Prevent citizens from doing the stoop farm labour and “dirty jobs” and underpaid and dangerous construction jobs that undocumented immigrants usually end up doing? Prevent citizens from doing jobs that require specialised skills and education that they don’t have?
If you want to stop illegal immigration, a solution far more cost-effective than a stupid and expensive wall is to heavily fine or incarcerate those employers who knowingly employee undocumented immigrants. For example:
Its very difficult to find another sponsor. In general most employment visas are not portable for the employee. Our entire employment visa system is rife with abuse and exploitation.
Efforts allegedly made to “protect American workers” have the opposite effect. Especially since the people making the laws and the arguments for them fail to account for foreign investment in this country. They create a class of skilled workers who are hired for under market rates who are chained to their employer.
Their employers do not have to obey the law because they have their workers essentially held hostage. The whole idea of “guest workers” has never worked in application. When people stay in a country long enough they grow roots and contribute to the country. H-1B visas are essentially white collar peonage.
People with useful skills the country can benefit from who are locked up with a single employer exploiting them.
Various incidents where an immigrant’s family are held hostage and sex trafficking rings are evidence to the contrary.
Given the rampant abuse of the system in the early 00’s that hasn’t been true in the slightest for a while. Generally the only employment visas which are that easily accepted are “E” international. investor visas. Those are only given to people from countries which do massive trade with the US. The highest one E-2 confers permanent residency and can be literally bought for $250,000 to $500,000
It is very difficult but not impossible. I went to the trouble of helping an H1-B try to find another sponsor when our company lost funding decades ago, but at the time they didn’t have the 60-day grace period so the clock was ticking too rapidly despite our best efforts.
And while I agree about the potential for abuse and exploitation, that’s a problem with the employers and not (as the commenter above implied) with the visa holders.
For the most part, the H1-B system works, with everyone understanding the trade-offs (more hoops to jump through for the employer; the “tethering/chaining” aspect of sponsorship and slightly lower wages for the employee). At least in the tech industry, the standard practise for decades has been that the more desirable sponsors (large or small) help the employee apply for her green card almost immediately as part of the compensation package. And in my industry I also really don’t see any evidence that indicates that citizens with comparable skills are losing out in terms of employment opportunities or wage levels – the demand is that high and the citizen supply is that low.
In the context of current immigration debates, that phrase is most often used by racist demagogues to stir up the bigots and Know-Nothings, the same morons who will complain about government regulation (e.g. OSHA) hobbling businesses and about “evil” unions in their next breath.
But they aren’t “locked up”. They can quit and are free to leave the country and return home within a certain time frame.
This doesn’t begin with extended credit. From the very start, the plan was to traffic these individuals. Help with passage is the beginning of the ruse.
He was laying this exploit on the immigrants, not the “employers”.
Usually what we are seeing is the skillset for the H-1B is either purely STEM related or Professional skills + fluency in another language. Both of which are in high demand and short supply. Especially if the other language is used by countries with a lot of commerce with the US. People talking about employment visas seldom factor in how many countries set up shop in the US. They think its only American companies hiring foreigners. Many times its foreign companies bringing over its own staff or hiring people locally.
Which is both detrimental to our country’s work force and the worker. Since these people have grown roots here, contributed to the economy and have the ability to contribute more to it. The “temporary” status of work visas is detrimental in general and serves no actual function. Work visas should be convertable to permanent residency after a certain period of time.
That’s a problem that the wall-supporting anti-immigrant crowd doesn’t want fixed. They don’t want any path to citizenship that makes it easier for brown-skinned people and non-English speakers and non-Christians to gain the same rights and privileges they have. Bigotry and nativism have kept the entire system deliberately broken and needlessly complex for a long time, to the point where we ought to send that statue back to France or at least remove the Emma Lazarus poem at the base.
Yes. Employers who want quality H1-B employees usually offer help negotiating the system as part of the employment agreement. It benefits everyone.
They can, but the usual result is once the worker gets their green card, they flee. So its not done very often and only if the worker has some form of leverage on the employer. What an employer can do and what they usually do are two different things. In the end, the immigrant is exploited and no tangible benefit is conferred to “American workers”.
Your poster is cute. But misses the reality of workplace immigration. Essentially begging the question but not bothering to go into detail for the reasons why or the effects. Our immigration system is poorly maintained, subject to a shitload of arbitrary decisions/policies, easily exploited and doesn’t serve the nation in an adequate manner.
I have a man from Ghana who is trying to get to the States the proper way (he got to Tijuana via southern passage) living on one side of me, and a woman from Guatemala who was deported without her children, who was trying to get back into the States illegally (notice that the method is illegal, not the person), lost her life savings to a known coyote here in town, and by our advice is looking for a better way to reconnect with her kids – possibly a different country of residency.
If I ask nicely, and maybe compensate them for their time, they might be willing to answer some questions for us.