President Trump has made Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s decades-long record on supporting the offshoring of American jobs a key point in his campaign speeches.
“For 47 years, Joe Biden took the donations of blue-collar workers, gave them hugs and even kisses, and told them he felt their pain — and then he flew back to Washington and voted to ship their jobs to China and many other distant lands,” Trump said in his Republican National Convention speech.
The line was a reference to Biden’s support for China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), normalizing U.S. trade relations with China, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
“While Joe Biden has spent nearly five decades shipping jobs overseas and supporting disastrous trade deals like NAFTA that killed US jobs, President Trump is prioritizing American workers, negotiating better trade deals, and putting America First,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella told Breitbart News.
The lesser-known outsourcing scheme often deployed by multinational corporations, giant tech conglomerates, and financial firms involves the wage-cutting H-1B visa program that Biden has vowed to hugely expand.
“Biden will support expanding the number of high-skilled visas and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country, which create unacceptably long backlogs,” the Biden plan states on his campaign site.
Long acknowledging how big business uses the H-1B visa program to replace white-collar American workers, Trump is planning vital regulations to prevent corporations from using the program to import cheaper foreign workers. While tens of millions are unemployed due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis, Trump shut down the H-1B visa program to prioritize Americans for U.S. jobs.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order to ensure federal agencies are not displacing Americans.
The move came after Trump saved the jobs of about 200 Americans at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) who were in the process of having their jobs outsourced to foreign H-1B visa workers whom they were being forced to train.
Trump stepped in to save the TVA jobs, fired TVA chairman Skip Thompson, and successfully got the TVA to drop its plan to outsource to foreign H-1B visa workers.
Biden, to date, has not made a statement on the matter.
“He’s never once commented on Americans being displaced by H-1Bs and training their foreign replacements,” a spokesperson with U.S. Tech Workers told Breitbart News. “In fact, he’s made the false claim H-1B visas require employers to prove they couldn’t find Americans before foreign workers are sponsored.”
Similarly, the American Workers Coalition — one of the nation’s leading groups in fighting H-1B outsourcing — told Breitbart News that Biden’s campaign has not contacted them for a discussion on the issue.
The most high-profile H-1B outsourcing case came during the Obama-Biden years.
In January 2015, nearly 250 Americans working at the Disney Corporation were told they would be laid off. Later, they discovered they were being replaced with foreign H-1B visa workers whom they would have to train in order to receive their severance packages.
A Disney worker wrote exclusively in Breitbart News at the time of the H-1B outsourcing:
As I watched the grim faced Disney Executive, it was obvious that bad news was going to be delivered. The dead silence was broken when the Disney Executive made a harsh announcement. All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days. Your last day of employment for this company will be January 30, 2015. Your jobs have been given over to a foreign workforce. In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay.
Biden did not comment on the scheme or discuss the issue with laid off Disney workers who tried to sue the corporation for discrimination. Trump famously campaigned alongside the outsourced Americans in 2015 and an investigation into the hiring practices was opened in 2017.
There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off 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.
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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