Des Moines Sun

Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has addressed concerns regarding U.S. tech companies’ use of foreign worker visas and their impact on American employment. Grassley explained that his committee oversees federal immigration laws, including temporary visa programs for nonimmigrant visitors such as business professionals, students, and agricultural workers.

Grassley has worked with former Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Dick Durbin to monitor foreign visa programs and address potential loopholes and abuse. He highlighted that the H-1B and L-1 visa programs allow businesses to temporarily employ foreign professionals when there is a shortage of qualified domestic workers. Employers must sponsor these visa holders, file petitions with relevant government agencies, and pay application fees—a fee the Trump administration recently proposed raising to $100,000 per visa holder.

The senator pointed out that Congress established the H-1B program in 1990 for three years with a one-time renewal option. Over time, some employers have allegedly used this system to replace American workers with less expensive foreign labor. Grassley noted that he and Senator Durbin recently wrote to ten major companies—including Amazon, Apple, and Google—seeking explanations for their continued hiring of thousands of H-1B visa holders despite rising unemployment among U.S. graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

"Amazon has laid off tens of thousands of employees in recent years and yet applied and received approval to hire more than 10 thousand foreign H1-B employees. This doesn’t pass the smell test. Homegrown talent must come first," Grassley said.

He added: "Specifically, we want a full accounting about their recruitment practices; such as the number of H1-B workers they’ve hired, including salary and benefit disparities between visa holders and American workers; and whether U.S. workers were displaced when filing for thousands of visa petitions for foreign workers." According to Grassley, about 700,000 people currently work in the United States on an H-1B visa, most from India and China.

Addressing legislative efforts to close loopholes in these programs, Grassley stated: "I’m recharging bipartisan efforts to shed light on abuses and improve the H1-B visa system to stop the outsourcing of American jobs." He referenced past incidents at Southern California Edison and The Walt Disney Company where American technology employees were replaced by foreign H-1B workers after being required to train them.

Grassley continued: "That’s why Sen. Durbin and I recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation called the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act to provide protections for American workers and visa holders." The proposed bill aims to increase transparency in recruiting foreign labor, strengthen enforcement tools for the Department of Labor (DOL), require employers seeking H-1B employees to post jobs publicly on a DOL website, authorize new fees on labor condition applications, prioritize STEM graduates with higher education levels for visas, set new time limits on L-1 visas, verify foreign affiliates through the Department of State, and increase penalties for wage violations.

"The bottom line is simple. American workers ought to come first," Grassley said.