Biden Invites More Foreign Graduates to Take Ordinary White Collar Jobs

A graduate wears his mortarboard with Free at Last written on it as Vice President Joe Bid
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s deputies have expanded a visa work program to help CEOs hire many more foreign graduates to work as landscape architects, child psychologists, mechanics, and technicians.

The expansion spotlights the determination of the nation’s pro-migration, Cuban-born border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, to help foreign graduates get more mainstream white collar jobs. Those jobs are needed by young American women and men to get on their career ladder, get married, and start families.

“Do we have a shortage of Americans willing to take well-paid jobs as landscape architects?” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “Absolutely not — there’s no evidence of that.”

Allowing foreigners to take careers in child psychology and mechanics “is a betrayal,” said Kevin Lynn, the director of Project for Immigration Reform told Breitbart News, adding:

It’s a complete fracture of the social contract. You know, somehow somewhere there has to be the expectation that the government and our institutions … are working in the best interests of the American citizen. This is proof that they’re not.

It “just doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you want to help the owners of [large] architectural firms to maximize profits,” he added.

The cheap and complaint foreign graduates will also be used by larger firms to push small firms out of business, Vaughan told Breitbart. “A lot of [U.S.] landscape architects are self-employed — and they’re the ones who are having trouble competing with the companies that are already hiring illegal workers,” she said.

University Work Permits 

The work permits are offered to foreign students via the Curricular Practical Training (CPT) and the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programs.

Foreigners can get these work permits by enrolling and graduating in U.S. universities and community colleges. This vast loophole in the border means that U.S. universities have a hidden financial incentive worth perhaps $40 billion to sell access to work permits so foreigners can compete against the universities’ American graduates.

For example, New York University had roughly 21,453 foreign students in 2022, the University of Maryland had 6,169 foreign students, and the University of North Texas had 8,713 foreign students.

The CPT one-year work permits are for students who have not graduated. The one-year OPT work permits are for graduates. The STEM-OPT permits are more valuable because they last for two extra years, and are supposedly reserved for “top tier” high-tech graduates.

This process allows low quality foreign graduates to take mainstream U.S. jobs for four years by enrolling in lower-tier colleges.

In January 2022, Mayorkas added 22 new courses to the STEM-OPT category, including forestry, data visualization, environmental studies, and organizational psychology.

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Council on Foreign Relations

The STEM-OPT list now includes child psychiatry, dairy science, poultry science, environmental studies, wetlands management, urban forestry, “textile sciences,” “paper science,” wastewater management, “biology, general,” animal behavior, “population biology,” undersea warfare, “computer support specialist,” nutrition sciences, paleontology, and “social psychology.”

The CPT and OPT programs are a bonanza for U.S. employers.

Employers get a tax break for hiring foreign graduates. Most of the foreign graduates also will also work long hours at low wages in the hope of getting employers’ approval to apply for H-1B visas and, eventually, the huge prize of green cards and citizenship.

The programs were created as one-year addition to the H-1B program by agency officials working for President G.W. Bush. not by Congress. There were expanded by President Barack Obama and twice by Biden.

Biden’s January 2022 expansion added more categories of university degrees that are eligible for the two-year “STEM-OPT” program, which awards two-year work permits to people with degrees favored by West Coast tech investors.

The July 7 expansion includes:

Landscape Architecture (04.0601) A program that prepares individuals for the independent professional practice of landscape architecture …  Institutional Research (13.0608) A program of study that prepares an individual to be an institutional researcher at a postsecondary educational institution … Linguistics and Computer Science (30.4801) A program that focuses on the relationship between computer and human language and computational techniques applied to natural language … Developmental and Adolescent Psychology (42.2710) A program that focuses on the scientific study of the unique stages of psychological growth and development of individuals from adolescence to adulthood … Demography and Population Studies (45.0501) A program that focuses on the systematic study of population models and population phenomena, and related problems of social structure and behavior.

“These are precisely the kinds of jobs that we want to make more available to those Americans who for a variety of reasons, don’t want to, or can’t afford to go to college, but deserve the opportunity to have a rewarding professional career,” said Jenks, adding:

With the number of American STEM and technical graduates at not only colleges but also vocational schools and community colleges, what leads anyone to believe that there aren’t Americans who can do this work? … It’s a deliberate and deceitful evasion of the rules in our legal immigration system.

The full list of education programs eligible for the two-year work STEM-OPT permits includes many non-technical careers, many of which are mostly sought by women rather than men. Many of these careers are for community college technicians, not the much-touted “Top Tier” STEM graduates.

The list also includes many careers at universities that can dangle the huge prize of H-1B visas — and therefore citizenship — to an unlimited number of low-wage foreign graduates. “Many American grads would jump at the chance to keep working at a university on a research project —  nut these jobs simply aren’t open to them anymore because of the cronyism fostered by the H-1B and OPT programs,” said Vaughan.

Biden’s Economic Strategy

The expansion is part of the administration’s economic strategy that is hidden by “equity” demands for migration.

Biden’s deputies, including Mayorkas, are stimulating the economy by importing blue and white-collar workers, renters, and consumers, via a myriad legal, quasi-legal, and illegal pathways.

