How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers

This book shows how the politicians and cheap labor tech people are trying to destroy the tech industry and the careers of decent hardworking Americans.

This is especially bad as the tech industry is an area where average people can go to school and with some effort and discipline hopefully get a well paying long term job. The politicians talk about well paying long term jobs and they actively attack and attempt to destroy an industry and the careers of their citizens. This is terrible. And, that they are bought off makes it worse, crapweasels is an excellent and accurate word.

The book shows, in detail, the people and the schemes, fraud, misrepresentation, pay scales, charging fees, etc. involved. They are again destroying the careers of Americans. They are also exploiting the foreign workers. This should all be shut down.

The book also explains how this affects the people that will enter the industry and therefore the future of the industry and the future of American tech workers.

The American companies obviously have no shame, they do not seem to care. The people in the companies have not thought that their job could be next.

Well worth reading and everyone should be very upset at the crapweazels attacking an industry and the career of tech people.

Barry Ceminchuk

As a program/project manager in IT consulting, I saw time and time again where management forced using off shore labor. Joining the Indian companies is not a solution, they're prejudice against providing fair interviews, training for American workers and they don't want to be reducing their H1-B numbers. I've seen American techs carrying 24/7 pagers for 1-2 years to fix offshore problems.
Bill Gates lead the H1-B visa cry when he went before Congress to raise the numbers and now the perpetual lie crushes the skillsets, livelihood and healths of Americans, provides un-deserved comments of lower quality and leaves the US more and more vulnerable. But the billionaires are making a bundle. Any book on this travesty is going to be a great book

I was shocked to discover just how our government and business work in tandem to sell out the American worker. The information in this book, about various VISAs and guest worker programs being used to hand jobs to foreigners over Americans, I've never heard before. Also, the abuse of the VISAs is rampant, and there is no oversight. Worker VISAs were used to bring in underage girls and use here in the sex trade industry. And who uncovered this horrendous misuse of the VISAs? An ordinary citizen who saw something suspicious, not some government agency. If you want to understand why America has no jobs, Michelle Malkin explains it.

I HATE reading nooks that leave me INCENSED after reading them, & this book IS ONE OF THEM! While it now needs an updated "2nd Edition", it clearly is the BEST MUCKRACKING EXPOSE of "visa fraud" that perpetuates immigrants coming into the U.S., and DISPLACING AMERICAN WORKERS! There is something in this book to INFURIATE both sides of the immigration debate, and even not infuriatingly, the book NAMES NAMES, CORPORATIONS, and the BI-PARTISAN TRAITORS that have created & perpetuated the current work visa debacle that necessitated the book to be written! The facts are endlessly cited, the research is first-rate, and this time does not have near the tone of an Ann Coulter diatribe!
If you are NOT incensed by what this book exposes, and are not STALKING your federal legislators as a result, then you are PART OF THE PROBLEM-as everyone in DC clearly is. That fact is meticulously detailed as well.

