Tech Elites Endorse Joe Biden to Secure More Foreign Workers for U.S. Jobs

Tech industry elites have endorsed Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, citing their opposition to President Trump’s efforts to prioritize Americans for high-paying tech jobs in the United States.

Twenty-four winners of the Turing Award, considered the Nobel Peace Prize for computer science, have endorsed Biden on the premise that the former vice president will allow the tech industry to import more foreign workers, specifically those on H-1B visas, to fill coveted U.S. jobs.

The list includes Google executive Vinton Cerf, Pixar executive Ed Catmull, Facebook executive Yann LeCun, and Alphabet executive John Hennessy.

“Information technology is thoroughly globalized. Academic computer science departments attract talented students, many of whom immigrate and become American inventors and captains of industry,” the executives and industry insiders wrote in their endorsement of Biden:

We celebrate open source projects, the lifeblood of our field, as exemplars of international collaboration. Computer Science is at its best when its learnings and discoveries are shared freely in the spirit of progress. These core values helped make America a leader in information technology, so vital in this Information Age. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris listen to experts before setting public policy, essential when science and technology may help with many problems facing our nation today. As American computer scientists and as US citizens, we enthusiastically endorse Joe Biden for President and Kamala Harris for Vice President. [Emphasis added]

Since mass unemployment hit the U.S., spurred by the Chinese coronavirus crisis, Trump signed an executive order halting a number of visa programs including the H-1B visa. Likewise, the Trump administration is eyeing H-1B visa reforms that would more effectively weed out the business model of outsourcing that has allowed American workers to be replaced by foreign H-1B visa workers.

In August, billion dollar tech corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter signed onto a U.S. Chamber of Commerce lawsuit against Trump’s executive order — arguing that they have a right to import foreign workers to fill U.S. jobs.

Unlike Trump, Biden has promised to increase the number of foreign H-1B visa workers that tech corporations will be able to import every year. The practice is a boon to tech executives.

There are about 650,000 H-1B visa 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.

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 H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.