Highly educated Americans with much-sought-after technical and scientific skills have been complaining for years about not being able to find jobs or being replaced by foreign workers who have come to this country on H1b visas (Congress authorizes only 65,000 H1b visas annually, for hiring foreign workers with skills that can’t be found here). Turns out they were right. The Department of Labor has finally started cracking down on law firms and corporations deliberately bypassing federal laws aimed at protecting American workers from being displaced by foreigners willing to work for much less.
When they apply for H1b visas, U.S. companies must first certify that they cannot find any qualified American applicants. But, as Chicago network engineer David Huber discovered, the certification process can be rigged. Huber, a University of Chicago graduate with NASA management experience, had to train his own replacement at Commonwealth Edison. He claimed Chinese nationals were given access to Commonwealth Edison data communication switches controlling the Chicago electrical grid. Huber told The Examiner that when he applied for a Cisco Systems job advertised in the Chicago Tribune last year, he noticed that the contact was not a Cisco hiring manager, but an attorney working for the nation’s largest immigration law firm, Fragomen, Del Ray, Bernsen & Loewy.
A subsequent Labor Department audit uncovered evidence that the New York-based Fragomen- whose client list includes many Fortune 500 companies – was improperly advising clients to disqualify American candidates so they could hire much cheaper foreign workers. In an unprecedented move, Labor Department officials are now auditing all of Fragomen’s pending visa applications.
The probe has been extended to San Francisco where LawLogix was caught red-handed submitting more than 100 fraudulent applications. The software firm is now barred from submitting any applications for the next three years. And after a video of Cohen & Grigsby attorney Lawrence Lebowitz brazenly telling clients that “our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker” was posted on YouTube, Labor officials placed the Pittsburgh law firm on “supervised recruitment” – which means heightened scrutiny for all future visa applications.
The displacement of highly qualified American scientific and technical workers by foreign visa holders has gotten scant attention by the media, which tends to focus on protecting illegal immigrants in sanctuary cities like Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. The legal part of our broken immigration system has gotten much less attention, which is why it may very well pose as grave a threat to national security as porous borders.
