PROGRAMMERS GUILD E-NEWSLETTER
January 2008

Announcing HIRE AMERICANS FIRST Project

Dear members and subscribers,

Our challenge this year is to block any H-1b increase and to continue pushing for H-1b reforms that add meaningful protection for U.S. workers. We also need reforms in L-1, as employers are now bypassing H-1b and just bringing in foreign workers on L-1, bypassing the LCA (labor condition application) and prevailing wage requirements. (See InfoWorld "Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits.")

Officials with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Tuesday that there is no chance for a major immigration re-haul bill in Congress this year, but that they hope to get increases in certain visa categories including the H-1B visa for highly educated foreign workers - Chamber of Commerce: no large immigration bill, but hopeful on visa increases - January 8, 2008.

The December 2007 newsletter highlighted the role that Immigration Voice is having. They have 21,000 members, most of whom do not even hold permanent residence status in the U.S. - lobbying against the interests of U.S. workers. U.S. Citizens are apparently third in line for representation - behind multi-national corporations and citizens of other countries.

Hire Americans First Project

Hire Americans First is associated with the Programmers Guild. Its goal is to build up a core of activists that will speak with the media, contact Congress, and be plaintiffs in Programmers Guild class actions (sharing in the damage awards). In order to reach out to as many U.S. tech workers as possible, we are doing this independent from the membership fee and other restrictions imposed by the Guild.

Site Features

Membership is free. The homepage spells out the reforms that our members support.
Members create a profile that contains a statement of H-1b harm.
Addresses are not collected, and first name, last name, email, and phone are only released to confirmed members of the media.
Media can search for members and request to be put in contact with them.
Site has RSS Newsfeed that is maintained by members and filtered by several categories. Add the feed from this url: http://www.hireamericansfirst.org/rss/rssfeed.aspx

Hosting alone costs $240 per year. Contributions will support enhancements for employers to post positions and members receive automatic notification of skill matches. This could serve as a model for the transparent recruitment requirement we are advocating as a condition of LCA approval.

REQUEST

Please sign up to join Hire Americans First, and encourage your personal contacts to sign up as well.

Doing nothing is the equivalent to donating to Immigration Voice - let's not do that. We need several hundred members before we can do a press release to the media.