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EXCERPT:

[SOURCE @ loudobbs.com + READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT - Aired May 22, 2006]

“LOU DOBBS: Small business owners tonight say they are finding it impossible to compete against larger competitors that are able to hire cheap foreign labor under the H1B visa program. This visa program, destroying the careers of middle class workers all across this country, and it’s now jeopardizing the future of our nation’s small businesses.

Bill Tucker reports. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): This fire station and three others in Bloomfield, New Jersey, are getting wireless broadband networks. The work being done by a small businessmen using American engineers. But most of the jobs Oscar McKee bids on he loses for one simple reason: wage costs.

He bids against companies who use engineers here on H1B visas, a visa originally designed in part to allow companies to hire foreign workers when no Americans were available. In McKee’s experience, the program is abused and the wages paid by his competitors are dramatically less. Independent studies back that up.

PAUL KOSTEK, FMR. IEEE-USA PRESIDENT: The salaries that H1Bs are being paid tend to be $13,000 a year less than the average salary that a U.S.-based engineer would receive.

TUCKER: That’s a hefty price advantage, but the way McKee sees it, it’s not just a price advantage, it’s destructive.

OSCAR MCKEE, O-MC SIGNAL RESEARCH: They are lowering my standard of living, whether it’s me as an engineer, whether it’s me as an employer of engineers. They are lowering the standards of the entire technical workforce in this country.

TUCKER: McKee says the problem is that the H1B program has no oversight, which leads to the abuses. His experience is not unique, but he does have a congressman who is listening.

REP. BILL PASCRELL (D), NEW JERSEY: I’ve seen too many people in my own district who have been forced out of jobs because of H1B workers. I’ve seen people in my district who have been forced out of jobs by the L1.

TUCKER: The L1 visa is a separate guest worker program which has no caps. It’s apparent that few in Congress care, which only rubs salt in the wound.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It’s our government that’s allowing that to happen. You know, it isn’t us. It’s the law that was written that’s not being really enforced.

TUCKER: Instead of stepping up enforcement, the Senate is getting ready to expand the H1B program.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TUCKER: Current immigration legislation would raise the cap on the H1B program to 113,000 from the current 65,000. And Lou, that cap would automatically increase every year thereafter by 20 percent each year that the cap is hit.

DOBBS: Twenty percent a year?

TUCKER: Yes. DOBBS: And the Heritage Foundation reports that we’re going to see immigration, as it’s currently laid out in this country, legal immigration, go up by 66 million. A minimum of 66 million over the next 20 years. Irrespective of any other — anything else, it doesn’t include natural population or illegal immigration, because obviously there’s no border security proposal either.

What is Congress going to do here? Tell me something.

TUCKER: They are going to do something. They are going to increase the limits on the H1B program so we can bring more foreign workers in.

DOBBS: You know, as we sit here and we laugh at the absurdity of this, I mean, as you’re reporting, I mean, American citizens are getting hammered on this.

TUCKER: Yes.

DOBBS: On a — on a host of issues in this country. What’s it going — has anybody got a sense of what it’s going to take to wake up Congress to what they are doing with the visa program?

TUCKER: Well, you listen to the — listen to the man in the piece, Oscar. His standard of living is being hurt. The standard of living for the engineers he hires are being hurt. If that doesn’t wake them up, Lou, I don’t know what it’s going to take to get our elected officials woken up.

DOBBS: And the immigration system in this country is so broken that people coming into this country, primarily from Mexico and Central America, working in agriculture, the horse industry, who have visas, who have entered the country legally, have to leave the country in order to have that visa extended and apply for its extension. And this Congress is talking about in that sense moving as many as 20 million illegal immigrants to the head of the line. And keep saying they are not moving anyone to the head of the line.

It’s an absurdity beyond even the beginning of understanding.

Bill [TUCKER], thank you very much.

[SOURCE @ loudobbs.com + READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT - Aired May 22, 2006]“

MY COMMENTS:

It is very clear to me that large businesses and corporate conglomerates in the United States are not only using contemporary standards for outsourcing of domestic jobs (to the expense of extremely qualified American citizens), but they are simultaneously using other tactics that literally allow them to replace those domestic workers that were still able to keep their jobs in the face of overseas outsourcing – since their particular positions and duties required someone to physically be present. In other words, American citizens that did not previously need to worry about their jobs being given to someone overseas (since their job descriptions and duties required them to be physically present – unlike those jobs that can technically be done anywhere around the planet, primarily due to global high-bandwidth connectivity), now do need to worry about cheap overseas labor manifesting within their actual workplaces and residential neighborhoods. Moreover, since the foreign labor that is now coming over is still tangibly connected to their “homelands,” they can “afford” to be paid so little (while American citizens are still handcuffed to various US economic predicaments, such as real estate bubbles, inflation, etc. that obviously disallows them to be paid anything resembling an equivalent - least amount - wage).

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