“Let me start with the biggest challenge,” he told Politico.com for a July 21 softball interview:

We’re dealing with a broken system and everyone agrees on that, and yet we cannot cross the finish line of fixing it. It is a sad chapter of governance for our country, and we see other countries maximizing the benefits of immigration and minimizing the challenges of it through nimble processes and programs. Take a look at Canada, Canada, when it comes to the value of immigrants and their contributions to the economy, Canada calibrates its level of migration in a year, according to its market needs … their migration level of skilled or low-wage workers is tied to their market needs. They have a system like that. We have caps with limits, numeric limits that have been years and years ago. We have tend million vacant jobs in the United States. There’s a tremendous supply of labor [in foreign countries] that can boost our economy and yet we can’t marry the two. That is the greatest challenge that we’re facing.

In 2022, for example, Biden’s deputies provided roughly 300,000 OPT and CPT work permits so that foreign students or graduates could take off-campus jobs.

Since January 2021, Biden has admitted roughly eight million migrants into the United States, about one migrant for every American birth during the same period. His flood includes roughly 3.2 million migrants welcomed across the southern border, 1.5 million “got-away” people who were allowed to sneak across the border, 800,000 “overstay” illegals in 2022, two million legal immigrants, and more than 500,000 temporary white-collar workers.

Some GOP legislators and staffers have pushed back against the migration into white collar jobs.

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C-SPAN

President Donald Trump halted the H-1B program for a year, while his staffers downplayed the OPT program and posted the number of foreign graduates who got jobs at named high-status firms. That data showed that Microsoft hired 5,074 foreign graduates with OPT work permits from 2003 to 2019, partly because Microsoft’s foreign-born managers were eager to hire co-nationals into their company.

Still, Trump’s establishment deputies persuaded Trump to not kill the OPT program.

A legal group is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to end the program because it has no authorization from Congress.

Ethnic Hiring

The CPT and OPT programs fuel the ethnic hiring networks in U.S. companies that funnel foreign workers into jobs that would otherwise go to young Americans.

The office-politics discrimination is profitable for foreign managers because they can leverage diversity rules, the visa programs, and a cross-cultural black market, to fire Americans — and then sell the jobs to foreign visa workers.

For example, Tata Consulting Services is an Indian firm that supplies Indian workers to U.S. companies via the H-1B and other visa programs. In June, it fired six managers and severed relations with six companies in the United States and India. “TCS has named a new head to oversee the hiring of temporary workers amid an internal probe into the bribes-for-jobs scandal that led to the sacking of some executives,” an Indian publication reported.

The cheating is commonplace because the payoff for Indians is huge — if they can move from very poor India to jobs in the wealthy United States. For example, many Indian reports show widespread cheating in the “IELTS” language tests needed to get work visas in the United States.  For example, a 2022 report in IndiaTimes.com described one case where four Indians tried to sneak into the United States from Canada:

“When they were produced before a court in the US, they failed to answer in English the questions asked by the judge. The court had to take the help of a Hindi translator. The court was baffled as these students had scored 6.5 to 7 bands in IELTS, an English proficiency test,” Mehsana’s Special Operation Group Police Inspector Bhavesh Rathod said.

The headline was “Close To 1000 People Have Travelled From Gujarat With Fraudulent IELTS Certificates This Year.”

Similarly, many Indian-born managers in the United States use fraud to get visa workers, usually in expectation of a kickback from those workers. Indian workers also use marriage fraud to get the funds needed to travel to the United States.

The ethnic hiring only possible foreign workers are delivered via the CPT, OPT, H-1, L-1, the B-1/B-2. and other visa programs.

The inflow of foreign graduates has pushed many outspoken U.S. technology professionals out of well-paying careers, ensuring they cannot help accelerate the nation’s technology development. A 2021 study by the Census Bureau reported:

The vast majority (62%) of [American] college-educated workers who majored in a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling. In addition, 10% of STEM college graduates worked in STEM-related occupations such as health care.

The pro-migration policies have also helped to flatline salaries for nearly all college graduates since 2000, even while inflation and housing costs rise. “Most college graduates have actually seen their real incomes stagnate or even decline” since 2000, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on April 2022.

The skewed, non-professional office politics of the visa workers has deeply damaged companies such as Intel, Boeing, and Theranos.

The rampant corruption and the scale of funding have prompted claims of corruption in U.S. universities.

Congress

Amid the vast evidence of corruption and harm, U.S. legislators are trying to hugely expand the inflow of foreign workers into jobs needed by U.S. graduates. In July, two senators introduced a bill that would allow universities to offer green cards to foreign students who pay for technology-related degrees.

“By denying international students with advanced STEM degrees the opportunity to continue their work in America, we are losing their talents to countries overseas and won’t see the positive impacts of their American education,” said a July 19 statement by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD).

The bill accepts the degrees named in the agency’s STEM-OPT list, including child psychology and landscaping.

The Durbin/Rounds bill is backed by the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees.

Indian-born Rep. Subramanian Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) is pushing a similar bill in the House, with support from Indian-born executives,

The giveaway program is strongly backed by investor groups, such as the Mark Zuckerberg-funded FWD.us lobbying group for West Coast investors, and its allies, such as the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. The groups gain from the supply of compliant and cheap foreign labor and the tuition fees paid by the foreign workers.

From Vaughan’s perspective, Mayorkas is trying “to blow open more holes in our immigration system”:

He believes, arguably, that there is no level of immigration that is too high, and that if there are any downsides, they’re more than outweighed by the benefits to our country and to his political allies…  He thinks Americans have had it too easy all these years in their own country.

“This is a person who is utterly unconcerned about the effects of his actions on Americans,” she said.

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