SAN JOSE — Two members of Congress from California have locked horns over differing approaches to revamping the H-1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers.
Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from San Diego County, has introduced a bill seeking changes to H-1B visas, which he designed to protect Americans. He hopes his bill will reduce outsourcing of U.S. jobs to foreign countries, minimize the number of foreign workers replacing American employees here at home and help retain the nation’s most skilled workers.
The proposed legislation, H.R. 170, is designed to close a loophole in the immigration system that has enabled some companies to bring in cheap foreign labor from abroad for high-skilled jobs.
Issa’s bill would raise the salary requirement for the H-1B visa positions to $100,000 a year, up from the current $60,000 annual wage. By raising the salary minimum to be more in line with average U.S. wages for high-skilled jobs, Issa believes the legislation would reduce the chances that American workers lose their jobs to cheaper foreign labor.
Issa said his legislation “will ensure that our valuable high-skilled immigration spots are used by companies when the positions cannot be filled by the existing workforce.”
One of President-elect Donald Trump’s key policy goals is to bolster hiring of American citizens and reduce the number of U.S.-based jobs being outsourced.
Issa contends his bill would help achieve that goal.
“This bill is simple, bipartisan and is an important step to growing our economy and fixing one of the many aspects of our country’s broken immigration system,” he said.
But Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Santa Clara County Democrat, warned Thursday that she believes Issa’s bill could undermine Silicon Valley’s job market. That’s because tech companies in a location such as Silicon Valley, where software engineers can command a starting wage of $140,000 a year, might still have incentives to use foreign workers for $100,000, Lofgren said.
“Raising the wage from $60,000 to $100,000 would do nothing to prevent the sort of outsourcing abuse we’ve seen under the H-1B visa program,” Lofgren said. “It could worsen outsourcing, particularly for high-income areas like Silicon Valley.”
Lofgren plans to introduce her own bill in a few weeks. Under her plan, employers who pay as much as 2.5 times to three times the prevailing wage in their metro area would get first preference to hire people through the H-1B visa program.
Lofgren said her bill would prioritize allocation of H-1B visas and jettison the current lottery system that’s based on the $60,000 pay level for high-skilled jobs.
“Preference would go first to employers that hire mainly U.S. workers and then to H-1B-dependent employers,” according to a summary of Lofgren’s approach, which was released in June. Lofgren has been working on her bill for more than a year.
“My bill refocuses the H-1B program to its original intent, to seek out and find the best and brightest from around the world,” Lofgren said.
Her legislation would “supplement the U.S. workforce with talented, highly paid, highly skilled workers who help create jobs here in America, not replace them,” she said.
