Podcast Episode 279: What Can the Administration Do about H-1B Abuse?

Show notes: https://cis.org/Parsing-Immigration-P... The Trump administration has made a number of moves recently to try to curb widespread abuses in the “skilled” foreign-worker pipeline, including the H-1B and OPT programs. The Center for Immigration Studies is publishing several reports and a podcast on this subject by Senior Legal Fellow George Fishman, a 30-year veteran of immigration policymaking on Capitol Hill and the executive branch. Fishman outlines the abuses – such as replacing U.S. workers with H-1Bs, or allowing foreign “students” who are no longer students to stay and work – as well as the statutory background and the changes proposed by the administration. The broad finding of these analyses, which Fishman discusses with Parsing Immigration Policy host Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center, is that many of the abuses in the white-collar foreign-worker pipeline are legal – because past Congresses chose to make them legal. Replacing American workers with H-1Bs, for instance, is a feature of the program as enacted by Congress, not a bug. Fishman concludes that, while some of the administration’s moves to rein in these abuses may succeed, ultimately only Congress can truly fix the problems in the law.