Biden Opens Doors for More White Collar Migration into U.S. Jobs

H1-B Visa Workers
MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden told his deputies Monday to import more foreign graduates for the Fortune 500 white collar careers needed by indebted U.S. graduates and their families.

The directive is described in a White House fact sheet outlining the directive, “Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.” The sheet says:

Use existing [legal] authorities to expand the ability of highly skilled immigrants and nonimmigrants [visa workers] with expertise in critical areas to study, stay, and work in the United States by modernizing and streamlining visa criteria, interviews, and reviews.

Biden is “setting up another wave of indentured servitude workers,” responded Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. TechWorkers.

The visa programs include the infamous H-1B program, which grants roughly 200,000 three-year work permits each year to low-skill and mid-skill foreign graduates.

The programs “are used to bring in ordinary [mid-skilled foreign] workers to not only displace Americans but allow [CEOs and investors] to control these people during their entire tenure in the country,” Lynn said.  The CEOs and university presidents can control their indentured workers by dangling the hope of green cards and the threat of exile back home, he said.

U.S. employers keep at least 1.5 million visa workers in a very wide variety of workplaces and jobs, including fashion designers, teachers, marketing analysts, pharmacists, therapists, managers, and recruiters. Many are officially paid just $65,000 a year — not counting kickbacks to their supervisors in payment for their U.S. job — and many sleep in overcrowded apartments.

The expansion plan was developed by White House officials, Fortune 500 lobbyists, and investors such as former Google chief Eric Schmidt — even though corporations have multiple legal ways to hire or import the most skilled foreign workers.

Employer lobbies immediately began trying to cash Biden’s blank check, regardless of the obvious career damage to skilled American graduates.

“Here we offer a comprehensive analysis of potential … beneficiaries under several key provisions brought to attention by this EO [Executive Order],” said a shopping list offered by Divyansh Kaushik, an imported Indian immigrant working for a lobby group that represents white-collar employers, the Federation of American Scientists.

His shopping list includes easier visa renewals for J-1 workers and F-1 worker-students, easier procedures for H-1B and J-1 workers to get green cards, fast-track green cards for favored foreigners, and skilled O-1 visa workers.

He also called for “parole” exemptions from border laws for favored foreigners and the cancellation of embassy interviews for favored visa applicants.

The visa programs cited by Kaushik have no annual limits, no significant rules to slow the displacement of American graduates, and minimal curbs on the types of white-collar careers the foreign workers can take from Americans. Many — or most — of the mid-skill visa workers come from fast-growing India, whose government uses trade talks to demand more outsourcing of U.S. jobs to Indian graduates.

Kaushik added:

These changes would also benefit U.S. companies and research institutions, who often struggle to retain and attract international AI talent due to the lengthy immigration process and uncertain outcomes. In addition, exercising parole authority can open a new gateway for attracting highly skilled AI talent that might have otherwise chosen other countries due to the rigid U.S. immigration system.

Biden’s deputies have already begun the process of outsourcing more career-starting jobs needed by new U.S. graduates to mid-skilled H-1B workers.

Section 5 in the posted Executive Order mimics Kaushik’s wish list.

In 2016, Donald Trump promised to reform the H-1B program. But he and his top deputies got pushback from West Coast CEOs and investors, so he did little until the very end of the administration. The delay allowed Biden’s deputies to quickly block his useful reforms — and prevented Trump from bumping up his low poll ratings among white-collar swing voters.

The issue of foreign migration into white-collar jobs has gotten little mention in the 2024 race. A primary cause is that white-collar reporters at corporate-owned media have little or no authority to cover the pocketbook damage from any form of migration.

GOP leaders in Congress could block the Biden outsourcing by barring any funding for the plan.

U.S. companies now employ at least 1.5 million mid-skilled white-collar visa workers, many of them via fraud-ridden, software-sweatshop subcontractors. Most work long hours at low wages in a wide variety of ordinary white-collar jobs to get the dangled prize of government-provided green cards. That huge giveaway is a massive incentive for companies to hire foreigners over Americans who have to be paid in cash.

