{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/qanda-foreign-worker-visas-should-not-displace-us-workers", "Q&A: Foreign Worker Visas Should Not Displace U.S. Workers", "2025-10-10", "2025", "2025-10", "Republican", "Senate", "IA", "Chuck Grassley", "G000386", "www.grassley.senate.gov", "grassley", "https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases", "scraper", "Q: Why did you write U.S. tech companies about their employment practices?\n\nA: I chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal immigration laws, including temporary visa programs that govern nonimmigrant visitors. A citizen of a foreign country who comes to the United States to study or obtain employment must obtain permission through one of the more than 20 nonimmigrant visas available, such as a business visitor, nanny, student, temporary agriculture worker and more. For years, I\u2019ve led bipartisan oversight of foreign visa programs with former Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois to close loopholes and root out fraud and abuse.\n\nThe H-1B and L-1 programs provide a pathway for businesses to temporarily employ foreign professionals with specialized knowledge when there\u2019s a shortage of qualified workers at home. It requires an employer to sponsor the visa holder; file required petitions with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the U.S. Department of Labor; and pay fees for the application process. Recently, the Trump administration proposed raising the fee to $100,000 per visa holder.\n\nCongress created the H1-B program in 1990; it lasts for three years with a one-time renewal option. Over the years, some employers have exploited the system to cut out American workers for cheap foreign labor. Sen. Durbin and I in September wrote letters to 10 of the biggest companies in the country, including Amazon, Apple and Google, to get an explanation why they continue to hire thousands of H1-B visa holders while recent data show U.S. college graduates with majors in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields now face higher unemployment than the general population. For example, Amazon has laid off tens of thousands of employees in recent years and yet applied and received approval to hire more than 10 thousand foreign H1-B employees. This doesn\u2019t pass the smell test. Homegrown talent must come first. Specifically, we want a full accounting about their recruitment practices; such as the number of H1-B workers they\u2019ve hired, including salary and benefit disparities between visa holders and American workers; and whether U.S. workers were displaced when filing for thousands of visa petitions for foreign workers. Approximately 700,000 people are working in the United States on a H1-B visa, most are from India and China.\n\nQ: How would your legislation close loopholes used to displace U.S. workers?", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:32:54Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/qanda-foreign-worker-visas-should-not-displace-us-workers"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.1153436973690987, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}