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These programs are Unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment, not for their supposed reasons for having been created, but because of the conditions of Involuntary Servitude under which they effectively enslave millions of young people who were brought to the USA with the promise of opportunity. The 13th Amendment specifically outlaws such treatment of any person within the territory of the United States or in any place under its control, regardless of how or why they are in such place.

Their Unconstitutionality rests, not on the text of the enabling legislation nor of the concepts behind their existence, but upon what they pragmatically do to fellow human beings. This abusive treatment is the functional reason for these programs, and they would lose their attractiveness if this treatment did not continue while the rest of the Nation looks the other way.

"The Peculiar Institution" returns in a new and not-so different form, with a new class of victims.

That seems a rather odd and restrictive viewpoint with little legal justification. I plan to do some additional investigation.

I work with several fellow IT people who carry H1B. My manager at a previous employer was an Irishman who was one of the best people I ever worked with, and showed no sign of considering himself "enslaved" at any time.

If the concepts and the legislation are constitutional, then that should be enough. Surely the USA has had enough of the lawyers re-writing the law under the cover of the constitution? If the law doesn't work, change it. If course, that does imply a functional legislature...

All countries need some system like this. In the UK we have lots of temporary visas, from tier 1 (exceptional talent) to tier 5 (religious worker). But the sponsoring employer has to be licenced, can be checked by the immigration service, and has to pay the minimum wage, among other things. Temporary agricultural workers are typically recruited and provided by "gangmasters" who have to be licensed in the same way.

I am sorry that's just unabashedly uninformed. None of the non-immigrant visas result in "indentured servitude" as you claim. Typically, the biggest issue is - if you are fired, you go back to home country. And, several non-immigrant visa holders do have a path to citizenship.

Do you have any studies or reports of investigations (other than your claims of "witnessing" 17 people in one house) that point out such mistreatment?

I understand if you are against immigration I understand. But, the stated concern for holders for immigrant visa to be seems mendacious at worst and terribly uninformed at best.

I talked about the issue in much more detail in my previous blog post on the subject.

There is always the "legitimate, well-educated temporary worker," and these people (such as your Irishman) are quickly brought to the front-and-center in justification of the entire program. But, in my previous post, I had talked about sheepherders and the H-2A visa program. And how, for the majority of visa holders (especially in tech) there are never offered any futures ... no citizenship, not even a green card. They're simply sent home.

Likewise, I eyewitnessed those "17 well-dressed people getting into a bus." I saw those sleeping bags. Never mind that it is illegal under US Law to have so many people in one housing-unit: I'm quite sure that it was registered under the name of one or two people and the other fifteen were un-recorded "house guests."

When your purpose is to have workers who "can't say no and have nowhere to go," plenty of euphemisms have been invented. It has always been so.

But there are some people in Washington DC who are aware of the abuses. I suspect that their "visa reform act" doesn't have a chance of pa$$ing anytime $oon, but it's enough to read (as I allude to in the previous blog post) of some of the things that they have chosen specifically to outlaw. These abuses are happening, to real victims plaintiffs people, right now.

(And the presence of that proposed legislation, I submit, is the very-best evidence of how widespread the situation actually is. Lawmakers don't write specific provisions to outlaw things that they don't already know exist. That the "employers" must prove that wages were actually paid. That the "employer" must actually have an office. These abuses are widespread, and there are even those in Washington, DC who know it. It's easy to find the exact text of the legislation itself, in its various drafts, at http://thomas.loc.gov.)

Interestingly, you are also beginning to read blog posts out of India which make the observation that there are much better countries in the world to temporarily-visit for work purposes, than the United States. Apparently quite a few returning workers are telling the truth when they get home, and their countrymen are listening.

You can also still find Congressional speeches made in the 1840-1850's by lawmakers (both North and South) defending the necessity and legitimacy of "their flavors of" peculiar institutions.

