Will the Biden Administration Sell Out American Tech Workers?
Jose Nino
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Americans are correctly worried about the emerging crisis at the U.S.’s Southern border.
However, one overlooked aspect of migration policy that most people tend to ignore is the expansion of legal immigration. David North of the Center for Immigration Studies raised a good point.
Say what you want about the Trump administration, it did enact measures to raise wages for H-1B workers. Big business and other business entities who are reticent about paying their workers decent wages, were obviously annoyed. Visas of the H1-B variety are generally used as a way for these businesses to cut costs.
However, Trump’s pro-worker policy might get reversed by Joe Biden. According to North, one of the Biden Administration’s first acts is “to at least postpone the higher-wage rule, and perhaps alter it, as Law360 has just reported.”
There is considerable speculation that Silicon Valley, which has strong ties to the Biden administration, was able to convince Biden to delay the implementation of this rule.
In the worst case scenario that this pro-Big Business handout goes through, Republicans in both chambers of Congress will need to speak out. This could be too much to ask for though, given how beholden to Big Business most Republicans have become over time.
North highlighted the H1-B reform that the Trump administration pursued towards the end of his presidency:
The Trump administration’s innovation in this setting was profound. Instead of using the traditional lottery to distribute the applications, which always exceed the 65,000 and 20,000 annual caps on the program, it decided (appropriately) to grant applications offering higher wages for specific job categories, and thus denying applications showing lower wages for similar jobs. (The larger cap went for slots calling for bachelor’s degrees, the smaller one for those with advanced degrees.)
North continued expounding on some of the implications of Trump’s policy change:
It was to become an auction, not a lottery. The higher wages for the incoming H-1Bs would, it was expected, tend to raise wages in the industry for all workers, including citizen ones, and might encourage some employers to look again at America’s own high-tech workers.
But due to Biden’s policy change, the next round of H-1B visa applications will be allocated in the traditional manner that hurts American workers. According to estimates from The Times of India, roughly 85,000 of H-1B visas are issued annually.
Under the Biden administration, Woke Capital will be fully in charge. One of their primary imperatives is to keep the cheap labor gravy train going.
If Republicans had any ounce of decency they would not only campaign against illegal immigration, but also mass, legal immigration which serves to reduce Americans’ labor power and economically dispossess them during a time of dire economic crisis.
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