as distinguished professors and other “outstanding scholars, scientists, and teachers” of “exceptional ability whose services are needed in the country.”¹⁶ Lawmakers mistakenly assumed that for a small...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Part I: The H-1B Betrayal
• Part II: An Alphabet Soup of Visa Fraud, Abuse, and Corruption
• Part III: The Big Government–Big Business Betrayers of America’s Best and Brightest Workers
• Conclusion: Pro-American Immigration Reform
• Appendixes
• Acknowledgments
• About Michelle Malkin and John Miano
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright