White-collar professionals rallied Monday in Lafayette Square in front of the White House, urging President Donald Trump to slow the outsourcing of white-collar jobs via the unpopular H-1B visa program.
The gathering took place before President Trump’s meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose nation is a leading supplier of cheap white-collar workers via the H-1B program, which keeps a population of roughly 650,000 contract workers in the United States doing many types of white-collar jobs, including professors, scientists, designers, doctors, therapists, and engineers.
“American workers should have a voice,” said Sara Blackwall, a lawyer who created an anti-H-1B group, Protect US Workers. She continued:
We’d love to have a moment of time with President Trump. He’s meeting with Modi and CEOs. It’s time for him to meet with American workers who voted him into office. Most of those advising him right now weren’t standing behind him during the election, we were.
Many people interviewed at the protest, titled “You’re Fired,” preferred to remain anonymous because of their concerns over job security, future job opportunities and because of legal obligations incurred when they were laid-off by H-1B replacement contracts.
One woman, who described herself as a former Democrat-turned-Breitbart-reader, said the H-1B visa issue was the most important factor in leading to her support of Trump in the 2016 election. “I was let go by an [information technology] department that severely discriminated against Americans [even though] I came in there highly qualified with a master’s degree in computer science,” she said, adding, “The mainstream press often lies about a skill shortage.”
She also went on to criticize the quality of the H-1B. “Most of these workers are highly unskilled, but it doesn’t matter because a profit is being made by hiring them at a far lower wage relative to Americans,” she said. “One H-1B hire literally slept on the job.”
“Consultant companies from India put their management on-site at [American] information-technology firms to fire Americans who were hired by [prior] different consultant companies. … Laid off workers rarely have a voice for them.”
She said she is slightly pessimistic about Trump’s frequent promises to protect American tech workers from H-1B visa exploitation. “I’m not completely confident in Trump [because] the wrong people are advising him,” she said. “We’re the people who need to be advising him,” she argued.
Another information-technology professional, Matt Culver, worked at Carnival Cruise Lines and was one of the many laid-off professionals replaced by H-1B visa recipients as reported in a Breitbart News exclusive. The company forced Culver to either resign immediately or leave the company later after training H-1B visa holders who would replace him and his American colleagues. Culver chose the former option, even though it meant that he could not collect severance or other benefits as a result. He said:
The H-1B visa program is being exploited. Right now, it is not being used in the spirit of what the program was intended for. It was initially meant to hire foreign workers for jobs Americans could not do. Now, people are getting rich by selling out the American economy and undercutting American labor …
Trump shouldn’t talk about H-1B visas with Modi at all. He should just keep his promise and reform the program like he promised.
To read more about Breitbart’s coverage of the H-1B outsourcing program, click here.
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