Rick Scott Signs All-American Flag Act, Spent Millions Creating Jobs For Foreigners

Rick Scott Signs All-American Flag Act, Spent Millions Creating Jobs For Foreigners

			Politics: Rick Scott Signs All-American Flag Act, Spent ... Florida Governor Rick Scott
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But this symbolic act is overshadowed by the Scott administration's history of awarding multi-million dollar contracts and economic incentive dollars to companies which are known for heavily employing foreign H-1B visa workers. 

H-1B visas were created to assist U.S. employers that cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified foreign workers. The program is not supposed to be used to displace existing U.S. workers.

However, the H-1B visa program has come under recent criticism following a New York Times article about 250 Disney World employees who were told that they would be laid off but had to spend their remaining three months of employment training workers who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India.

Florida spent a total $1.32 billion in state and local taxpayer dollars to lure research companies to South Florida under an "Innovation Initiative Fund" that began under the Jeb Bush administration. One of those bio-tech research companies, the German-based Max Plank Institute, has been paid over $94 million in state taxpayer dollars to create 135 jobs, with 94 jobs confirmed so far (or $1 million per job), according to State of Florida Department of Economic Opportunity records. However, records also show that the institute has applied for over 30 H-1B visa positions in the last four years for the Jupiter location. The Scripps Research Institute, which was paid $310 million to create 545 jobs, actually created 572. At a cost to taxpayers of $542k per job, Scripps applied and was certified for 39 H-1B visas to hire foreign workers.

In April 2015, Deloitte Consulting, L.L.P., which is among the top five companies for the most amount of H-1B visas issued in the U.S., was awarded $1.7 million from Seminole County and the City of Lake Mary to create 1,000 jobs with an average salary of $60,520 a year at its new Delivery Center in Lake Mary, Florida.

“Access to skilled workers — especially in areas such as business, HR, IT and systems engineering — and proximity to well-respected educational institutions make the Orlando area an optimal location for our Delivery Center,” stated Bert Naquin, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Center director in a press release announcing the opening of the Delivery Center.

But despite locally skilled labor in the Orlando area touted as a reason for the company's location choice, Deloitte claimed to the Department of Labor that it cannot find skilled labor in the Orlando market by filing for H-1B visas for over 2,000 high tech positions in Lake Mary, Florida.

Although Deloitte did not receive any state incentives for the Lake Mary location, the company did receive a $63 million contract under Florida Governor Rick Scott's administration to create a website to process benefits for unemployed Floridians. The malfunctioning website was beleaguered by criticism from frustrated unemployed Floridians and also from the IT community which called into question the quality of the work performed by Deloite's foreign programmers. Despite the bad publicity generated for the Scott administration by the troubled unemployment website, another $36 million contract was awarded by the State of Florida to Deloite to update the Sunshine State's medicaid processing system.