Immigration-Related Hip Hop
"If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name." --M.I.A. "Paper Planes". Kala., Interscope Records, 2007.
Yes, I have a one-track mind. Fortunately, M.I.A. has many tracks, many of which are quite good.
H-1B Visa Fraud Alleged in Iowa (and a Defense of the H-1B program!)
U.S. Attorney Matt Whitaker announced yesterday that his office and federal immigration enforcement authorities had uncovered an alleged scheme here in Iowa involving the H-1B visa program. Whitaker alleged that U.S. computer companies Vision Systems Group Inc. and Pacific West Corp claimed to have H-1B employees located in Iowa, when in fact, the H-1B employees were actually located in larger coastal cities. If you're not familiar with the H-1B program, you're probably wondering why and how this would be a crime.
Employers of H-1B workers are required to pay these employees at least the minimum of the "prevailing wage" for the specific occupation in the specific geographic area where the employee will be working. Because of cost-of-living differences and a host of other economic factors, the prevailing wage for a software engineer working in Des Moines, IA, is considerably lower than the prevailing wage for a software engineer working in Manhattan or Los Angeles. So, basically, Whitaker is alleging that the computer companies were claiming that their H-1B employees were working in Iowa, when in fact they were working in coastal cities, so that the employer could pay the employees considerably less money.
If true, this is an unwelcome development, and certainly an incident Sen. Charles Grassley and other anti-H-1Bers will point to as an example of the the visa program's supposed inherent evil. For the uninitiated, the H-1B visa program allows the U.S. government to issue a total of 65,000 visas per year to foreign workers who qualify for an H-1B visa and want to come work for U.S. employers. In order to qualify for an H-1B visa, the hiring company must have a position available that qualifies as a "specialty occupation". In very general terms, a specialty occupation is one that requires a minimum of a bachelor's degree in a related field of study. Further, the position must be an occupation that requires a theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge. And of course, the worker's educational and professional background must fit the specialty occupation.
As this scandal unfolds across the 6 other states cited by Whitaker, my concern is that these bad apples will be held up by anti-immigration forces as a reason to eliminate or severely restrict the H-1B program. A short-sighted measure of this nature would be an unmitigated economic disaster.
The H-1B visa is the primary vehicle through which immigrant entrepreneurs enter the United States. And according to Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, more than half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants over the last decade. These immigrant-founded tech companies employed 450,000 workers and had sales of $52 billion in 2005 alone. Furthermore, a recent study by William Kerr of Harvard Business School and William Lincoln of the University of Michigan found that in periods when H-1B visa numbers went down, so did patent applications filed by immigrants in the U.S. And when H-1B visa numbers went up, patent applications also increased. If we truly want our country to be the world's preeminent knowledge-based economy, why would we make it more difficult for the world's most entrepreneurial minds to legally find their way to the United States?
For every U.S. employer who abuses the H-1B visa, there are thousands who use the program appropriately, in accordance with the strict letter of the law. With our economy on very unsteady footing, now is not the time to be placing additional restrictions on the H-1B program. The system already has safeguards in place, they simply need to be enforced. So, as long as these H-1B related arrests don't create a backlash against the H-1B program as a whole, they are a good thing. The arrests prove that the appropriate safeguards already exist to hold accountable employers who chose to utilize the H-1B program. Here's to hoping that cooler legislative heads prevail.
Immigration Courts Completely Swamped
National Public Radio does an exemplary job of covering the way our country's immigration laws and enforcement priorities affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike. During yesterday's "All Things Considered" segment NPR produced another revealing and insightful piece examining the degree to which the Bush Administration's immigration enforcement crackdown has completely overwhelmed our immigration courts. Give the full story a listen here.
As the piece points out, over the past new years, the Bush administration's immigration crackdown funded thousands more agents to arrest allegedly illegal immigrants and hundreds more government lawyers to prosecute them. What the Bush administration failed to do, however, is hire the judges necessary to adjudicate (ie., evaluate and rule on) the millions of cases that resulted from the stepped-up enforcement actions.
The sheer numbers involved are staggering: last year 214 immigration judges were asked to adjudicate 350,000 immigration cases. That works out to an average of 1,635 cases for each judge. If the immigration courts operate approximately 255 days per year (factoring in federal holidays), then that means the average immigration judge had to adjudicate over 6 cases per day.
And these cases are no trifling matters. Rather, these judges are almost exclusively dealing with removal (ie., deportation) and asylum claims. As one person during the program put it, "these are the equivalent of death penalty cases, and we're conducting them in a traffic court setting." In other words, despite the judges' heroic best efforts, one could be forgiven for thinking that such a voluminous and overwhelming caseload might not lead to the careful, deliberate and exacting administration of justice.
And, I would argue, one could be forgiven for concluding that the former administration was alright with the idea of judges being rushed, razzed and organizationally at the end of their respective ropes when asked to consider the merits of cases brought by alleged illegal immigrants. This systemic insult to our cherished concept of due process awaits new DHS Director Janet Napolitano. And obviously, during a time when our tax coffers aren't exactly spilling over, it's going to be an enormous challenge for the Obama administration to provide our immigration courts with the resources they need to adequately consider and evaluate these cases. But, for a nation founded by immigrants and built on the backs of immigrants, the least we can do is provide immigrants with a meaningful day in court in front of a judge who isn't at their wits' end. Isn't it?
SCHIP for Legal Immigrants!
In catching up a bit from last week, I'd like to commend President Obama and Congress for passing the "Legal Immigrant Children's Health Improvement Act" (ICHIA) as part of the SCHIP reauthorization.
Under the former law, LEGAL immigrants were generally barred from utilizing Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program for 5 years after they entered the United States as LEGAL immigrants. The new ICHIA legislation authorizes states to waive the senseless and cold-hearted 5 year waiting period.
Given the fact that the expansion of this program will prevent hundreds of thousands of law-abiding, tax-paying U.S. residents from having to inefficiently seek medical treatment through the emergency room, and thereby promote pro-active health care and health care cost containment, it's difficult to imagine that anybody would be against this program. Alas, they were. So congrats to President Obama and the congressional leaders who stepped forward to help make this happen. While ICHIA is the first pro-immigrant legislation signed by President Obama, my most sincere hope is that it won't be the last.
