Panelists examine H-1B abuse during National Press Club Newsmaker
A Jamaican-born fashion model plans to refile her lawsuit against Trump Model Management arguing that she was paid only $3,380 in three years instead of the "promised" $75,000 annual wage, her attorney told a National Press Club Newsmaker April 8.
"It shocked my conscience," said Naresh M. Gehi about the treatment of his client, Alexis Palmer. "We are not giving up," said the New York-based immigration lawyer who is refiling the case with the Department of Labor in New York.
The New York-based immigration lawyer spoke on a panel about the uses and abuses of the H-1B guest worker visa program. Palmer's lawsuit against Trump Model Management seeks more than $200,000 in back wages. The agency issued her an H-1B visa.
Republican Party presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is not named as a defendant. However, it's the first time in a U.S. presidential campaign that a foreign guest-worker program has attracted such attention, said Jamie Horwitz, chairman of the NPC Newsmaker Committee and moderator for the event.
Ronil Hira, a national expert on immigration and an associate professor of political science at Howard University, pinpointed the overall uses and abuses in the H-1B visa program.
"It's not the Facebooks or the Googles. It's companies like Infosys [an India-based firm] and others who are getting the most visas," Hira said.
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Hira said, "Some of these loopholes [in the visa program] are intentional, some are not, but they all add up to a system
that encourages employers to exploit the H-1B program for cheap labor." Although the program is intended to fill skills gaps "with supposedly specialized workers," Hira said at the Newsmaker that 50 percent have only Bachelor's degrees.
"Employers have figured out that they can bring them in [foreign workers] at much lower wages than American workers. It's so easy to do," Hira said.
No one knows how many H-1B workers are currently in the United States, Hira said. Although the H-1B is capped at 85,000 this year with 20,000 more permitted with advanced degrees, 650,000 H-1B guest workers are estimated to be in the United States at any one time. An additional 45,000 employers, such as universities and government-research entities, are not subject to the H-1B cap.
"The goal for these companies is to try to offshore as much as possible," Hira said. "For $6-$8,000 (annually), you can hire an [information-technology] IT person in India.... This business model is extraordinarily profitable."
The U.S. prevailing wage "is set so low that companies can get a greater than 40 percent discount with these workers," Hira said.
American workers train their foreign replacements and are forced to sign "non-disparagement agreements". With this "knowledge transfer", panelists noted, their replacements figure out what tasks can move overseas.
"They have this down to a science," Hira said. But some jobs are too "sticky" to travel. At Southern California Edison, for example, 300 of 500 jobs replaced by foreign workers stay here but at much lower wages, he said.
Several bills before Congress seek either to dramatically expand the H-1B program or to reform it with better protections for American and foreign worker and high-wage requirements.
"Employers weren't supposed to be able to use this [visa] program to withhold wages," said panelist Greg Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, AFL-CIO. He cited Trump's criticism of H-1B program when Trump said it was "very, very bad for workers" while also admitting he used them to service his properties. "It's the new business model," he said.