Even in Times of Economic Shutdown, Businesses Want to Still Flood the Market with Cheap Migrant Labor
Jose Nino
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According to Neil Munro of Breitbart News, the Department of Homeland Security is attempting to speed up the delivery of H-1B foreign worker visas to U.S. and Indians. All of this is being done despite the economy tanking and plenty of evidence demonstrating that American graduates are being displaced in the work force.
On March 16, 2020 the program’s acceleration was announced when DHS’s immigration services agency revealed it would limit the usage of “premium processing” to “help us to reduce overall H-1B processing times.”
Through premium processing, companies can pay a premium to skip the line for roughly 100,000 H-1B work visas annually. However, Munro notes that “the line-jumping slows the routine award of H-1B visas to the corporate managers who prefer to hire blocs of compliant foreign workers instead of interviewing innovative American professionals and graduates.”
Every April, 85,000 H-1B visas are given to U.S. companies through a rushed application and lottery process by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency. Additionally, 15,000 “cap-exempt” H-1Bs are granted during the course of the year to non-profit employers at universities, research laboratories, and hospitals. The cap-exempt employers are can hire as many H-1Bs as they want.
The current head of DHS, Chad Wolf, previously worked as a lobbyist for the Indian-based outsourcing industry.
In the meantime, business groups are attempting to expand the H-1B program. Munro mentioned that “activists are citing the coronavirus disease as an excuse for Congress to allow investors to hire an unlimited number of foreign graduates for jobs in the healthcare sector.”
Immigration restriction advocates are demanding a cancellation of the 2020 H-1B awards during the economic crash. “Why should Indians be favored over Americans who can’t pay their rent?” inquired Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “It is ridiculous.”
The H-1B program covers the majority of foreign visa workers in the U.S. However, additional visa programs roughly keep 1.5 million white-collar visa workers in jobs that would otherwise be occupied by U.S. graduates, which tend to be software jobs on both coasts.
The majority of visa workers hail from India, which can be attributed to the fact that many Indian-born managers in U.S. companies prefer to hire Indian nationals instead of young American graduates, according to the accounts of numerous American professionals. The discriminatory preference has motivated people to file several private lawsuits after federal agencies have dragged their feet on the matter.
U.S. business lobbies are also working with groups of prospective immigrants to push Utah Senator Mike Lee’s S.386, a bill which would significantly increase the citizenship rewards to an even greater number of Indian H-1B workers who replace American college workers. Several groups such as No on H.R. 1044 and The Multinational Coalition Against H.R. 1044/S. 386 have stood up to these expansions in immigration.
“The purpose of the H-1B program is to replace Americans with cheaper foreign workers,” asserted John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute. He added:
That’s it. No other description matches what Congress enacted, yet the media persists that with that bullshit notion that it is designed to provide higher-skilled workers. This notion is a typical lobbyist tactic — they take a turd and call it a rose, and most of the American media will call it a rose if the politicians — especially Democrats — say it is a rose.
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