With contending pieces of legislation now up for consideration in Congress, California has returned to the national spotlight on one of the most contentious immigration issues — special visas granted by the federal government to attract foreign talent.

Long critiqued by economic nationalists, including some Democrats, the H-1B visa program has been accused of undercutting qualified candidates in key industries who are U.S. citizens. “The H-1B program offers 65,000 visas each fiscal year, with an additional 20,000 reserved for foreign workers who have advanced degrees from U.S. colleges and universities,” according to Ars Technica. “The visas are awarded by lottery each year. Last year, the government received more than 236,000 applications for those visas.”

With the prestige, economic importance and compensation level attached to those jobs, they have become a focus of reform for allies of President-elect Donald Trump. “Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the highest-profile Republicans in Congress and a supporter of Mr. Trump, said Wednesday in a statement on his website that he is reintroducing a bill designed to ‘stop the outsourcing of American jobs’ and ensure laws are not ‘abused to allow companies to outsource and hire cheap foreign labor from abroad,'” The Wall Street Journal reported. The bill would seek to achieve that outcome by hiking “required salaries for positions granted under the H-1B scheme that replace American workers from $60,000 to $100,000 per year,” according to the Journal.

Bipartisan frustration

In a sign of the cross-cutting partisan interests shaking up some established battle lines on immigration, Issa boasted a Democrat, fellow Californian Rep. Scott Peters, as the co-sponsor of the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act. Silicon Valley, where political allegiances at the end of the Obama era have begun to shift in new ways, has come under attack for its use of H-1Bs. “In 2013, the top nine companies acquiring H-1B visas were technology outsourcing firms, according to an analysis by a critic of the H-1B program,” Ars Technica recalled, noting that Microsoft rounded out the list’s top 10. “The thinking goes that if minimum H-1B salaries are brought closer to what high-skilled tech employment really pays, the economic incentive to use it as a worker-replacement program will drop off.”

But other big California corporations have not been left out of the criticism. “It’s specifically required that there be a shortage” in qualified candidates, Issa said of Southern California Edison, which he attacked for asking “employees being laid off to train their replacements,” as U-T San Diego noted. 

“Edison said at the time of the layoffs that it was ‘not hiring H-1B workers to replace displaced employees. Any H-1B visa workers SCE does hire for its own workforce are paid a wage comparable to SCE’s domestic workforce. Disney and a handful of other California companies have been criticized in recent years for similar moves.”

Dueling drafts

Issa and Scott’s path forward has been complicated, however, by legislative competition from one of his fellow California delegates to Congress. “Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Santa Clara County Democrat, warned Thursday that she believes Issa’s bill could undermine Silicon Valley’s job market,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “That’s because tech companies in a location such as Silicon Valley, where software engineers can command a starting wage of $140,000 a year, might still have incentives to use foreign workers for $100,000, Lofgren said.”

Casting her alternative as a return to the original intent of U.S. visa laws to attract the so-called best and brightest, Lofgen recently announced the details of a draft bill that will circulate formally in several weeks’ time. “Under her plan, employers who pay as much as 2.5 times to three times the prevailing wage in their metro area would get first preference to hire people through the H-1B visa program,” according to the Mercury News. Lofgren has suggested that Issa’s intended fix could leave some problems intact. “Raising the wage from $60,000 to $100,000 would do nothing to prevent the sort of outsourcing abuse we’ve seen under the H-1B visa program,” she warned, according to the paper.

State Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, repackaged some of his long-cherished plans for law enforcement reform in Senate Bill 178, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or Cal-ECPA. In a press release, Leno’s office described SB178 as a prudent piece of legislation with enough exceptions to ensure public safety and effective policing:

“Cal-ECPA protects all electronic communications, including personal messages, passwords and PIN numbers, GPS data, photos, medical and financial information, contacts and metadata. Exceptions to the warrant requirement are included in the legislation so that law enforcement officers can continue to effectively and efficiently protect public safety in the event of an emergency.”

A string of failures

Leno has tried and failed to enact similar legislation in the recent past.

His troubles emerged in the wake of a controversial California Supreme Court ruling in 2007. The plaintiff, Gregory Diaz, was incriminated after an arrest when an officer with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department scrolled through the text messages on Diaz’s cellphone. The justices sided against Diaz, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Diaz’ case.

So in 2011, Leno’s attempt to require warrants for cellphone searches fell prey to a veto from Gov. Jerry Brown — even though it passed the Assembly unanimously. As CNN reported, Brown warned that “courts are better suited to resolve the complex and case-specific issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizures protections.”

