60 Minutes Reports, Selectively, on H-1B Visa Scandal

Sunday night, CBS’ 60 Minutes featured a segment on the American job killing H-1B visa, created as part the Immigration Act of 1990. The H-1B is a growing concern across America since more and more stories have been published about the role it plays in rampant American worker displacement.

Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B visa, a jobs killer for Americans.

Less well understood than its 1986 predecessor (the Immigration Reform and Control Act), the 1990 legislation nevertheless provided for more legal immigration and created the insidious diversity visa (DV). More than 25 years later, advocates for sensible immigration are struggling to reduce the 65,000 H-1B cap and eliminate the DV.

A legal analysis of the Immigration Act of 1990 includes the following, which, in hindsight, explains how the H-1B and its non-immigrant visa cousins came to be so widely abused:

1. It increased the number of legal immigrants from about 500,000 to about 700,000.

2. The first group of legal immigrants was “priority workers” that allegedly possessed extraordinary ability, such as highly skilled professors, researchers, and certain top executives and company managers. For these groups to be considered to have extraordinary ability would require recorded and recognized acclaim within their field, such as sciences, arts and even athletics.

3. The second category for visa grants was for aliens who were “advanced professionals and those of exceptional ability.” This group included individuals with advanced degrees in their field of study and who were considered to have “exceptional ability” in the fields of science or business. Those included in this second category must seek certification through the U.S. Labor Department.

4. The third category was considered skilled workers, signifying that the immigrant was able to perform labor that requires more than two years of preparation and training. Other workers included in this category are for labor occupations that are considered “unskilled.”

5. Aliens who receive visas must also be in occupations that are considered to have a shortage of qualified U.S. workers and are needed to fill the positions.

Most of the justifications for the visas the Immigration Act of 1990 created have been debunked, most frequently the claim that the U.S. has a labor shortage.

Please go to the CAPS Action Alert page here to tell President Trump that you support legal immigration reductions that include fewer non-immigrant visas.