And never mind the millions of displaced high-tech workers who now can avail themselves of a US Department of Labor program to re-train them to work changing the sheets in hotels . . . that's another subject entirely. And yet, it demonstrates how the very department in the US Government that is responsible for Labor has institutionally accepted the idea of "non-immigrant visas forever" and will spend money to teach American citizens to accept their new, demoted, status.

Another interesting bit of Googling has to do with "legal challenges to indentured servitude."

Even in the 1700's, reformers understood the abuses that were taking place in industrial states under the euphemism of bringing in foreign workers "to learn a trade." As these sentiments eventually grew to become the 13th Amendment (with its three-letter clause), it's interesting to look at what the challenges against that "peculiar institution" were. (After the Amendment became law, these became Supreme Court decisions backed by the Amendment. But, they never seemed to go far enough. The "peculiar institution" remains to this day.)

Among the things that could be enacted (or, decided) that would drive a stake through the heart of the "non-immigrant visa institution" ... in addition to the Act now being debated ... are:

Strike the "sponsorship" requirement. Any visa-holder is free to quit his or her job and to go to another job. And, while he is out of work for whatever reason, he is not subject to deportation until the term of his visa expires, provided only that he can show continued evidence that he is seeking work (and, being denied).

Maybe that alone would be enough.

The fundamental flaw of all forms of the "peculiar institution" is that they entrap people with no hope of escaping adverse working conditions. If you can't leave your employer, and you can't be out-of-work without fearing a knock-knock from the Federales, you are entrapped. And the provisions by which you find yourself in the USA are specifically designed to entrap you and to keep you there for the duration of your presence here.

That's "unconstitutional."

Perhaps you should edit the title of your post then... Nevermind, I misunderstood.

I can't exactly change the title to, "So, this has been going down, in one form or another, since before the United States of America began." However, it really isn't "new" in this country, nor in any other country.

Perhaps the only "unusual" thing about this particular flavor of "The Peculiar Institution" is the involvement of the so-called "Immigration" system, although these particular visas are (emphatically ...) non-immigrant. The "Immigration and Naturalization Service" (as it used to be called) is being used now only as "the heavy." (Yes, if you make an unfortunate mis-step that your employer sponsor doesn't like, you can wind up in a Customs Service prison, although you have never stood in a courtroom nor been accused of a crime.)

No, in both American and in world history, "this is not new." But it is quite disturbing to see "the brand-new industry that was going to change the world" dumpster-diving into abusive labor practices that were supposed to be "unconstitutional as of the mid-1860's," and defending those practices using the same rhetoric that somehow has always been used to defend these "peculiar, but accepted" things.

Remember: for every one of the now-millions of high-tech workers who are supposed to avail themselves of US Department of Labor programs to re-train them to change hotel sheets, there are, necessarily, an equal number of millions of people right here among us. They are many thousands of miles from their homes (and with no way to return there, if they wished to, without facing financial ruin), many of whom are trapped in a 21st Century "Peculiar Institution" even if they wear business suits every day and smile ... before crawling into their sleeping bags at night.

If you happen to know a "happy little exception," please rest assured: they are "the exception."

Theft of labor is one of the founding blocks of the United States. Later on, we fought a war about it, so it just morphed into other forms. Then came sweat shops, child labor, and chain gaings. Then came . . . . well, it's still going on, but you get the idea.

Certainly there have been abuses of H1B visas. I have long considered the arguments for H1B visas to have been specious attempts to bring, if not cheap, at least less expensive labor to the US, instead of paying citizens a living wage. One thing history teaches us is that the haves are generally adept at stealing from the have-nots while finding creative and pompous-sounding justifications for doing so.

It's not the H1B visas that are at fault. It's the thieves of labor and all their enablers, sycophants, and apologists, regardless of the pretexts and justifications they use.

I'll stop now.

In a sense SUNDIAL is correct. I remember one particularly egregious case that was reported in India. It was about skilled carpenters, masons etc who were brought to USA to work for a contractor (gang master - probably not authorised to import people) on a project. They were housed in one room which had hastily knocked together wooden boards as double decker sleepers. You know with wet towels strung along the ceiling .. like a dystopian victorian sweat shop. Interestingly they had been promised good wages on par with American citizens and a part of the hype was for them to make some legit money on a one year deputation. In reality they didn't even have money for a beer after the shift (you know how the body aches after a day's hard labour).

