IndiaTimes Phantasm

Date: Friday, April 18, 2003 4:34 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Within 15 minutes of receiving Dr. Norm Matloff's newsletter, I went
online to find the article at http://economictimes.indiatimes.com .
Much to my surprise it wasn't there. Even a Google News search didn't
catch it so I asked Matloff where he got it. He explained that a person
that has access to Lexis/Nexus sent the article to him.

Lexis/Nexus had enough time to index it before somebody at IndiaTimes
pulled the article. Since Google indexes that site every couple of
hours and didn't detect it, the disappearance didn't take long. It is
now an internet phantasm.

We can only speculate about why this article was censored. Dr. Damon
Scott, creator and maintainer of the Petition on the ZaZona site, was
given quite a lot of space to voice his opinion and he was quoted
accurately. Perhaps "The Economic Times" decided that publishing this
article over the Web could generate too much sympathy for our side of
the H-1B/L-1 issue. It would be even more sinister if the decisions to
censor the article were the result of the ITAA in the United States or
NASSCOM in India pressuring the editor.

If you haven't already, sign and mail in a Petition to Abolish H-1B at
http://www.zazona.com/H1BPetition/
This petition is sent to the Speaker of the House and many other
prominent politicians - and that may be why IndiaTimes was told not to
give it publicity.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Norm Matloff [mailto:matloff@laura.cs.ucdavis.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 11:40 AM
> To: Norm Matloff
> Subject: H-1B/L-1 hearing

Ms. Jackson-Lee has shown over the years that she is solidly pro-H-1B.
The only small exception is that once in a while she briefly raises the
question as to why there aren't more African-Americans in the IT field.
(She herself is black.) As long as the Indian companies make some
cosmetic offer to help educated minorities in IT--I say "cosmetic"
because there are lots of qualified minorities available to work in IT
right now, but as is the case with white males, the industry ignores
them and hires H-1Bs and L-1s instead. So expect the Indian companies
to make more (insincere) noises about getting minorities into IT, and
Jackson-Lee will give H-1B and L-1 her renewed blessing.

The following passage is typical:

According to officials in the Indian software industry body Nasscom,
the job losses in the US cannot be directly attributed to the visas.
The loss in jobs are across the board in all industry in US due to a
slowdown in the US economy. Moreover, the telecom industry has seen
the maximum layoffs which has nothing to do with the visas issued to
Indian companies.

Who are they trying to fool? Siemens ADMITS that it has replaced
Americans with L-1s. The Bank of America ADMITS it has replaced
Americans with H-1Bs. Sun Microsystems ADMITS that it has laid off
Americans and yet retained H-1Bs in the same jobs.

I've gotten behind in sending things out again. I'll try to catch up
in the next couple of days.
Norm

Copyright 2003 The Economic Times of India, Coleman & Co Ltd
The Economic Times

April 17, 2003

Congress Panel to Discuss H-1B, L-1 Visas Soon

K. Yatish Rajawat

The US Congress House Subcommittee on Immigrations and Claims will meet
in the next two weeks to begin hearings on H-1B and L-1 visas,
according to Sheila Jackson Lee, Congresswoman from Texas who is a
member of the committee.

Jackson Lee spoke to ET on the sidelines of a CII seminar hosted for a
delegation of US Congress members visiting India. Congressman Joseph
Crowley, a Democrat from the district of New York, is heading the
delegation.

The delegation represents a part of the Indian caucus in the US
Congress, and Crowley is the co-chairman of the caucus. According to
Lee, the H-1B visa bill will be taken up by the Congress in the fall.
The sub-committee has received information on L-1 visas from several
people and is in the process of examining concerns around it.

Indian software companies are the biggest users of H-1B visas but have
recently shifted to using L-1 visas more. The US Congress has reduced
the H-1B visa quota from 195,000 to 65,000. H-1Bvisas are subject to
annual numerical limits, currently 195,000. The limit is set to go down
to 65,000 from October 1, '03.

The L-1 visa was created in '70 to allow MNCs to send their expatriate
employees to the US. The L-1 visa allows transfer of key employees from
a foreign corporation to a US branch, parent, subsidiary or an
affiliated entity.

The purpose of the visa, also known as the intra-company transferee
visa, is to give US corporations the ability to bring top-level
managerial or specialised employees into the US. There is no cap on the
L-1 visa but recently several workers union in the high-tech area in
the US have been petitioning the Congress to look into the "misuse" of
this visa, as reported by ET earlier.

Meanwhile, in a connected development a US citizen, Damon Scott, an
assistant professor of mathematics at Francis Marion University in
Florence, South Carolina is petitioning the US Congress to abolish the
H-1B visa programme completely. Mr Scott told ET, that his petition has
been sent to the Speaker of the US Congress and he has not received any
response on the petition which has been signed by more than 1,000 US
citizens. Mr Scott has been using the internet to campaign support for
his petition to the US Congress.

According to Mr Scott, "The principal reason why the H-1B Visa
programme should be abolished is that Americans are definitely thrown
into unemployment and underemployment, and on a truly massive scale, by
this law. The rest of the world is 20 times the population of the US.
By the laws of supply and demand, any industrialised nation's job
markets would be devastated by a global supply being readily available
to meet a demand that is only domestic."

There are no meaningful protections for the American people from being
displaced into unemployment by either the H-1B or L-1 visa programmes.
Consequently, Americans are losing their jobs in large numbers and
being replaced with foreign labour, and under a national government
that could not care less about what this process is doing to the
American people," he says. According to officials in the Indian
software industry body Nasscom, the job losses in the US cannot be
directly attributed to the visas. The loss in jobs are across the board
in all industry in US due to a slowdown in the US economy.

Moreover, the telecom industry has seen the maximum layoffs which has
nothing to do with the visas issued to Indian companies. According to
industry observers, Davon Scott's petition to abolish H-1B visa may or
may not go anywhere with US Congress. And Mr Scott himself is not very
optimistic that the current Congress will do anything on it. "We are
all expecting that Congress will continue its demolition of American
job markets this year as it has in the past years," he says.

Several association like Washtech, Techunite.org and others have popped
up in recent times to support anti-outsourcing bills.

Some other association like The American Engineering Association, The
Organisation for the Rights of American Workers, and even the IEEE-USA
are now supporting the anti H-1B visa lobby.

Interestingly, US corporations have gained more than $ 8bn in the last
few years due to outsourcing to India.

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