Though pro-amnesty lobbyists, without any proof, insist that America has a shortage of high-tech workers, Vice President Joe Biden spoke about the importance of good-paying technology jobs for black women “from the hood” in Detroit to give them more “pathways” to the middle class.
At an event on youth unemployment with the Chamber of Commerce, which has vowed to spend at least $50 million pushing comprehensive amnesty legislation that would decimate the earnings of and take jobs away from Americans on the lower end of the economic ladder, and the Urban Alliance, Biden on Friday praised Urban Alliance interns who are “being exposed to in-demand fields such as information technology and business.”
Biden then spoke about a visit to UST Global, which is a placement operation for large and small IT firms.
“I went all around the country to take a look at some of the programs, and I went to Detroit, which is just getting off its knees,” he said. “I mean, Detroit has been battered.”
He said UST Global asked him to “come by the program they have going on at a community college in the inner city of Detroit.”
“And I walked in and there was, I think it… was a 15-week program, and it was a group of women from the neighborhood, or from the ‘hood,” he said, noting that the youngest was 24 and the oldest was 58 and there were about “two dozen of ’em” who were learning computer programming and had two more weeks to go in the program.
“These were people with high school degrees coming out of the most hard-scrabbled neighborhoods, every one of them in Detroit,” Biden said. “Every one had a job. The lowest starting salary $58,000. The highest, [$81.000], because in Detroit, there is an immediate need now for 1,000 programmers… Every one of those women has a job… average job $65,000 a year.”
Biden, who has also pushed for comprehensive amnesty legislation, cited a White House study that found that in the information technology field, “we are going to need 1.4 million jobs over the next ten years in it.” He said the country will need “software developers” that have an “average salary $68,000 a year” and “typically need a bachelors degree” and jobs that require two-year degrees like “computer network specialists” that pay around $59,000 a year.
But even though nonpartisan scholars and studies have debunked the notion that there is a shortage of American high-tech workers, pro-amnesty lobbyists continue to push for more guest-worker visas to get cheaper foreign labor, which would prevent the women from Detroit that Biden praised from getting jobs that will provide the pathway to the middle class that Biden said was so crucial.
Ron Hira, an H-1B expert and public policy professor at Howard University, has said that the IT sector has been an “area of social mobility” where “people who come from working-class backgrounds who go into these sectors.”
“It’s a way of getting into the middle class and the professional class, and that’s being cut off,” Hira said on a conference call with nonpartisan tech scholars, as Breitbart News reported.
On a recent appearance on The Laura Ingraham Show, Hira accused Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg of taking away such opportunities by pouring millions of dollars into lobbying efforts for amnesty legislation.
“This is really important because the STEM degrees, information technology and engineering in particular, have been real pathways to the middle class,” Hira told Ingraham. “It’s been a traditional path for working class kids to study. It’s a very meritocratic set of occupations, unlike some other areas. By cutting this off, we are cutting off that upward mobility to the middle class for so many of the working class kids.”
U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow has written President Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus and urged them not to support massive amnesty programs because of the “disastrous effect of illegal immigration on the employment of all Americans, but particularly black Americans.” He also said Obama’s “proposed executive order is unfair to people who are attempting to immigrate legally.”
“Any grant of legal status will serve as a magnet to prospective illegal immigrants and further depress employment opportunities and wages for African-Americans,” Kirsanow wrote Obama in August, as Breitbart News reported.
Obama was silent on amnesty in addressing the Congressional Black Caucus Dinner last week even though he will soon enact an executive amnesty that may give work permits to millions of more illegal immigrants and has said he will not give up the fight for comprehensive amnesty legislation, which will award tech companies massive increases in guest-worker visas for foreigners.
Tech companies like Microsoft are pushing for massive increases in guest-worker visas even as they lay off 18,000 American workers. When Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) suggested that Facebook’s Zuckerberg look into hiring some workers Microsoft laid off, Facebook board member Marc Andreessen called Sessions an “odious hack” and implied that was “clinically insane” for standing up for American workers against the so-called “Masters of the Universe.” Days later, Joe Green, the president of Zuckerberg’s pro-amnesty FWD.us group who implied that foreign workers were better than Americans, was “forced” out.
Sessions has blasted the “cosmopolitan elite” who want American workers to “believe your concerns are somehow illegitimate, that you are wrong for being worried about your jobs, or your schools, or your hospitals, or your communities, or your national security.”
“These elite citizens of the world speak often of their concern for people living in poverty overseas, yet turn a blind eye to the poverty and suffering in their own country,” he recently said on the Senate floor. “They don’t want you to speak up. They don’t want you to be heard. They don’t want you to feel you have a voice.”
Sessions told American workers and legal immigrants that they “do have a voice” and that it is “being heard.”
“I am delivering that message to the Senate today,” he said last month.
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