I have frequently remarked that the paradox of immigration reform is that fixing the system has to be done by the same folks that screwed it up in the first place.
It seems in these days of lobbyist-written legislation that any time Congress tries to fix anything they end up making the situation even worse.
Congress displayed spectacular legislative incompetence in the Immigration Act of 1990 that created H-1B. Each and every time Congress has addressed H-1B again it has only screwed up the system more.
One of Congress's serial screw-ups in was to exempt universities from the H-1B quota.
It turns out that universities are just as adept at abusing H-1B as commercial ventures. I previously wrote about universities replacing their American employees with H-1Bs.
A newly released forensic audit of Wright State University in Ohio explores another creative way universities can abuse the H-1B quota exemption Congress has given them: Import workers on H-1B visas and then contract them out to commercial employers. (This story first broke in 2015.)
H-1B workers hired by Wright State University and exempt from the quota found their way to several companies, including Lexis-Nexis and UES. To add to the foul stench of corruption, Lexis-Nexis's managing director for North America, Sean Fitzpatrick, is on the board of trustees at Wright State and the CEO of UES was on the board until this story became public.
What is it going to take for Congress to seriously address the abuse in H-1B? Americans being replaced by foreign workers has not done it. Maybe it would take something as extreme as someone using H-1B to import teenage sex slaves into the United States to finally get Congress to do more than dance to industry lobbyists feeding them campaign cash.
My mistake — that already happened, and Congress responded by expanding H-1B.