Come back and discuss in your own words, rather than in talking points that were handed to you.

This bill would drastically increase the number of H-1B visas issued to foreign professional workers.

As a Human Resources representative, I see first hand how the H-1B visa and employment based green card programs actually work together to drive U.S. citizens in a wide variety of white collar industries from their jobs and even from their careers. To begin with, there is virtually nothing in the law that prevents employers from hiring H-1Bers for open positions even if qualified Americans are available and willing to do the work. Americans are routinely laid off and replaced with lower paid H-1Bers also. In these cases, Americans have practically no legal recourse available under current law.

H-1B is also a dual intent visa, which means an employer may sponsor an H-1Ber for an employment based green card for legal permanent resident status. When a company seeks to sponsor a foreign worker for an EB green card, they are required by law to demonstrate a good faith effort to recruit Americans first. This process is called labor certification. But employers routinely game the labor certification process for green card sponsorship to defraud even well qualified citizen job applicants in favor of low wage foreigners. They use fake job ads and/or bad faith interviews of American citizens to convince the federal government that they tried to find American workers first. These practices are common in non-tech industries as well as high tech industries, but HR people are told to keep quiet about it or lose their jobs.

I would be in favor of a program that issues a small number of self-sponsoring green cards for truly innovative or entrepreneurial foreign nationals on a competitive basis. But very few of the H-1Bers or green card applicants that I have seen in 10+ years even come close to being truly innovative or entrepreneurial. Most are just practitioners with skills that are actually quite common among the domestic workforce. The only thing special about these foreigners is that they will work for substantially less than Americans in order to have a chance to become legal permanent residents. Thus they are used by management to sweeten corporate balance sheets.

The prevailing wage regulations are supposed to insure that foreign nationals are paid the same as their American counterparts in the same job functions, but these regulations are so riddled with loopholes that they are a bad joke.

Since my work allows me to have access to salary records, I can tell you that the labor cost savings for H-1Bers and green card applicants is substantially greater than the costs of filing the applications with the government.

Citizens in all white collar professions should demand that both the H-1B and employment based green card programs be abolished in their current form.

http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2007/05/22/cq_2770.html

The RSCC & NRCC are getting hammered money-wise by their Democratic counterparts, but the RNC itself is still pretty flush.