Unfortunately for the contractor, one of the employees was a sympathiser of a legal leftist trade union and he got his comrades to file a case in an Indian court with photographic evidence and the court ruled that THIS LABOURER be compensated - "class action suits" have yet to catch up in India.

So abuses do take place but 't take it out on the hapless guy on the job for whom the USA is still an aspirational place to make good clean money and return to his land.

OK

"It would be nice ... very nice ..." if the actual proposition was that you could "make good, clean money and then return to your land."

History tells us very plainly what actually happens with "business arrangements" such as these. (The non-immigrant visa program, although perversely managed by what used to be called the "Immigration & Naturalization Service," specifically excludes both of these possibilities: you will not get a green card, much less naturalization. No, you will be sent home ... but they never bother to tell you about the actual conditions that will face you while you are here.

Anyone who broke an Indentured Servitude contract ... had broken a contract. But a non-immigrant visa holder has broken the law. Yes, he might be deported (at his own and at his remote family's great expense), but first he is likely to be imprisoned, without any sort of trial, in a Customs Service prison for an indeterminate period of time. Somehow, the earnest young souls are never told about such things, until they get here.

Yes, it might be better than their conditions in the ghettos of Calcutta, but that's not supposed to be the point.

Nevertheless, this is the age-old motivation that causes businesses to "import" millions(!) of workers, and for there to be a separate industry of slave traders companies who seek out and provide those workers.

Nothing's new in this world. In the 1860's, someone tried to outlaw it in the supreme law of the land. But it never really stopped: sharecropping, "guest" agricultural workers in avocado fields, and, since the early 1990's, "non-immigrant visas."

Unconstitutional. In any and every form. Backed by any and every euphemism.

And the US Department of Labor "retraining for displaced American workers" program should also sound very familiar to any student of history: "Non-Immigrant visas today, non-immigrant visas tomorrow, non-immigrant visas forever!!"

And, it's happening in your "multi-nationalized" country, too. What's being described to you as "immigration," actually is not. These people are not "immigrants," and they will never be allowed to be. Companies would not be the slightest bit interested in "importing" these people if their status allowed them any future ... or, any voice, or, any recourse whatsoever.

I meant, change the H-1B to H-2A; but I see now that I was confused: by "previous post" I thought you meant previous post in this thread, but upon rereading, you actually meant http://www.sundialservices.com/blog/...mer-in-the-usa

Exactly. The "H-1B" program is often pushed to the forefront of the popular press because it is supposed to have "quantity limits."

This is done so that people will innocently believe that the impact is controlled. But the truth is quite different.

First of all, there is "an alphabet soup" of programs. Also, there are enormous loopholes that allow [Indian] slave traders personnel agencies to set up a shop in the United States (even if "in name only" ... hence the legislative requirement for "an office") and then to claim that their people are "American." In other words, if your purpose is to "look the other way," then there are plenty of ways in which to do it.

"The peculiar institution" is something that just keeps coming back, in new guises and disguises. But its fundamental goal is always the same: to create a pool of pliant workers who can't go anywhere and who therefore can't fight back.

The cruelty(!) of the "non-immigrant visa" programs is that they now are able to leverage the draconian powers of the US Department of Homeland Security to hang a "sword of Damocles" over the head of each and every non- (and never-) "immigrant worker" who fails to toe the line.

Although proponents are (of course) quick to proffer "legitimate uses" of these programs, in defense of the programs as a whole, I think that the "duck principle" applies. For one thing, you seem to be importing millions of ducks. Furthermore, you are seeking out these ducks in obvious preference to the birds of your own land, even to the point of allocating vast sums of money to re-train the native birds to change sheets in hotel rooms. There must be a reason, and, upon any reasonable inspection, that reason seems to be many hundreds of years old. "Yes, here it comes again."