(AP) Banks collecting billions of dollars in federal bailout money sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers to the U.S. for high-paying jobs, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications. The dozen banks receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers...The figures are significant because they show that the bailed-out banks, being kept afloat with U.S. taxpayer money, actively sought to hire foreign workers instead of American workers.
As my book, The Uprising, showed in its examination of efforts to unionize high-tech workers, these companies use the H-1B program to hire workers who will take much lower wages and whose immigration status is effectively determined by their visa-holding employer (read: they can't try to unionize, etc.), thus undercutting American workers. In the case of the banking industry, while "lower wages" still certainly means decent wages, the bottom line is that the importation of foreign workers - at a time when domestic unemployment is rising - is a way to drive down the corporate bottom line. And now, that drive is being subsidized by the very taxpayers who it is hurting.
And yet, in the face of this, we're expected to believe that provisions ensuring taxpayer cash is used to hire American workers is somehow evil "protectionism," while letting taxpayer cash subsidize outsourcing is Enlightened Prgamatism. What a joke.
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