I have just finished reading “Sold Out” by Michelle Malkin and John Miano. It is an expose’ of how the government/industrial alliance is selling out the American STEM worker. Unfortunately it probably may not be well read and may only be of interest to American workers in scientific fields (IT, Engineering, Physics, Math, etc.). In addition it is a rather long book (316 pages with an additional 115 pages of appendixes and notes) so it is unlikely that someone who picks it up to see what it is about will purchase or read it ( I did!). That is a tragedy because this is an important book for American workers and voters, particularly in the STEM field. I used to work in the STEM fields before I retired and all of my family are working in or studying in STEM fields. So I am going to try to summarize some of the major points of the expose’.
While this is a must read book, it is also a discouraging book. It documents how the government and tech industry had contrived to bring in cheap foreign labor at the expense of the American STEM professional. We often wish for bipartisan efforts. Well, unfortunately here is bipartisan at work, both the Republicans and Democrats want to keep STEM wages low (sometimes for different reasons) and make back office deals with the U.S. Tech Industry. Well the back office deals between the government and industry are not directly with the Tech Industry (although people like Bill Gates and other corporate leaders from Silicon Valley are often spokesmen for foreign workers); rather they deal with their lobbyists or PAC groups. If you ever heard that the lobbyists were the fourth leg of government, this expose’ will help you come to believe that is true.
You may logically ask why would the U.S. politicians and tech industry companies conspire to injure the American STEM worker? Well follow the money. Foreign STEM worker come a LOT cheaper than American workers and Tech Companies are willing to contribute heavily to politicians who back bringing in (and keeping!) foreign workers. This is one of the reasons why ordinary people do not believe what the government is telling us. You may have heard that there are not sufficient American STEM workers to fill the jobs that industry needs and that American workers need to be retrained. Both are false narratives developed and fostered by the government/industry groups who want to import cheap labor.
There are many ways to get guest workers into the U.S. but at the center of all of this is the H-1B visa. It was supposed to be a program for high-skilled guest workers to alleviate shortages in specialty fields with specific restraints on the number that would be allowed in. The program began 25 years ago and is no longer represents the original intent. With very few exceptions, the purported shortages of American STEM workers do not exist, and there is nothing special about the hundreds of thousands of H-1B visa holders flooding our workforce. In addition, these are supposed to be temporary workers but there is no tracking mechanism to determine that they have left when their contract is up. And perhaps the most important feature (and bad feature) of the H-1B program is that almost all of them are sponsored by companies that specialize in offshore outsourcing of U.S. jobs. These are the same companies that want cheap labor.
So when you hear your Congressman or Senator say they want to bring the jobs back to the U.S. and that there is a shortage of U.S. STEM workers or they are against income inequality, ask them where they stand on H-1B visas.
You have probably heard that American workers need to be retrained. Well hold on to your seat because the events that have helped bring all of this misinformation into the news was when major companies (Southern Cal Edison, AIG, Disney, and others) laid off thousands of American IT workers to replace them with H-1B foreign workers. But the kicker was that unless they TRAINED the H-1B workers they would not get their severance pay! This became as known by the American workers as “Digging Your Own Grave”. This came to light because a few brave souls did the right thing and brought the practice to the authorities.
While the Disney case probably got more publicity, the AIG case was perhaps the worst. A total of 249 full-time AIG employees, plus additional contract workers, lost their jobs to cheap, foreign workers imported into the U.S. Some years later one of the laid off employees came back as a consultant to help clean the mess the foreign IT workers had created. The work was terrible and certainly did not approach the original concept of highly skilled guest worker. Some say that the bad IT helped lead to AIG’s bankruptcy.
However, perhaps the biggest exposure of this injustice to American STEM workers came when Jennifer Wedel was selected to do an on-line interview with President Obama. Perhaps they did not vet her sufficiently because her question was as follows:
“Mr. President, my husband was laid off three years ago. He has an electrical engineering degree and had yet to find a job. My question to you is how are you preventing foreigners with H-1B visas from getting American citizens’ jobs?”
This caught the Administration completely off guard and Obama stumbled to try to answer the question. He ended by saying this is the kind of American that should be able to find a job, please send me his resume. Despite supposed help from the White House it took over an additional year for Mr. Wedel to find a job and salary that matched his considerable credentials (he was graduated from a highly rated University, held several certifications, and had extensive experience in his area of expertise). This should have raised concerns about the concept that we did not have sufficient Americans with STEM qualifications and that most needed retraining. The truth is that companies prefer foreign workers (even if they are less qualified) because they are cheaper. Which is a major factor in the stagnant wages issue we hear so much about.
It has been mentioned before that most companies, not individuals, apply for the H-1B visas. They are supposed to prove they have first sought to fill the job with Americans but that is not enforced. Next they are supposed to list the “prevailing wage” for the job. They are not required to use the wages for the specific area and can use “acceptable” studies from other areas. They can also use a lower level rating for jobs that require higher skills. For example, in Charlotte, North Carolina the level 3 wage (for the job offered) is about $80,000 – the actual prevailing wage. But an employer, unlikely to be caught by DOL rubber-stampers, could claim the Level 1 prevailing wage of $51,000 and save $29,000. In Chicago, the prevailing wage for an architect is $77,000 a year. Under the present system an H-1B worker can be paid just $49,000. So you can see why companies prefer foreign workers over American workers. You can also see why wages have been stagnant, they are being held down by the below average wages of thousands of foreign workers.
The book lists numerous examples of H-1B abuses but unfortunately the H-1B visa is not the only way workers can get into the country. Here is a list of other methods to “beat the system”:
B visas: These are visitor visas mean for foreigners on short-term stays for business or pleasure, They are not supposed to be used for paid performances or gainful employment of any kind, but they are used fraudently in this manner.
EB-5 : This was designed for alien entrepreneurs to obtain green cards by investing between five hundred thousand to one million dollars in a new commercial enterprise or troubled business. This has become a cash for green card deal since it has many loopholes.
L visa: This was designed for multinational companies to move employees back and forth between countries in which they have locations. This is another fraud-friendly program which is greatly abused to get workers into countries to work in industries other than their own.
F-1: This is the foreign student visa program and is abused almost as much the H-1B program. This is another program that is supposed to be temporary but many graduates overstay their visas and get jobs here in the U.S. Related to this program is another program called OPT (Optional Practical Training ) which allows foreign college students and others to stay in the country to work both part-time and full-time to get needed training.
If like me you are overwhelmed by the methods available to get cheap foreign workers in the country I will not try to explain how each category is exploited; however the book does an excellent job of providing these details, including how those who supply the workers make fortunes (some are billionaires), those who hire them (U.S. tech companies) save enormous amounts of money on wages paid, and politicians who push the foreign worker agenda get tons of money for their campaigns.

