States, Federal Government
Hire Foreign Workers

By Wayne Lutton

tate and federal government agencies from coast to coast are hiring foreign workers for good-paying jobs at the expense of American citizens. Despite the availability of tens of thousands of highly-trained recent college graduates and high national unemployment rate pegged by the Labor Department at 8.9 percent for white-collar workers, American governments are using the federal H-1B foreigner-employment program to import foreign workers, shutting out unemployed Americans.

The hiring of foreigners with taxpayer dollars flies in the face of new reports of U.S. workers hit by layoffs. In February American businesses cut over 308,000 jobs, adding to the more than 380,000 private-sector positions and half-million manufacturing jobs that were lost last year.

"The labor market situation has deteriorated dramatically and is weighing heavily on consumer confidence and spending," said Richard Yamarone, an economist with Argus Research Corp.

Federal agencies that have hired H-1B non-citizen workers include the Argonne National Laboratory, U. S. Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, Department of the Navy, Department of Veterans Affairs, U. S. Department of Agriculture, U. S. Naval Academy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratories.

State governments using public money to retain foreign nationals at a time when large numbers of qualified Americans are seeking employment include the Arizona Department of Transportation, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, California Department of Transportation, Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety, Indiana Department of Transportation, Louisiana Department of Public Safety, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Minnesota Department of Transportation, New Jersey Department of Transportation, New York Public Library, Tennessee Department of Transportation, and the Virginia Department of Corrections.

The state of Florida under Republican Gov. Jeb Bush has been an especially prominent employer of H-1B visa holders. The Florida Department of Corrections, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Department of Health, and Florida Department of Transportation are among the state agencies that have hired foreign professionals.

The state of Ohio, led by Republican Governor Bob Taft, presents a case study of the types of good jobs going to foreigners instead of Americans. At least eight Ohio state agencies have hired H-1B workers, most of them citizens of India and the Pacific Rim countries of China, Korea, and Taiwan. The Ohio Department of Job & Family Services has hired a number of foreign computer programmers and analysts at starting salaries ranging from $50,336 to over $64,000.

When asked why his department hires foreign citizens for well-paying jobs, the Director of Job & Family Services, Tom Hayes, replied, "We here believe in the American dream…but we can't say that we have to hire people who are American citizens."

The H-1B visa program, a provision of the 1990 Immigration Act, was created to allow American companies to hire foreign professionals at a time when the high-tech industry complained that a huge labor shortage was looming. Although the shortage never materialized, Congress expanded the program from an initial 65,000 temporary visas, good for up to six years, to 115,000 visas in 1999, to 195,000 foreign workers admitted annually through this year.

Under the H-1B program, employers are not required to document a shortage of qualified Americans for a particular job opening. They simply pay an application fee of $1,000 per employee, which is written off as a cost of doing business. In the case of government agencies, American tax dollars pay the fees used to hire foreign workers and keep Americans out.

Corporations and government agencies like to hire foreigners because they help satisfy the elites' demands for diversity and multiculturalism. At the same time, private companies can pay them lower wages and fewer benefits than Americans would expect for similar work. The pay-off for foreign workers is that they receive higher pay in the United States than they would at home, and employers often sponsor them for permanent residence. For hundreds of thousands of non-citizens, the H-1B program has become a backdoor entry into America.

The H-1B program is not the only way that non-citizens can work legally in the United States. Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, discovered that more than 715,000 foreigners were issued employment visas in 2001 (the most recent figures available). Another 110,000 non-immigrants received permission to work after they arrived in the United States.

Congress has the authority to end these practices. The various non-immigrant work visa programs can simply be terminated. But the general public has yet to make this a pressing issue.