Report says Maine a gateway for foreign workers

PORTLAND – Maine has become a portal for foreign workers who obtain their visas here and then go to work for companies in other states, the Portland Press Herald reported.

An investigation shows that the state served as a foreign worker gateway for dozens of companies, including several with little or no connection to the state, in 2004 and 2005, the newspaper said.

Individual companies filed applications for as many as 500 foreign high-tech workers who would have been working in Maine communities such as Portland, Augusta and Pittsfield, the newspaper said. But the newspaper questioned whether all of those workers actually became employed by companies in Maine.

Citing federal figures, the newspaper said the U.S. Department of Labor basically rubber-stamps applications for H1B visas for skilled foreign workers, exposing the system to fraud and raising national security issues.

A June 2006 U.S. Government Accountability Office report says that of 307,771 H1B labor condition applications filed nationwide last year, 99.7 percent were certified by the department.

The ease with which people are approved for visas makes it a magnet for those who want to defraud the system, the auditors suggested in the same report, as evidenced by continued findings of fraud in the system by their office.

“It literally is like the wild West,” said Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech, a unit of the Communications Workers of America union. “There’s not even a Wyatt Earp in sight when it comes to reining in the H1B visa program.”

Some large Maine companies use the H1B system to legitimately fill gaps in their work forces. But the newspaper’s investigation raises questions about whether there are enough jobs in specialized fields in Maine for all of the visas said to be for Maine-based companies.

From fiscal years 2003 to 2005, the number of Maine-based labor condition applications filed with the Labor Department grew 230 percent, according to federal records analyzed by the newspaper.

Showing a particularly high increase was the number of computer-related application filings. In 2003, 53 applications were filed through Maine for 206 computer-related workers, but by 2005, 722 applications were filed for 2,266 computer workers. The 2005 records are the latest available from the government.

Maine’s high-tech sector is modest in size. Experts say it’s difficult to envision actual demand driving the jump in visa certification applications.

According to the latest state records, the number of computer programmer and software engineer positions declined 9.4 percent in Maine from 2003 to 2004.