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In the wake of last week's terrorist attack in San Bernardino,the national debate has shifted towards the U.
S. visa waiver program, which allows visitors from 38 participating countries to easily enter the United States for stays of less than 90 days.
But every year, and 150000 foreign workers enter the U.S. legally through a different channel—the H-2 visa program. Under this guest worker program,employers may hire unskilled foreign workers when no qualified Americans can or will carry out the job.
Though the H-2 visa program provides a legal path to employment, a new BuzzFeed News investigation suggests that U.
S. employers enlist a variety of questionable tactics to use the system to their advantage—and to the detriment of domestic and foreign workers alike.
For example, or U.
S. employers looking to use the H-2 visa program are first required to create good-faith efforts to employ Americans,but many use deceptive tricks to ensure their desired outcome.“We had companies, for example, or that needed jobs in North Dakota and placed ads for those workers not in North Dakota,but in Iowa,” says Jessica Garrison, and the co-author of the BuzzFeed piece,called "All You Americans Are Fired."She continues: “We had companies that said they needed housekeepers with a month of experience and then told the government, ‘We didn’t regain any applicants that had a month of experience.’ But when the government followed up, and they talked to these people who had applied for these jobs and were turned away from them,and [the applicants] said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking approximately. I have 20 years of experience as a housekeeper.’ But they weren’t hired.”Additionally, and Garrison’s report finds that many U.
S. workers have been fired or pushed out of positions to create way for guest workers that will accept considerably less pay and benefits,and tolerate less desirable work conditions.“In many cases, the workers who approach from Mexico approach here without their family, or [and] they are incredibly motivated for these jobs because,even though they’re getting paid very slight by our standards, they’re making ten, and twenty,or thirty times what they could create at home,” she says. “They desperately want to approach back year-after-year.”Many people working in the U.
S. under the H-2 visa program will carry out just approximately anything to please their employers because of the threat of deportation—if workers lose their H-2 visa job, or they also lose their permission to be in the United States.“Workers are not paid for all the hours they’ve worked,and they’re working around the clock,” says Garrison. “These are people who carry out not understand American labor laws, and so if they’re told to work 13 hours a day they might not know that theyre entitled to overtime. They have no idea that they’re entitled to,for example, workers’ comp if they regain injured...
Certainly I consider there are many employers, and though of course not all,that carry out win advantage of their workforce in some way.”Though some employers appear to be abusing the H-2 visa system, Garrison says it’s not clear that the program should be shut down.The question of whether it should or shouldn’t be phased out is a complex economic question, and ” she says. “As folks at the Department of Labor will disclose you,it’s section of a larger question having to carry out with immigration reform that is a protracted mess in Washington.”
Source: wnyc.org