30-06-09(14:51:32)
June 30, 2009
30-06-09(14:46:32)
June 30, 2009
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June 30, 2009
30-06-09(14:39:16)
June 30, 2009
Chicago Bar Foundation Mini Golf Outing - Summer 2009
June 23, 2009
The Chicago Bar Foundation hosted their annual Mini Golf outing at Millenium Park. The Chicago Lawyer Network also took part in the event. Here are some photos for what turned out to be a perfect night for golf in beautiful surroundings. Many new connections were made through this networking event.
Click on the photo to view the caption.
10-06-09(10:50:48)
June 10, 2009
10-06-09(10:46:22)
June 10, 2009
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June 10, 2009
10-06-09(9:19:18)
June 10, 2009
An International Perspective: Stop hiring immigrants
June 9, 2009
By Kwabena Appenteng, Greene and Letts
Every April 1, for around 100,000 immigrant workers, the world stops turning. As the rest of the world spends the day before April 1 placing the finishing touches on their April Fools Day tricks, immigration lawyers across the United States frantically assemble applications for H-1B work visas for their foreign clients.
Less than 24 hours later, over 65,000 H-1B work visa applications are approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the world, slowly, starts to turn once again.
This year, things are different.
Unemployment rates in some states exceed an astronomical 10 percent, as the national unemployment rate hovers around a scary 8 percent quotient. To compound the misery of the statistics, job cuts continue to prevail across the economy, and competition for the scant number of jobs left is becoming vicious. With unemployment as bad as it currently is, a new solution is being encouraged by the U.S. government: stop hiring immigrants.
Somewhat ironically, leading up to this year’s Group of 20 nations summit held in London, the U.S. vociferously proclaimed its valiant commitment to fight against trade protectionism and the threat of nations putting up barriers to trade goods and services with other countries in order to stimulate and sustain their own dwindling economies.
Now, the same administration is taking steps to implement a different form of protectionism: employment protectionism, to prevent U.S. companies from hiring immigrant workers under the H-1B visa program.
Under the Employ American Workers Act, a component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — the stimulus package, for short — companies that receive federal funds through TARP, through section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act, or even from money borrowed through one of the Federal Reserve’s financial rescue programs, must jump through additional, congressionally stamped hoops in order to hire immigrant workers.
Specifically, these companies must prove that they have tried to recruit American workers at prevailing wages and that the immigrant workers they seek to hire are not replacing American citizens.
In the most unbiased tone I can muster, I ask you, is this right?
To proponents of the new legislation, the argument is simple: hiring a foreign worker deprives an American of a job. As American taxpayers are the ones funding the current bailout of the U.S. financial system, the cog that keeps the rest of the economy turning, it is not fair to deprive these same taxpayers from jobs being offered by employers who received taxpayer funding.
Conversely, critics of the legislation contend that granting jobs to foreign workers through the H-1B visa program will help the economy and lead to the creation of more jobs for Americans.
As a past recipient of the H-1B visa, it is hard to masquerade my feelings toward this new legislation, and my rationale for writing this column. However, for the remaining 300 words of this column, I promise to put away my British and Ghanaian passports, and remain as neutral as possible.
The U.S. economy is demonstrating an incipient recovery, and some sectors are beginning to hire once again. Whether our firms choose to hire an American taxpayer or a foreign worker, the result remains the same — an increase in tax revenue, consumer spending, and investment in the U.S. capital markets: the U.S. economy wins.
Although the foreign worker may have been awarded a job that an American worker could have earned, the existence of the foreign worker does not detract from the fact that the mere creation of a job helps the U.S. economy.
With that said, it is easy to appreciate the inherent unfairness of giving a job to a foreign worker within the current economic climate, and leaving American workers without a job in their nation, and at a company that they paid to bail out. On the other hand, as scant as jobs may be, it seems unlikely that employers across the nation will suddenly decide to expend the few jobs they have at their companies — or in our case, law firms — on foreign workers, especially given the additional cost employers must suffer to hire foreign workers. With or without the government’s current protectionism measure, American workers will remain the first choice of American employers.
The government’s decision to put up barriers to employ foreign workers not only looks like economic-crisis-induced xenophobia, but also goes against the spirit of global cooperation being promoted by the U.S. government and needed to restart the global economy.
Even scarier, however, are the long-term effects of such employment protectionism. As a nation built on the innovation and talent of immigrants, the United States — of all nations — can appreciate the diversity of thought and talent that foreign workers can add to an economy.
If the United States truly seeks to incite a stimulation of its own economy and the global economy, then employment of any eligible individual, irrespective as to where they are from, surely must be the priority.