Trump’s DHS Started Importing 85,000 H-1B Workers While American Graduates Face Bleak Economic Prospects
Jose Nino
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On Friday, March 27, 2020, Trump administration officials announced that they had started the process of importing 85,000 H-1B gig workers that will displace white-collar jobs.
These jobs will be needed after October by millions of American graduates who face dire economic prospects due to the government-mandated economic shutdown.
“This is just an unspeakable action,” said Marie Larson, a co-founder of the American Workers Coalition, an immigration restriction organization that has made a name for itself by opposing visa worker programs that have displaced at least million white-collar workers in America. “I don’t believe President Trump ordered this — the swamp went ahead with this,” she stated.
“If the H-1B program is just for filling jobs that Americans cannot fill amid for labor shortages, then this would not be happening,” said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Reform Institute. “But it is not a labor-shortage program — it is a cheap labor program to displace Americans,” he said.
The 2020 lottery “is in your face that that is the purpose of the program.”
This annual supply of H-1B visas included 20,000 visas for foreigners who pay for graduate programs at American colleges, on top of the 65,000 visas for graduates who are being imported from India, China, and other countries. Non-profits — such as hospitals and universities — are allowed to also import an unlimited number of “cap-exempt” H-1Bs for white-collar jobs.
Neil Munro of Breitbart News noted the following:
Roughly 100,000 new H-1B workers arrive each year. But they are allowed to stay for many years, so companies have gradually built up a resident workforce of roughly 900,000 H-1B workers, alongside several hundred thousand additional white-collar workers carrying L-1, OPT, CPT, E-3, B-1, TN, H4EAD documents.
The Trump administration has largely been disappointing in curtailing the issuance of H-1B visas. In March 2016, Trump went off on H-1B visas:
The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.
That said, the Trump administration is lagging in terms of results.
The current DHS chief, Chad Wolf, previously worked as a lobbyist for the NASSCOM outsourcing industry, which imports the majority of the H-1B gig workers.
Munro highlighted that “The group’s mix of Indian and U.S. companies use the H-1B program to extract salaries and wealth from the American college graduate class, and they split the gains among both countries’ executives and investors, plus the visa workers and India’s government.”
Trump’s inability to stem this program represents a failure on his part, and it’s clear that his staffing decisions are suspect.
He will need to learn the error of his ways and hopefully receive support and input from legislators who actually have America First interests at heart.
However, Trump must secure re-election and Republicans must retake the House in 2020 for any of this to happen.
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