DOING JOBS AMERICANS WOULD BE HAPPY TO DO: “Outsourcing Visa” May Hurt Even More than Reported.

Just in time for a primary season that’s highly-charged over the issue of immigration, the H1-B visa is back in the news for facilitating layoffs of American workers. The visa allows companies to bring over tech workers on a visa that gives them no path to citizenship status and ties their presence in the U.S. to their job. This makes the H1-B workers cheaper and more pliable than U.S. workers; furthermore, H1-B workers in the U.S. are often used to pave the way to outright offshoring. We’ve covered H1-B layoffs before, especially before the saga of workers laid off at Disney. But it turns out that due to a legalism present in many contracts, there may be far more affected workers who are not speaking out. . . .

This issue has salience for the GOP primary. Sen. Marco Rubio is a leading proponent of the I-Squared Act. On the other hand, Grassley and Durbin’s reform effort comes alongside one by Sen. Jeff Sessions (who has been rumored to be on the verge of endorsing Donald Trump) and Sen. Ted Cruz, which would essentially create a whistleblower’s exception to non-disparagement provisions: you could speak out if you were complaining about H1-B layoffs.

There are many reasons to be supportive of legal U.S. immigration. But as we’ve written before, the H1-B is an ugly, crony-ist measure. It brings none of the benefits to the nation of legal immigration, while carrying many of the costs. Lawmakers may be tempted to look to it as a way to work-around a broken immigration system—but evidence suggests that it makes many problems worse: layoffs, lowered wages, and ultimately, offshoring (as well as unknown amount of visa-overstays.) Passing an expansion of it right now would be sure to exacerbate immigration tensions, to little gain—unless you own a business that uses H1-B workers.

We have an ugly, crony-ist ruling class, so ugly crony-ist measures fit in quite well.