Joe Biden Breaks Public Support for ‘Skilled’ Migration

biden ignoring voters
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Voter support for the legal inflow of white-collar, college-graduate migrants has plunged amid President Joe Biden’s mass inflow of more than seven million southern migrants, according to a survey by the Associated Press.

The growing opposition is likely caused by Biden’s accelerating inflow of foreign visa workers for the professional careers sought by millions of Democrat-leaning, white-collar college graduates. For example, the Indian outsourcing firm, Tate Consulting Services, is being sued for firing Americans to help transfer U.S. jobs to cheaper and subordinate Indian migrants, according to a lawsuit described in the March 29 Wall Street Journal.

The huge legal inflow of white-collar migrants into U.S. jobs via the nation’s airports gets little press, partly because progressives, lobbyists, and establishment media outlets prefer to focus Americans’ attention on grateful southern migrants.

The new Associated Press survey showed that just 41 percent of 1,282 Americans see a “major benefit … [from migrant] skilled workers in fields like science and technology.”

That “major benefit” share is down by almost one-third compared to the 59 percent share in 2017:

A graphic shows how likely U.S. adults are to say skilled workers are a "benefit" to legal immigration, via an AP-NORC poll (AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research).

A graphic shows how likely U.S. adults are to say skilled workers are a “benefit” to legal immigration, via an AP-NORC poll (AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research).

Among Democrats, the “major benefit” response fell from 71 percent to 52 percent, the poll, which was conducted March 21-25, shows.

Among Republicans, the share fell from 51 percent to 33 percent — or less than the 36 percent who say “Not a benefit at all.”

Overall, the share of Americans who responded “Not a benefit at all” jumped 8 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2024.

The 28 percent opponents included roughly one in six Democrats. The Democrat opposition is sharply up from just 4 percent in 2017.

This shift likely creates a Republican’s opportunity to reduce Biden’s huge advantage among college graduates. Many of the graduates would support a candidate who protects them from corporate outsourcing and migration.

In 2016, candidate Donald Trump promised reforms to the H-1B program. He pushed some fixes — including a 2020 suspension of the corruption-ridden programs — but the promised reforms were foiled by covert, investor-backed opposition in his own administration:

The Associated Press survey echoes the data from Rasmussen Reports, which runs a long-term survey of attitudes toward migration. The survey asks likely voters, “Should Congress increase the number of foreign workers taking higher-skill U.S. jobs or does the country already have enough talented people to train and recruit for most of those jobs?”

The March 21 survey of 1,000 likely voters shows that 64 percent oppose importing skilled migrants. Just 23 percent favor importing more workers.

In a December 2019 survey, the respondents split 58 percent opposition to 28 percent support.

Since 1990, the federal government has allowed U.S. companies to import millions of long-term temporary workers for white-collar jobs. Many of the visa workers were allowed to get green cards and stay in their jobs. Many others took their jobs back to India or China when they went home.

Currently, the federal government is providing companies with a “Green Card Workforce” of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers. Many work for low salaries and long hours in the hope of getting green cards and citizenship. The visa workers are imported via the H-1B, OPT, CPT, H4EAD, TN, L-1, and J-1 programs, as well as the B-1/B-2 loophole.

The result is a massive loss of white-collar jobs, white-collar salaries, white-collar cloud in the Fortune 500, and white-collar prosperity and political clout.

Despite the massive damage to the U.S. professional classes and U.S. innovation, this government-boosted white-collar outsourcing has gotten very little publicity from U.S. journalists. The Wall Street Journal report, however, sketched the national trend:

A U.S. visa program for skilled foreign workers has long stoked concerns over American workers losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. Now a group of experienced American professionals is accusing an Indian outsourcing giant of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas.

…

The complaints revive questions about how Indian IT companies use H-1B visas. The visas are designed for skilled foreign workers but have for years led to concerns that Americans are being displaced by cheaper foreign workers with lesser qualifications. Companies apply for visas on behalf of workers and aren’t required to demonstrate that Americans with those skills are unavailable.

…

The American former TCS employees are Caucasians, Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s and living in more than a dozen U.S. states. Many have master’s of business administration or other advanced degrees, according to the complaints, which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

In December 2022, bipartisan opposition defeated an investor push to dramatically expand the white-collar outsourcing programs that have spiked stock prices while crippling innovation at many U.S. companies, including Twitter, Boeing,  Theranos, and Intel.

The government-incentivized failures have allowed China to seize the technological lead in many critical areas, including 5G telecommunications, by subordinating U.S. professionals’ workplace clout to the investors’ stock-market priorities:

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