Mica said the bill, HR 2154, would close "a loophole in current immigration law and protecting American jobs." The bill prevents employers from renting employees to third parties once they arrive in the U.S., a practice Mica said provides U.S. corporations a "back door to cheap labor."

But critics said Mica's bill would be useless in addressing L-1 visa abuse and won't make a difference in the hiring cheap, foreign labor to replace Americans workers.

Norm Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis and an activist on high-tech labor issues, called the bill "vaporware." "It's just a ruse being used to make the public think that Congress is really going to address the issue of tech guest workers as cheap labor, when in fact they want to preserve U.S. firms' access to cheap labor," Matloff said.

The L-1 visa is one of several non-immigrant visa categories created to enable corporations to bring in workers from other countries. Visa holders are called "intracompany transferee" and the maximum stay for the category is 7 years. According to Mica, there are currently over 325,000 L-1 visa holders in the United States.

Unlike the H-1B visa, a non-immigrant visa that allows companies to hire foreign skilled workers for their own use, the L-1 visa has no cap and fewer restrictions.

When U.S. companies started to hit the annual H-1B cap, which was raised from 65,000 to 195,00 per year in 2000, companies turned to the L-1 as a way to get around restrictions. As a result, L-1 visa applications have grown in the last few years, according to Jessica Vaughn, senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

The number of L-1 visas issued rose 51 percent between 1997 and 2001, from 80,065 to 120,538, according to CIS.

Mica's bill would eliminate abuses like using L-1 visas to replace several hundred U.S. IT workers at Siemens Information and Communication Network division in Lake Mary, Fla., in December 2002. Siemens ICN hired TATA Consultancy Services, an Indian-based job shop, to provide workers from India to replace American IT workers in Florida. Siemens ICN even required the U.S. employees to train their Indian replacements as a condition of receiving their severance pay.

Tata used L-1 visas to bring India employees to its U.S. subsidiary in Florida. Once the Indian employees arrived, Tata contracted them out to Siemens.

Still, critics of Mica's bill said the restriction it proposes is no restriction at all. To get around the new L-1 visa policy proposed by Mica, Siemens would simply say it was subcontracting the project to a company like Tata. Then, critics said, Tata could say visa holders were working solely for Tata, not Siemens, even though visa holders might make frequent visits to the Siemens site, Matloff said.

Mica's bill is expected to be referred to the House Immigration, Border security and Claims subcommittee.

A spokesman in Mica's office said the bill has generated a lot of "positive response," but no other lawmakers have signed on yet. The spokesman said similar legislation could be introduced in the Senate.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved