New York Times Shill

Date: Monday, June 02, 2003 2:05 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

You would think that the NY Times would be a little more careful after
their recent scandals over Jayson Blair - but no, they are at it again!
This time we get a biased article co-written by Daniel Preysman.

Preysman is a college intern whose father is CEO of a Silicon Valley
company called DataSweep:
http://www.datasweep.com/

Guess who hires lots of H-1Bs? If you guessed DataSweep please move to
the front of the class.

Daniel Preysman is a shill that should have never been allowed to write
an article on this subject.

So what could be a worse conflict of interest you may ask? Well if you
don't ask, I'll tell you anyway.

By going to: biz.yahoo.com/t/o/onis.html you will find out that Daniel
Preysman is the beneficiary of a trust set up from a stock sale of Oni
Systems Corp. where daddy used to work.

There are all sorts of things wrong with this article, but for now I
need to check out my newest spam emails. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. This spam says I
can buy Prozac online....................

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/technology/30VISA.html

http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/3910802.html

Special visa's use for tech workers is challenged
Katie Hafner and Daniel Preysman
New York Times
Published 06/01/2003

With the economy in a slump, a growing number of American technology
workers say their jobs are going not only to lower-cost foreign workers
abroad, but also increasingly to workers who enter the United States
under a little-known visa category known as L-1.

In the nearly three years since the technology bubble burst, the use of
L-1 visas to bring in workers -- with a large percentage from India --
has become a popular strategy among firms seeking to cut labor costs.
The number of these temporary visas granted rose nearly 40 percent to
57,700 in 2002 from 41,739 in 1999.

The visas are intended to allow companies to transfer employees from a
foreign branch or subsidiary to company offices in the United States.
But they are now routinely used by companies based in India and
elsewhere to bring their workers into the United States and then
contract them out to American companies -- in many instances to be
replacements for American workers.

The number of Americans who have been replaced by foreign contract
workers is unknown. American companies that use contract workers have
said that the decision to do so is based on factors such as skills, and
not on cost alone.

Some immigration experts are questioning the legality of this use of
the visa. Officials at the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services (BCIS), a division of the Department of Homeland Security that
oversees the granting of L-1 and other work visas, say the bureau is
conducting an assessment of the L-1 visa to determine whether there is
misuse.

"If this is a company offering the services of their employee to go
work for another company, it sounds dubious," said Bill Strassberger, a
BCIS spokesman.

"To bring someone in ostensibly as an intracompany transfer and then
put him to work for somebody else and then to say that we're paying him
still, that just sounds like someone's trying to really stretch the
envelope on that visa category," Strassberger said.

H-1B visa use down

The legal questions, however, remain murky. Steve Yale-Loehr, who
teaches immigration law at Cornell, said that strictly speaking, what
these companies are doing is legal, though perhaps not what Congress
intended. However, Yale-Loehr added, "If Congress is upset about this,
then Congress will act on it."

In response to the controversy, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., introduced a
bill this month to prevent companies from hiring foreigners with L-1
visas.

"When you have people using this to bring in lower-cost labor to
displace Americans, it's something we need to address," Mica said in a
telephone interview.

During the boom years, the technology industries successfully lobbied
Congress to expand the number of foreign software engineers who could
be permitted to fill programming needs in the United States. In 2000,
Congress increased the annual cap on more restrictive temporary visas
-- known as H-1B visas -- for highly skilled foreign workers to 195,000
from 115,000. That quota will drop automatically to 65,000 on Oct. 1
unless Congress approves an extension, a move that is considered
unlikely.

In the past two years, the trend in the use of H-1B visas has declined
sharply. Many experts say the use of L-1 visas will grow.

The main advantage of the L-1 for consulting companies is that unlike
the H-1B visa, the L-1 does not require employers to pay workers
prevailing wages and there is no cap on the number of L-1 visas.

This has ignited an outcry among technology workers who have lost jobs
and say that foreign contract workers are paid substantially less than
prevailing wages in the industry.

