To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter 167

Stuart Anderson was on C-SPAN today.  You can view the tape of the
program at

http://www.broadbandc-span.org/Recent/Default.aspx

This was Anderson at his slickest.  For example, one caller asked about
cases in which Americans were laid off and forced to train their H-1B
replacements.  Anderson said (this is not verbatim), "It's illegal to
lay off an American and pay the H-1B less than the prevailing wage."
Slick!  It's illegal to pay less than the prevailing wage, period; the
layoff is irrelevant.  But Anderson was able to use this juxtaposition
to make it sound like it is illegal to lay off an American and replace
him/her with an H-1B.

And of course the key point about prevailing wage law is that it is full of
loopholes, so that the legal prevailing wage is well below the real
market wage.  Several callers brought up the issue of H-1Bs as cheap
labor, but unfortunately they didn't know it's a loophole issue, which
allowed Anderson to say, as usual, that the solution is better
enforcement of the law.  He's been through this hundreds of times, and
he knows exactly how to make it all sound so reasonable; the poor
callers just aren't ready for him.

Norm