CLAIM: Former Vice President Joe Biden (D) claimed during the CNN Democrat debate that it is merely a “Republican canard” to say that foreign workers take jobs in the United States from Americans.
VERDICT: False. Foreign workers, whether arriving illegally through the U.S.-Mexico border or on employment-based visas, do fill U.S. jobs that would have otherwise gone to Americans.
“The canard that they’re taking jobs, these immigrants are taking jobs from Americans,” Biden said of the current illegal and legal immigration system that imports about 1.5 million foreign nationals every year. “Which is one of the Republican canards.”
Biden, in 2007, held the opposite opinion — admitting that employers have used the nation’s annual mass importation of cheaper foreign workers to drive down wages for American workers.
Biden: "The canard that they're taking jobs, these immigrants are taking jobs from Americans. Which is one of the Republican canards." pic.twitter.com/1Xpud5Winv
— Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) March 16, 2020
Years of research and anecdotal examples confirm that illegal aliens and foreign visa workers take jobs from Americans in blue-collar and white-collar industries. In the blue-collar fields, for instance, Americans applied for jobs at Koch Foods last year after the facility was raided by federal immigration officials.
As Breitbart News analyzed in 2018, such workforce raids often open jobs and hike wages as employers are forced to raise pay, offer better benefits, and improve work conditions to recruit underemployed and unemployed Americans.
One of the most famous cases came in February 2018 when 600 jobs were secured for black Americans and wages were increased when officials raided the Cloverhill Bakery in northwest Chicago, Illinois. The black Americans’ wages rose 25 cents thanks to immigration enforcement.
It was the black American employees who called ICE officials after their illegal, Hispanic counterparts were treated better by the bakery’s executives while being paid less than themselves.
Similar circumstances have occurred in white-collar industries.
Currently, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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