“The California Republican Party has hired a Canadian as what they call ‘a State Deputy Political Director.’ They’ve all done these things through the H1 visa programs…”

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is urging the Bush administration to reform a guest worker program that he believes has led to the elimination of many American jobs.

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Grassley says the administration has not kept the promise it made last August to implement some needed reforms to the H1-B visa process. H1-Bs are the most common type of skilled guest worker visas.

The Homeland Security Department sent a response to Grassley last week on the matter, but he said the response was not worth the paper it was printed on. “It’s easy to see why we’ve got problems here. For instance, some companies are applying for H1 visas for pizza tossers, hotel managers, and llama farm operators. The California Republican Party has hired a Canadian as what they call ‘a State Deputy Political Director.’ They’ve all done these things through the H1 visa programs,” Grassley points out.

Grassley notes these are not quite the “high-tech jobs” intended to be filled through the H1-B visa program. He has also received complaints that close to 30,000 H1-B visa jobs have been filled by foreign corporations.

“We have people who are kind of like pimps for H1-Bs, where they will gather under their wing a lot of H1-B workers and try to sell them — not in a slavery type of way — but sell them to companies that need them,” he explains. “And then we’ve got companies that have trained H1-B workers and then outsourced them,” the senator contends.

The main problem, says the Iowa lawmaker, is that “we are not making our companies make a good faith effort to find out if we’ve got Americans who can fill these jobs before they import H1-Bs.”