Those wanting change to two different aspects of the H-1B program lost in two different courtrooms recently. Both instances involved quite different groups of workers, largely from India.
In one case, those seeking change sought to kick some H-1 B spouses (holding H-4 visas and work permits) out of the labor market; in the other, a group of H-1Bs who are members of a disadvantaged caste back in India wanted to be treated like other H-1Bs. In the first instance, the court rejected the whole effort, while the judge in the second court threw cold water on a key element of the case.
During the Obama administration, a large subset of H-1B spouses with H-4 visas were granted the right to work in the U.S. — formerly they had been denied that option because it is not provided for in statute. This group, almost all women, were married to a select sub-group of H-1Bs; their spouses had been sponsored for green card status by their employers, and thus both husband and wife were on their way, ultimately, to citizenship. At the time, it was estimated that there were some 180,000 of the spouses. Most of them were from India.
John Miano, a lawyer who is also a CIS Fellow, figured that the Obama administration had no right — without congressional authorization — to create a large new class of legal workers and sued seeking to take away the work permits of the spouses. His point was that creating the new rights to work for the spouses would lead to the loss of 180,000 or so jobs now held by citizens and green-card holders and, in any case, was Congress's prerogative, not that of the executive branch.
Time passed, as it often does in the courts, and Law360 reported late last month that a Washington, D.C., federal judge, Tanya Chutkan, dismissed the case and downplayed the number of H-4s, saying that they constituted “less than 0.12% of the U.S. work force”. She is a native of Jamaica and an Obama appointee, as the news service did not report. Miano says that he will appeal.
The other case was brought against Cisco, a $50 billion-a-year high-tech outfit founded some 40 years ago in San Francisco. It was accused of harassing an employee on a caste basis. The California Civil Rights Department was involved in the litigation and the Santa Clara County Superior Court dismissed the case against two Cisco employees who had been the targets of the suit.
The Civil Rights Department, despite the setback, said that the investigation of Cisco continues.
The chances are that Cisco management, at the CEO level, is not engaged in Subcontinent-style Hindu-on-Hindu discrimination. The chances are good, however, that as in so much of high-tech, personnel matters are handled by Hindu executives who may very well, in this instance, be treating the lower-caste workers badly.
Now called “Dalits” rather than Untouchables, these workers often have names that identify them as such, making them vulnerable to discrimination by those in the higher castes. That the most advanced of U.S. corporations — the high-tech ones — should be associated with these medieval practices is ironic, to say the least.