As reported in the 4/18/2007 Daily Bruin, UCLA is lobbying to increase the H-1b cap. The article fails to reveal the substantial harm that the increase will have on UCLA's predominately American students, both immediately upon graduation and throughout their careers as they try to compete for jobs in a job market where employers can select from resumes arriving from the poorest countries on earth. (India and China alone have seven times the population of the U.S.)The article fails to reveal that the reason H-1b cap is being reached is not because of foreign graduates from U.S. schools, but rather due to the flood of graduates of foreign universites. Unlike UCLA graduates, these graduates do not have huge student loans and thus can accept lower pay, driving down all wages.
The article closes with this gem by Bernard Wolfsdorf, national second vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which lobbies for more H-1b to increase their $100 million industry of processing these visas:
“The fact of the matter is immigrants don’t take jobs, they create jobs.”This is false. Some employers claim that up to 90% of the applications they receive are from H-1b or people seeking H-1b sponsorship. Under the law of averages, a substantial number of Americans are not getting jobs they apply for due to the H-1b visa - which contains no requirement to first recruit American workers.
