WikiLeaks, Video: Hillary Clinton Touts H-1B White-Collar Outsourcing Program

Hillary Clinton repeatedly touted the H-1B white-collar outsourcing program while meeting behind closed doors with technology companies, Wall Street firms and banks during 2013 and 2014, according to a collection of her comments released by unknown hackers.

“The only point I would make for the tech community is on the H1B visas, I support them. When I was a Senator from New York I supported them,” she told a meeting hosted by a software company in August 2014, according to a document apparently prepared by her campaign team. 

The 72-page document lists many of the controversial statements she made in 2013 and 2014, presumably to help her staff prepare responses if the speeches are were released. The new comments add to an extensive list of other pro-H-1B statements by Clinton. 

Currently, the federal government is providing multi-year H-1B work visas to roughly 650,000 foreign graduates to work in jobs sought by American graduates.

The foreign graduates fill 100,000 teaching, research and medical jobs at American colleges, they fill engineering jobs at Caterpillar in Illinois, up to 70 accounting jobs at McDonalds’ headquarters in Ohio, plus many more medical, teaching, management and software jobs in Florida, Connecticut, and California and throughout the United States.

“So let me just make three quick points,” she said in April 2014, at a summit hosted by a marketing company. “One, I think it’s essential to keep focused on the [H-1B] visa issue, because that’s a discrete problem that even though I’d like to see it be part of an overall, comprehensive reform, you have to keep pushing to open the aperture, you know, get more and more opportunities.”

The marketing firm, Marketo Inc., hires H-1Bs in place of Americans, according to a website that tracks H-1B hires. Screen Shot 2016-10-08 at 12.02.04 AM

In contrast, Trump produced a plan in May to reform the H-1B program so that it doesn’t outsource Americans’ jobs. The plan promised to:

Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.

Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americans outside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need companies to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to the unemployment office, not USCIS.

Many of the H-1B visa-holders manage to convert their work-permits into Green Cards, so they can become long-term residents of the United States. For example, data provided by one visa-tracking site, MyVisaJobs.com, shows that the H-1B program has pumped at least 100,000 foreign professionals into Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where they now compete against white-collar Americans.

The inflow of foreign workers, both blue collar and white-collar, drives down wages and raise profits, according to a September 22 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. That “immigration tax” transfer roughly $500 billion per year from Americans worker to employers, shareholders and to new immigrants.

EPI-wages

In June, 2013, Clinton told an event for a personnel-management trade association that she agreed with their call for government to expand the H-1B program to start providing work-permits to all foreigners who graduate from U.S. colleges with masters’ degrees. She declared:

Specifically about H-1B visas, you know, we give so many more student visas than we give H-1B visas … I support what you’re trying to do because I think our economic recovery is to some extent fueled by a steady stream of well-qualified, productive workers coming out of our own institutions, native born, legally here and those who have something to contribute who are going to help us continue to grow our economy.

On the 2016 campaign trail, her campaign has repeated that offer to “staple Green Cards” to foreigners’ college degrees.

In 2013, Clinton supported a similar provision that was included in the Senate’s “Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, but the measure was eventually killed by GOP grassroots opposition in June 2014. If it had been enacted, it would now be providing companies with an unlimited supply of lower-wage foreign graduates to hire instead of American graduates. 

Clinton’s open-borders promise to foreign graduates is posted at her campaign site, and is titled “Hillary Clinton’s Initiative on Technology & Innovation.”

But Clinton’s support for H-1Bs is just a corner of Clinton’s larger support for tight cooperation between government and major corporations, regardless of national borders.

In 2013, she told one audience that “my dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” That statement was made in May 2013 to an audience invited by Banco Itau.

Her dream for every “person” presumably includes the 320 million Americans in the United States — but it apparently also includes roughly 470 million other people in the hemisphere, from Argentina to Brazil to Venezuela to Honduras to Mexico and Canada.

The November election is intended to pick a president for the United States, not a president for the hemisphere.

For Clinton, those national barriers and politicians’ duties to national populations are washed away by immigration. At the Nexenta event, for example, she described her country as merely “a nation of immigrants.” In fact, the United States is a nation of 280 million Americans who have invited 40 million foreign to join them in the United States.

But she is a politician, and knows that if she wants to be elected, so must be careful to make token statements to reassure voters. At the Nexenta event where she praised the H-1B outsourcing program and the 2013 mass-immigration bill, she also suggested that companies try to show some “sensitivity” towards American job-seekers.

But given the great recession and the fact that so many people lost jobs across the economy including in the tech field, there has to be an extra effort made to try to fill jobs with people who are already here. They can be either native born or immigrants, but already here, so that then if that’s not possible you have a good faith argument that you tried, because too many people [think] the H1B visas are, instead of an opportunity to get good, strong talent, a way of avoiding hiring American workers. So I do think there has to be some sensitivity to that, but I believe that’s doable.  I don’t think that’s an overwhelming task.

But the request for “sensitivity” come from Clinton, who also told another audience in April 2013 that government officials often need to work behind-closed doors.

“If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position,” she said, according to the leaked document.

Each year, 4 million Americans turn 18 years old and enter the workforce. But, each year, the federal government also imports 2 million immigrants, guest-workers, refugees and asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. The inflow of professionals and workers drives down the salaries of American white-collar and blue-collar workers while boosting income for investors and employers.

The inflow also crowd the schools used by the children of lower-income Americans, sharply increases tax transfers from Americans to immigrants, reduces innovation and productivity, pushes many lower-skilled Americans out of the workforce, and enables large-scale violence by immigrant communities and crime against Americans who do not live in protected neighborhoods.

Few of the elite leaders in the GOP or the Democratic Party care about the costs or risks of mass immigration.

 

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