The United States has offered literally millions of opportunities for people to come here and work under employment-based Visa programs. But do we really know the people, their intentions and their loyalties?
A disturbing new story out of Minnesota shows how we may need to drastically change the way we scrutinize the people who are awarded Visas. In this case, a doctor, who had been working under the H-1B Visa program, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for trying to join the Islamic State terrorist group and carry out attacks on US soil.
Apparently, Muhammad Masood had once worked at the Mayo Clinic as a research coordinator and had direct contact with patients. He got the attention of federal law enforcement after he posted messages on an encrypted social media platform and made attempts to travel to Syria and Iraq to “fight on the front lines.”
Every year, lobbyists in DC propose new legislation that will secure work for hundreds of thousands of foreign workers on American soil. We wonder if another Muhammad Masood will soon make an appearance here in America.
With all this new information coming out, no one at the company is commenting about what could happen at the company’s Hartford office.
CT Governor Ned Lamont, who championed a grant for the company worth millions in exchange for expanding their Hartford footprint, did not return our calls.
If anyone inside the office at the Hartford Infosys office feels a need to share some juicy gossip, feel free to reach out … cttechworkers@protonmail.com
US Techworkers, a subsidiary of the Institute for Sound Public Policy (IfSPP), filed a complaint with the Department of Justice this week that showed two Chicago-based nonprofits colluded with companies across the country to hire H-1B Visa workers over American workers.
The complaint, filed against P33 and Techicago (nonprofit agencies based Illinois) and their corporate partners, showed how they willfully and knowingly sought to hire H-1B workers for IT positions in Chicago and across the country. This hiring push, called Chicago H1B Connect, listed hiring advertisements specifically for foreign nationals that are working in the United States under the H-1B visa program.
This is a clear violation of federal US labor laws. Specifically, it’s a textbook case of country of origin discrimination, as outlined by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency created by Congress in 1964 to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These laws were set up to protect Americans of every racial, ethnic, religious and sexual persuasion from discrimination at the workplace.
In recent years. global corporations headquartered in the US have turned to Visa workers for IT staffing as a way to maximize profits. Here in Connecticut, Governer Ned Lamont is using taxpayer money to award grants to companies that have repeatedly violated US labor laws and have a long history of discriminating against American workers. We’ve document countless examples of this on this site.
One Stamford, CT, attorney explained how Techicago and their partner companies violated the law.
“According to US employment laws, you can’t hire someone based on their racial, ethnic or nationality. But that’s exactly what these companies were doing,” she said.
“Imagine if a company created a Want Ad that sought to hire a caucasian Christian man in his 20s and 30s for an Accounting position and added No Women and Minorities Need Apply. But these companies were specifically targeting Indian nationals, because they could pay them a fraction of what an American makes and force them to work long hours.”
As part of their complaint, Kevin Lynn, IfSPP’s Executive Director, described a specific example of what they found in one of the cases it monitored in the complaint against P33 and Techicago, which clearly illustrates how Americans are being discriminated in hiring simply because they are Americans.
“A qualified U.S. worker who applied for an IT job at the University of Chicago never received a return call. But when a Southeast Asian candidate and H-1B worker submitted an identical resume for the same job, the university promptly responded with interest.“
Kevin Lynn, Executive Director for the Institute for Sound Public Policy
A total of 45 companies use Techicago as a pipeline for foreign workers, including John Deere, Caterpiller, Discover Financial Services, University of Chicago. These are name-global companies and institutions with assets totaling hundreds of billions of dollars.
If found guilty, all of them, including Techicago, will be subject to fines as a result of this complaint that could total as much as $10 million.
The DOJ has ruled in favor of Americans in the past, who were able to prove that they were discriminated against in hiring. Bob Heath, a legendary activist for American IT workers, won dozens of cases like this without any legal representation before he succumbed to cancer last year.
To help US Techworkers continue their fight, please consider making a donation. Their efforts have made a huge difference in IT hiring practices on American soil.
This is a must read for everyone before making decisions on who to vote for in upcoming elections.
A Harvard professor who has spent the last 30 years studying immigration – and its effects on the United States – wrote this piece for Politico. His message comes as no surprise to anyone with even a bit of common sense.
When you open up the floodgates and let everyone into the country, there are consequences. And, as usual, it’s the working class who feel the effects the most.
“Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.”
Who benefits the most from unfettered immigration – company owners who are looking for ways to pay their employees less and less every year.
“We don’t need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages. Similarly, the flood of recent news reports on abuse of the H-1B visa program shows that firms will quickly dismiss their current tech workforce when they find cheaper immigrant workers.”
“Companies cannot unlawfully discriminate against a job applicant because they prefer to hire someone with a different citizenship or immigration status,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “We will continue to hold companies accountable, both big and small, for their violations of this federal civil rights law.”
The ruling came after an American worker filed a complaint with the DoJ, in which he showed he was passed over for employment, despite being a highly skilled and having many years of experience in the field.
As part of the decision, Micron will pay the employee $85,000 in back wages. The company will also pay a fine to the DoJ and will have to train its staff on anti-discriminatory hiring practices.
The ruling comes amid a time when Big Business is seeking to hire hundreds of thousands foreign workers, despite laying off a similar number of American workers. They’ve long argued they just can’t find talented Americans, but this argument has been debunked over and over again. Not surprisingly, it’s just a way for management to save money and increase corporate profits.
