Elected Officials Step Up to Defend American Workers from Mass Migration
Jose Nino
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Several elected officials are stepping up to the plate to push President Donald Trump to expand his immigration executive order to stop issuing H-1B visas to foreign workers as unemployment rises up to 36.5 million.
In the previous month, President Trump signed off on an executive order stopping the issuance of several employment-based green card categories.
John Binder of Breitbart News noted that the “categories account for less than ten percent of all legal immigration to the U.S. The White House is considering expanding the order over the next few weeks.”
Conservative author Michelle Malkin and Sara Blackwell of Protect U.S. Workers’ Sara Blackwell came together at a panel where they said any expansion of Trump’s executive order should stop the issuance of the H-1B visa program in which more than 100,000 foreign workers are let in annually and allowed to stay in the country for up to six years.
At any given moment, there are approximately 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. Binder added, “There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.”
Blackwell stated the following:
Right now there are a lot of companies that are firing a lot of Americans and they’re keeping their foreign visa-holders. If you look at it from the employer’s point of view, if they fire the foreign visa-holder, they have to report it and then they have to let the foreign visa-holder go … and then if they have to rehire them, that company has to redo the paperwork and redo all this other stuff. It’s just easier to keep the foreign workers there and let the Americans go and then rehire them if they can.
Blackwell claimed she recently talked to American workers who recounted their experience being laid off in the middle of the Wuhan virus while their H-1B foreign visa co-workers are staying employed.
“We have a very precarious situation where a lot of Americans are calling me and saying, we have a whole group of us that are fired and not one foreigner got fired,” Blackwell stated. “It’s happening a lot in a lot of companies all over the country.”
Jay Palmer is a whistleblower whose allegations against Indian outsourcing firm Infosys catalyzed a federal investigation and civil settlement. Palmer announced that he and the American Workers Coalition are collaborating with Arizona congressman Paul Gosar to get Trump’s order expanded to put a stop to the OPT program, B-1 business visas, B-2 tourist visas, in addition to the H-1B visa program.
“We’re so over-inundated with these visas that we’ve got to put a stop to it,” Palmer stated. “We’ve got [36.5] million unemployed people right now … I’m getting emails of people’s visas being extended already before we even expand the ban.”
Binder exposed the level of multinational weight behind maintaining these programs:
Multinational corporations like Amazon, Google, Deloitte, and Intel employ thousands of OPT foreign workers over American STEM graduates every year. In 2017, alone, Amazon had placed nearly 2,400 OPT foreign workers into white-collar STEM jobs that could have otherwise gone to American graduates.
The incentive for Amazon and others to hire OPT foreign workers comes in the form of a 15 percent discount that has allowed employers to evade at least $20 to $30 billion in FICA taxes over the years.
“It’s the CEOs, the Zuckerbergs, it’s all these people for the cheap labor … I have a college-aged daughter, what is their future? … the OPT [program] has killed the future of our college-aged students right now,” Palmer remarked.
Michael Emmons was compelled to train his foreign replacement along with other American coworkers at Siemens ICN in 2002. Emmons urged that L visas be tacked on to any expansion of Trump’s order. The L-1 visa program is essentially limitless, allowing corporations to import as many foreign employees to the U.S. as they want. They can do so for up to seven years.
A number of elected officials have already stepped up to limit the issuance of these visas:
Already, GOP lawmakers Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX), and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have asked Trump to halt foreign visa worker programs.
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