POUND FOOLISH
Congress is getting it's pound of flesh on the H1-B Visa front from the TARP bill passed into law recently, as the FT reports:
"Bank of America
has become the first US bank to withdraw job offers made to MBA
students graduating from US business schools this summer, citing
conditions laid out in its bail-out deal as the reason.
The recently passed $787bn stimulus bill in effect prevents financial institutions that have received money from the government’s troubled asset relief programme from applying for H1-B visas for highly skilled immigrants if they have recently made US workers redundant.
BofA, which has received a total of $45bn in Tarp funds, is in the process of digesting two large acquisitions – Countrywide, the mortgage broker, and Merrill Lynch – which will see thousands of jobs lost.
A spokesman for the bank said: “Recent changes in legislation made it necessary for Bank of America to rescind job offers it had made to students requiring H-1B sponsorship.”
The article goes on to point out the broader implications of all this:
"Traditionally, about a third of MBA students at the leading US schools have taken up finance and banking jobs on graduation, with about a third of those MBAs coming from outside the US.
Some supporters of freer migration have criticised the Tarp measure for threatening to cut the US off from foreign talent and encouraging tit-for-tat retaliation by other countries."
This comes on the heels of other Congressional efforts to jump on the H1-B Visa populist band-wagon. Case in point was the recent letter sent by Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley to Microsoft and the company's response:
" Microsoft Corp. is letting H-1B workers go as part of its plan to lay off about 5,000 employees over 18 months, but the vendor will continue to hire visa holders as well, according to a letter that it sent to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) last week.
In the letter, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith told Grassley -- a vocal critic of the H-1B program -- that company officials "do not expect to see a significant change in the proportion of H-1B employees in our workforce following the job reductions..."
The letter was a response to one sent to Microsoft in January by Grassley, who said it was "imperative" that the company give job priority to U.S. citizens over visa holders during its layoffs."
Once again, our politicians are pursuing populist policies at the expense of the nation's long-term well-being.
this funding is even more important in the efforts too
Posted by: How to start a nursing agency | Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 09:37 PM
Mike, you are being led astray. The H-1B visas are supposed to be awarded when there is no local talent to fill the post. This has been seriously abused, especially in the software business to allow cheap, indentured, foreign labor to undercut US labor in the US. When this wasn't enough, jobs were off-shored, which is fair, because those jobs were no longer local.
If banks are laying off workers, then it is exactly right that they should be recruiting from this laid off pool, not another. This should not be a mechanism to reduce labor costs.
Posted by: Alex Tolley | Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 04:07 PM