But their powerlessness and their dependence on ethnic networks ensure they “are less productive and less innovative,”  said Lynn. However, the visa workers can spike short-term profits by reducing payroll costs, he added.

In contrast, American professionals have the workplace and legal clout that allows them to pressure managers and investors to spend money developing better products and services, Lynn added.

Unsurprisingly, many young Americans are excluded from jobs and careers by the visa workers’ ethnic hiring networks. Those discriminatory networks are enabled and protected by visa-workers regulations, lobbyists, and lax oversight by regulatory agencies, he said.

In June 2021, the Census Bureau reported the massive rejection of U.S. graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM):

Among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37% reported a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation, according to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates. This translates into less than a third (28%) of [American] STEM-educated workers actually working in a STEM job.

Young citizens who do get STEM jobs are quickly flushed out after they turn age 35, according to a November 2022 report by the Census Bureau. Their forced exit damages national competitiveness because it minimizes the number of experienced American managers — but it helps the existing companies corral their technology and boost their share prices, Lynn said.

The Americans’ forced exit from STEM careers also helps to flood the non-STEM job markets. The surplus of U.S. STEM workers pushes down salaries for many graduates, including the many journalists who ignore the replacement process.

The United States graduates roughly 800,000 technically skilled graduates each year into the flooded labor market. Unsurprisingly, many U.S. graduates have difficulty finding decent jobs, Bloomberg.com reported on October 30 on one unemployed American graduate:

Laney Coletti-Saracino … [a] 36 year old from Newburgh, New York, was laid off as a senior product manager at a tech company in February. At first she was able to get a few interviews through personal contacts, but when that petered out, she started “rage applying” online. She too has applied to 500 jobs, and at least initially when recruiters responded, it gave her a confidence boost.

White-collar wages have been flat for a decade while the cost of housing has spiked. The result has been a boom for investors on Wall Street.

Lobbies are using their clout to minimize media and public recognition of the damage to American white collars. For example, investors hire lobbyists to portray migration curbs as racial discrimination.

“I wanted to work in [immigration] policy because I believed that limiting citizenship based on racial preferences harms our democracy,” said Andrea Flores, the Vice President of Immigration Policy and Campaigns at FWD.us. “If advocates for a more equitable [emphasis added] immigration system don’t speak up, we won’t make progress,” Flores told the Harvard Political Review on October 30.

Her employer, FWD.us, is the major lobbying force for cheap labor. It was created by multiple West Coast billionaire investors, including Mark Zuckerberg.

The media-aided lobbying is very successful. For example, the Supreme Court has recently rejected two lawsuits that argued the White House cannot unilaterally create visa-worker programs for foreign workers. The court has also been passive even as Biden’s deputies refused to enforce Americans’ border laws.

The core political problem is not the migrants, said Lynn, but Wall Street’s demand for short-term profits. “It’s all about what did you do this quarter?”

Investors also dominate Congress, Lynn added, and hire lobbyists to claim that “the solution [to problems] is always more immigration.”

The temptation to use immigration as an easy fix deters U.S. legislators from dealing with systemic economic problems, he said. Those problems include slow productivity growth, under-investment in foreign trade, the diversion of research dollars to Wall Street payouts, and the deliberate use of unskilled illegal migration to inflate the consumer economy, he said.

In a short speech announcing the new plan on October 30, Biden declared he was on both sides of the workplace divide.

This order directs the government to help make sure AI isn’t used to shortchange workers. I’ve also asked for a conference report on the potential impact of AI on the labor market and how to help workers whose jobs have been disrupted. We’re going to support workers in every industry by defining their rights and defending [their right] to a fair wage, to organize as these … technologies emerge.

And finally, we’re going to make sure America leads the world in innovation and attracts top talent to stay at the cutting edge.

“Worker power is critical to building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, and so is economic growth,” said Biden, age 80.

 

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