Michelle Malkin is a very good political investigative journalist. Sold Out opens the public's eyes to what is really going on with the immigration issue here in America and it is not just the southern border. She identifies the U.S. government officials, their friends and cohorts and crony capitalist who use the immigration system to bring in cheap foreign labor to replace American workers and how they profit from it. How the foreign workers are enslaved by the system, that it goes beyond just visas, continues to threaten national security and has gotten to the point where American citizenship is being sold.

I often laugh when people say companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are using H1B to make workers cheap. Software Engineering, or Engineering or Science in general, are not built upon cheap workers.

Each engineer is an integral part of the system, sometimes it takes only one stupid bug to crash the entire system (this happens more often than you think), let alone all the issues like maintainability, scalability, and etc. Serious IT companies only hire the best, because not hiring is much better than hiring someone less-skilled and then having an engineering nightmare.
Because these serious IT companies only hire those qualified, those who can get hired are not paid anything less, even for interns. My upper-year internships pay between 7k - 8k USD per month, that is excluding all the transportation, housing, meals and all the other perks. The full-time offers I got paid between 95k - 110k USD per year (for someone who just graduated). I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it’s cheap. And I am only the average guy here, there are many people with H1B problems got higher salaries than me, and from all I know, we are not paid anything less than American engineers. The company probably ends up spending on us more due to resources put into H1B sponsorships.
H1B is not how you make engineers cheap, because you want good engineers, and if you don’t offer good price, they are gonna find good jobs elsewhere, and that might just be your competitor. To make engineers cheap, you have to work on retention. H1B is passable - one is free to change jobs, it provides no help in increasing retention. Worker turnover and offer negotiations are the biggest factors in cost. If an engineer works in your company for less than a year and leaves, you lose money. If an engineer has 5 offers and negotiates, you pay more. How do you limit this? - A while back, there was a huge scandal (at least in IT) about mutual agreement between several top IT companies in not hiring engineers from each other. It’s hard to pay enough to make good engineers stay. It’s impossible to make them cheap, unless you take away their options. H1B does not work here.

I believe, if one is an American software engineer and is unemployed, then he/she doesn’t work hard enough. There are so many IT jobs, and it’s simple, either you do better than other interviewees, or you do worse. H1B engineers will increase competition, absolutely. This is the real problem here: ~35% of H1B are given to foreign people who have been found to be more skilled in their position than the other people, American or foreign, that want the same position. Is it taking jobs from Americans’ hands? Of course. If you look at the competitiveness act, part of why H1B exists is to let foreign skilled workers take jobs from less-skilled Americans to ensure that America as a country will stay competitive to other countries. Because there are not enough skilled Americans, if you don’t let some high-skilled workers take over some jobs, you might have more Americans working for a while, but eventually China, India, Britain, Germany, Korea, Japan… will close in the gap. Look at 2016 Nobel prize winners, all 6 US winners (so far) are immigrants, none was born in US. Not a single native-born American won a Nobel prize this year. So really, this is all about Americans being not good enough and the resulting need to fill in with foreign talents.
I personally find it very unfair. “Oh they are taking our jobs”. Hell yeh. If you are sleeping when I am coding my own app; if you are partying when I am working on personal map-reduce cluster; if you are watching football when I am looking at tensor flow, guess who is getting the job?

After reading just the first 30 pages I was outraged to hear the truth about foreign guest worker programs and could not put this book down. All the facts are fully supported with notations at the end of the book.

Some shocking facts about America's foreign guest worker programs that I did not know until reading this book:

-America has no shortage of skilled IT workers now but our country will if the H1B program continues unchecked. The US census reports that 74% of US STEM grads are not working in the field. The majority of H1B visa applicants state that they are the lowest possible skill level. The O visa is in place for foreign highly skilled “Genius” workers.

-Disney’s H1B visa abuse is not an anomaly. The same thing is happening coast to coast. From AT&T to Zillow.

-Our lawmakers need to take action immediately. 1 out of 2 new IT jobs is filled by a foreign guest worker. Job ads have been found that are very clear that only H1B workers should apply. In other words if you are a US citizen you will not be considered.