YouTube Videos Reveal Anti-American Outsourcing

A law firm that thought it was demonstrating its cleverness in posting videos of its conference on business immigration instead showed how they cynically stack the deck against American job seekers for their clients.

UC Davis professor Norm Matloff has long sounded the clarion call that the H-1B program and green cards have numerous loopholes employers can exploit. That exploitation allows them to easily avoid hiring more expensive American workers, particularly older ones, in favor of cheap foreign labor.

Videos from a described by Dr. Matloff proved to be more than just a promotional effort for the law firm:

This set of videos gave a dramatic inside look at some of the loopholes, especially in the case of the employer-sponsored green cards. Here you have lawyers openly stating that their goals are to (a) help employers avoid hiring Americans, and (b) help employers hire foreign nationals on the cheap--and to do all this FULLY LEGALLY.

Matloff listed several choice quotes from the video, including this one by one of Cohen & Grigsby's partners, Larry Lebowitz:

And our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. And you know in a sense that sounds funny, but it's what we're trying to do here. We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card, and get through the labor certification process.

So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are the most numerous. We're going to try to find a place where we can comply with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants.

The videos have since been removed from YouTube, but not before being viewed by a lot of people, including InformationWeek and Google have done, should keep in mind just what the impact of such an expansion could be.