Football coach and Alabama Senate candidate Tommy Tuberville appeared to endorse the notion of admitting 400,000 Indian visa workers to the United States in remarks made on an Alabama politics podcast in December, claiming that current rates of illegal immigration are the only factor stopping the country from bringing in the large pool of workers.
“We have 400,000 people in India that are educated, well trained… That want to come here. They want to be Americans, they want to get into our system, they can help. 400,000, we can’t let them in, because we’re being overrun by illegal immigration.
We need workers, there’s no doubt about that. We need workers to come the right way.”
The use of the H1B program to replace American workers with Indian tech professionals is well documented, and it’s doubtless that allowing 400,000 workers from the world’s second most populous nation to immigrate to America on the premise of their supposed workplace skills would prove devastating to many American tech professionals.
American IT companies are increasingly staffing themselves with a workforce primarily made up of Indian nationals, pushing American workers out of the workforce in exchange for a staff that will work for far lower wages. The H1B program tethers visa workers to their employers, creating what is essentially a system of indentured servitude, where quitting a job jeopardizes a visa worker’s green card prospects.
Tuberville’s full remarks were made on an Alabama politics podcast, and they can be heard in their entirety here. (The interviewer questions him on immigration starting at the 22:35 mark of the video.)
Tuberville’s remarks suggest that his skepticism of immigration to the United States stops and ends with illegal immigration. It doesn’t seem as if cutting back on legal immigration, such as notorious cheap labor visa programs used by major tech companies to displace Americans from the workforce, is a campaign priority for him.
In contrast with Tuberville, his Senate primary opponent, longtime U.S. Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has one of the strongest conservative track records on immigration that any national political figure can speak of. Sessions has taken up difficult political causes in defense of American workers threatened by predatory work visa programs, most recently leading the charge in calling for an immigration moratorium in response to the coronavirus recession that President Trump went on to partially enact.