Then in 2012, as the Sacramento Bee reported, state district attorneys and Brown sank a bill Leno introduced that would have required warrants for any search of location data. And in 2013, they did the same to a related bill that mandated a warrant for emails requested from Internet service providers.

New Allies

But this time, political attitudes have shifted enough that Leno has reasoned he stands a better chance at success. He found a co-author for SB178 in State Sen. Joel Anderson, R-Alpine, known for introducing privacy-related bills that would have shielded Covered California data and prohibited state cooperation with the NSA in unwarranted surveillance activities.

What’s more, Leno was able to marshal the support of Silicon Valley luminaries, whose endorsement was key to building credibility and challenging California’s district attorneys. His bill, KQED reported, received the okay from titans like Google and Microsoft to social media heavyweights like Twitter and Facebook.

And it was backed by smaller startups like Dropbox, which offers secure online data storage.

In a statement released by Mufaddal Ezzy, California manager of public policy and government relations for Google, SB178 was portrayed as a natural extension of current Fourth Amendment protections against searchs and seizures:

“Law enforcement needs a search warrant to enter your house or seize letters from your filing cabinet — the same sorts of protections should apply to electronic data stored with Internet companies. California’s electronic surveillance laws need to be brought in line with how people use the Internet today and provide them with the privacy they reasonably should expect.”

Clarity in the courts

Most importantly of all, Leno finally has the U.S. Supreme Court in his corner. As Ars Technica reported, the court ruled unanimously in a 2014 case, Riley v. California, that warrants must be required to search a cellphone.

Instead of posing an awkward challenge to the courts, as Brown feared years ago, Leno’s desired protections would instead officially square California law with the holding in Riley.

While SB178 makes its way through Sacramento, Californians interested in privacy issues will also keep an eye on Washington, D.C. There, Congress will consider the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act, introduced by a bipartisan group of three lawmakers, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.

By Joseph Perkins

California Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, and Ken Calvert, R-Corona, ought to meet up for coffee while they’re back in the Nation’s Capital for Congress’ post-election lame duck session.

The chairs of state’s Democratic and Republican congressional delegations, respectively, should set partisan differences aside — if only for a brief, shining moment — and draw up a list of issues vitally important to their home state, on which both delegations can work together.

If Lofgren and Calvert asked me — and, for some reason, neither has returned my phone calls — I would suggest the following:

The fiscal cliff. Insist that their fellow lawmakers use the lame duck session to reach a bipartisan agreement that prevents the federal government from plunging over the dreaded cliff, otherwise more than $500 billion in federal tax increases, along with more than $100 billion in across-the-board spending cuts, will take effect this coming New Year’s Day.

If Congress fails to make a deal, no state will be more adversely affected than California, which would fall back into recession, plunging the state government into another budget crisis, as a report last week by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office warned.

“We examined one possible recession scenario,” the LAO stated, ominously, “in which state revenues were about $11 billion lower than in our forecast for 2012-13 and 2013-14 combined.”

Military funding.  Accept reductions in defense spending as the Obama administration winds down military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but oppose the draconian cuts slated to take effect through automatic sequestration.

More than 10 percent of federal defense dollars are spent in California, according to a study by Bloomberg Government. That amounts to a $57 billion a year boost to the state economy.

Sharp reductions in defense outlays will be a shock to the state economy, hurting California companies that have long contracted with the Pentagon, causing more than 135,000 defense-related job losses throughout the state, according to a report by the George Mason University Center for Regional Analysis. 

Immigration Reform. Take leadership on Capital Hill in creating a pathway to earned legalization for undocumented immigrants, including the estimated 3 million here in California.

Now is a good time to do something, inasmuch as illegal immigration is down a third since President Obama was elected four years ago, with net migration from Mexico estimated at zero, according to The Wall Street Journal.

As to deterring future illegal immigration, the best way is by making it less daunting for those seeking opportunity — work, education, business — to come legally.

How about a reinvention of the Bracero program, which lasted from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, which allowed Mexican laborers to enter the United States legally to perform temporary contract work (usually in the agricultural sector) before returning to their native country?

Electrical Grid. Urge lawmakers to take steps to modernize and expand the nation’s electrical grid. The California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity across the high-voltage, long-distance power lines that make up 80 percent of California’s power grid, depends on the national grid to deliver atoms from out of state to meet the California demand of 30 million business and residential users.

As it is, much of the nation’s grid was built more than a half-century ago. Today it is a patchwork system that ultimately will break down, warned a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, unless $673 billion is invested in the grid between now and 2020.

That massive investment needn’t be borne entirely by taxpayers. Curt Hebert Jr., former chair of the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, says there is plenty of private capital available for investment in electrical infrastructure. That is, if the feds give them sufficient incentives to invest.