Training their replacements

In the past three years, William O'Neill has seen his small computer
consulting firm in East Granby, Conn., dwindle from six contract
workers to none. The work itself has not disappeared, said O'Neill, but
his clients, most of them large insurance companies in Connecticut and
western Massachusetts, are turning to foreign companies, some with
workers who are in the United States on temporary visas. Satyam
Computer Services, a consulting firm based in India, for example, now
has a contract with the Cigna Corp. that has around 100 Satyam
employees working on computer applications management in Cigna offices.

And as others have claimed, O'Neill said that in many cases, existing
technology employees are asked to train their replacements. The L-1
visa requires that the foreign workers possess specialized knowledge of
the work to be done.

O'Neill said that the people he knows who are currently training their
replacements will not talk about their situation for fear of losing
what is left of their jobs. "They're scared to death they're going to
lose their jobs instantly versus six or eight or nine months down the
road," he said.

Once the replacement workers are trained, O'Neill said, the foreign
workers are often sent back to India to do programming and computer
work there for the American companies.

Wipro, InfoSys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), all of them based
in India, are other companies that are using L-1 visas to get workers
into the United States.

Girish Surendran, a human resources manager who oversees immigration
issues at Tata, said his company "is committed in letter and spirit to
all the requirements and regulations of all visa categories." He added:
"If workers are replaced, it's not that TCS comes in and employees get
let go." Surendran said he could not comment on a company's reason for
laying off workers.

Wipro plans to lobby against Mica's bill. If it becomes law, said
Sridhar Ramasubbu, investor relations manager at Wipro, the company
will simply turn back to H1-B visas. "We will not be affected
financially because our compensation is the same whether somebody comes
in under an H-1 or an L-1," Ramasubbu said.

Trade groups protest

But trade groups representing American workers say the foreign workers
are paid considerably less. "I have friends that were told in the last
three months that they must take a $30,000 pay cut to keep their job,"
said John Bauman, president of the Organization for the Rights of
American Workers, a nonprofit group based in Meriden, Conn.

Gary Burns, the legislative director for Mica, said there were about
325,000 L-1 visa holders in the United States. Those who stay in this
country can remain for up to five or seven years, depending on the
category of L-1 they hold.

Some experts say that the use of L-1 visas for contract workers is not
widespread and that fears of losing jobs to foreign workers are
exaggerated.

"Even if this brouhaha is about a real problem, I think when you look
at the number of workers involved, it is a totally insignificant drop
in a massive labor market," said Daryl Buffenstein, a immigration
lawyer in Atlanta who has corporate clients and is general counsel for
the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Buffenstein said that those who oppose the L-1 visa do not understand
how important it is for American industry. "It will hurt employment in
the United States if we impede the ability of legitimate users to
transfer managers and specialists between different affiliates of
international organizations," said Buffenstein, who was a member of a
panel that advised Congress in 1990 in revising the law governing L-1
visas.

Buffenstein said he was also worried that public overreaction would
result in measures like the Mica bill, which he contended would go too
far in restricting international companies from using L-1 visa holders
to do on-site client work.

Controversy over the visa, which has existed for 33 years, is not
entirely new. Three years ago, the General Accounting Office reported
that the the Immigration and Naturalization Services, the precursor to
BCIS, had found a high incidence of fraudulent use of L-1 visas and had
called abuse of the visas "the new wave in alien smuggling."

But protest over the use of temporary foreign workers has become more
vocal in a rocky economy. One 57-year-old computer consultant in Avon,
Conn., who has been out of work for five months said, "This isn't just
an IT issue," referring to the information technology industry.

"It's a big issue with multiple professions, and has a serious effect
on the economy," said the consultant, who asked that his name not be
used for fear of jeopardizing his chances to find work. "A lot of this
is about the economy, and the

L-1 issue is just exacerbating the problem."

) Copyright 2003 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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