If you, or someone you know, has been discriminated against in hiring or at the workplace, it is your right to file your own complaint with the DoJ. You can do it here.
US Techworkers is also a great resource for fighting discrimination at the workplace. You can email them at info@ustechworkers.com.
Airline industry experts can’t believe what they are hearing. Boeing is looking to recruit even more programmers from India to write code for their flight systems. This comes after the company saw billions in losses – and hundreds of people dead – in two separate crashes of their 737 Max jet, in which Boeing hired $9 per hour programmers to write code for the jet’s flight system.
After decades of earning the trust of travelers and the US government, the company embarked on a new strategic focus in 1997, after the merger with McDonnell Douglas, that culminated in the 737 Max disaster.
It looks like a new trend is developing on airlines traveling between the US and India. It appears young and heavily intoxicated Indians are whipping out their private parts and urinating wherever – and on whomever – they please.
The latest incident occurred Saturday night, on a flight from New York to New Delhi. College student Aryan Vohra, 21, was drunk and arguing with flight staff and, at one point, urinated on a passenger in Business class.
When the flight landed, Vohra was arrested by police and American Airlines slapped him with a lifetime ban!
Before being placed into custody, the 34 year-old said everything was OK after he allegedly gave the lady cash to have her clothes and pocketbook cleaned.
Mishra was cuffed and put on Air India’s no-fly list.
America has been a magnet to people throughout the world for people who wish to escape their roots and, through a life of hard work, achieve financial independence. But India’s ancient caste system is alive – and even thriving – in America’s tech sector, according to recent law suits filed in US courts.
It’s a big concern in the US tech sector because so many people from India have received US Visas and are working as coders and engineers. In fact, Apple had to take the explicit step to ban the practice in their offices.
But how could this happen today in the US? And could it happening more than we think?
In what has become a yearly ritual, Immigration Voice tried to push yet another piece of bad legislation through Congress and it was shot down before it got a chance to take flight.
In usual fashion, members of US Techworkers – and their supporters – led the fight against this bill. They took to their telephones and called each and every member of Congress to tell them how bad this legislation truly is.
The way this bill is worded, citizens of India would have been rewarded with over 74% of all Green Cards over the next 10 years, with Chinese citizens receiving 12% and citizens from the rest of the world receiving the remainder.
Does that sound equitable to you?
Does that make any sense?
In all reality, this is just a rehash of last year’s S386 bill (the so-called Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act) and others before that.
They just don’t get it. The American people want a fair immigration system that benefits THIS country – not the special interests of another.
This bill is bad in so may ways – but here are four reasons it is bad for our country:
It would have increased the size of the permanent IT workforce by thousands upon thousands of workers, at the very time Big Tech firms like Meta (aka Facebook), Twitter and other companies have announced huge layoffs.
It would choke off all talent from the rest of the world (India has 17% of the world population; why should they get 74% of all Green Cards?).
One of the key voices in Washington selling this to Congress was David Bier, an employee of the Cato Institute.
David Bier
You’ve got to wonder what motivates a guy like this to do the bidding of foreign interests. Is it money? I sure hope he’s getting something for his troubles. Because, in supporting this bill, he is rapidly becoming Public Enemy #1 among voters who are facing a weak job market.
“This guy is a traitor to his country, to the town he was brought up in and … probably to his own mother,” said one Stamford IT worker after the bill was defeated. “He won’t be missed.”
To help US Techworkers continue their fight against bad legislation like this, please make a tax-deductible donation to them here. It might just be your job they save next.
The Communications Director for Governor Ned Lamont’s office, Max Reiss, sought to tamp down a knee-jerk response to a recent CTTechworks.org post, which outlined the ways the state’s $18 MILLION deal with Infosys has turned into an unmitigated failure.
In recently revealed emails, unearthed by an FOI request submitted 6 months ago, Lamont’s brain trust, including Neil Dammando (the Chief of Staff of the Office of Workforce Strategy) and Jonathan Dach (Lamont’s Deputy Chief of Staff), debated ways in which the administration should respond to our post, which explained why the Infosys office in Hartford is a nightmare workplace that is rife with unproductivity.
Reiss bizarrely claimed CT Techworkers is a “trojan horse run by the CTGOP or Yankee Institute” and runs a “targeted and organized Infosys-hate site.”
He went on to advise that Lamont should not respond in any way … but if asked about it, should deflect and remind people how beneficial the deal is to the state.
Dammando agreed with Reiss but advised that this should be kept on the administration’s radar.
For the record, CTTechworkers can say that we have never received a single nickel from either the CT Republican Party or the Yankee Institute. This organization is completely self-funded and most of our membership are registered Democrats.
Having said all of that, we can say we are not “blowing smoke.” In fact, we are using publicly available documents to show that the whole Infosys deal is very bad for our state, our families and even for the Lamont administration itself.
Moreover, we are worried for the state of Max Reiss’s mental health. How did he come up with the notion that we were a “trojan horse” for the GOP? These are the words of a person trying to show they have a grip on public discourse and their fingers to wind of political currents. Instead, they come off as the desperate musings of a person trying to justify his job.
We wish him well, though, and we hope that the state reconsiders its deal with Infosys.
