Officials: H-1B Reforms on Fast Track to Donald Trump’s Desk

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 10: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a round table discussi
Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Donald Trump’s regulations to protect Americans from Congress’s huge H-1B job-outsourcing program are flying through the regulatory process, a top official told Breitbart News.

“By regulatory movement standards, they are flying — they’re moving very fast, and we still haven’t hit any meaningful roadblocks,” the official told Breitbart News.

The official declined to offer any details but said, “I am prepared to say that the president’s goals as expressed in June are still on track, at the same breadth and depth that he presented in June.”

“It’s a good thing that Trump wants to have this regulation out and implemented before the election,” responded Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers.

“They want to show that they are keeping their 2016 promise,” Lynn added. “Trump should go to Philadelphia and hold a rally in front of the Vanguard Group’s building and let the 1,300 workers who are being outsourced to an Indian [H-1B] firm know that this is not going to happen anymore.”

The American Workers Coalition also applauded the promised changes:

AmWorkCo is thrilled that the DHS H-1B reform will hopefully include a tighter definition for a specialty occupation and a significantly tighter definition for what constitutes an “employer”  so that the shadow employment practices [H-1b gig-workers] can be curtailed and American citizens can once again get high-paying professions.

The regulations have been bitterly opposed by Fortune 500 companies. Those companies use the outsourcing program to cut their labor costs and to minimize the clout of American professionals in their firms and technologies.

Many American professionals are being pushed out of jobs by the many CEOs who prefer to hire from the population of at least 600,000 resident H-1B workers, and the annual inflow of 100,000 new H-1Bs. “The productive class of this country has never been more job-insecure — they know what is threatening them,” said Lynn.

The pending H-1B regulations are intended to narrow the category of jobs that can be outsourced to the H-1B workers, drive up the wages that American graduates can get starter jobs, and shrink the widespread leasing of H-1B for gig-worker subcontracts offered by the Fortune 500 companies.

“The H-1B Interim Final Rule that we have coming out very soon will help protect American workers by cutting out a lot of the bottom floor of the H-1B -universe — the data-entry jobs — they’re just not going to cut it,” an official said, adding:

That rule enhances the definition of specialty occupation, it heightens the definition of employer-employee relationship, and one really key provision is for third-party worksites [where] we’re limiting the validity period of the [work permit]. This rule when it goes into effect will try as best as any regulatory schemes can do to cut out that shadow employer-outsourcing model that has perpetuated in H-1B  for the last couple of decades.

…

The [H-1B] statute only requires that the maximum [visa] validity period be three years. And so for very long, the agency practice was to this rubber stamp for years. As you know, by policy, USCIS intended to cut that down and we’re very successful in 2017 and 2018, then ITServe came and interfered with that. So we are fixing that via the reg.

“A focus on hiring American isn’t only good policy; it’s good politically,” said RJ Hauman, policy director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. For example, the president should focus public attention on the Pennsylvania-based Vanguard Group that has outsourced 1,300 jobs to an Indian company that imports Indian workers via the H-1B program, he said:

What’s happening at Vanguard [in Pennsyvania] is almost TVA 2.0 and demands President Trump’s immediate attention. We’re talking about the outsourcing of 1,300 jobs in a couple of key swing states. Not only that, Vanguard is one of the largest 401(k) companies. With older voters fleeing Trump in droves, why not go to Pennsylvania or Arizona and say that it is unacceptable to outsource the management of their retirement funds to the most notorious Indian body shop?

Late on Thursday, Department of Homeland Security officials shot down a Thursday rumor that the H-1B regulations had been sidelined by business opposition. The rumors began when an observer noticed that the draft regulations were no longer on a website run by the White House’s regulatory office, titled the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

An official explained Thursday night:

The H-1B Strengthening Rule continues to move forward as a priority rulemaking item for DHS. The [OIRA] Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs waived their preliminary review of the rule, which is communicated as a withdrawal on the website, but the rule remains active.

William Stock, a former head of the American Immigration Lawyer Association, explained the website actions:

What appears to have happened is a nearly unprecedented use of OIRA’s authority under EO 12866 to waive the economic analysis required in rulemaking since 1993 – allowing DHS & DOL to publish rules without showing the rules’ benefits outweigh their costs.

The Expanding Green Card Economy:

A growing number of visa workers have been imported since 1990 to take the jobs needed by U.S. graduates, via the various H-1B, L-1, J-1, and other worker pipelines.

Most foreign workers were imported for short-term training or lower-tier and routine software jobs. But an increasing number are being imported for coastal jobs in science, health care, management, accounting, recruiting, marketing, and other white-collar jobs.

The foreign graduates accepted the lower-wage job offers from many Fortune 500 companies in expectation of getting green cards from the employers.

Most of the imported workers are Indians because India’s government works with U.S. investors to exploit the huge wage difference between the United States and India.

But the corporate executives promised far more green cards to Indian recruits than the roughly 23,000 cards allowed per year by the federal government. So the gap between the executives’ promises and the annual supply of green cards for Indians has accumulated to create a massive backlog of roughly 350,000 indentured, compliant Indian workers (plus 350,000 spouses and older children) who are choosing to wait many years for their promised cards.

This multi-year Indian green card backlog is also a huge problem for the Fortune 500 companies and India’s economic strategy because it greatly hinders their ability to recruit another wave of Indian workers.

There is no limit to the number of foreigners who can temporarily get white-collar jobs in the United States.

The door is held open by administrators at U.S. colleges. They have the power to sign the enrollment documents needed by foreigners to get work permits via the government’s Curricular Practical Training (CPT) and the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programs. The two work permit programs were largely created and expanded by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with no approval from Congress.

Some of those CPT and OPT graduates are hired directly by Fortune 500 companies, but many get jobs in large or small staffing companies that provide gig workers for jobs outsourced by the C-suites of Fortune 500 companies. Indian migrants tell Breitbart News that many subcontractors hire OPTs and CPTs — as well as overstay illegal aliens — to fill the outsourced Fortune 500 jobs.

These migrant gig workers often work for sub-minimum wages because they hope to eventually win the green cards dangled by Congress and employers.

This Green Card Economy includes at least 1.3 million foreign graduates who arrived via the H-1B, J-1, L-1, Optional Practical Training (OPT), Curricular Practical Training (CPT), or H4EAD workforce pipelines. For example, the H-1B program includes at least 600,000 workers; the H4EAD program includes at least 100,000 workers, while the OPT and CPT programs keep at least 400,000 foreign workers in U.S. white-collar and technology jobs.

In contrast, roughly 800,000 Americans graduate each year from four-year colleges with skilled degrees in health care, engineering, business, math, science, software, or architecture. Many skilled American graduates are forced into other careers — despite college debts — because U.S. executives prefer to hire less-proficient visa workers for starter jobs.

The presence of these many legal and illegal foreign workers ensures a loose labor market in which Fortune 500 employers never have to compete against each other for U.S. graduates, for example, by offering full-time employment, benefits, and decent wages.

Many CEOs also prefer visa workers because they are disposable and subservient. For example, the workers are employed and swapped by a dizzying variety of subcontractors who can move blocs of labor from one city to the next, to fill short term contracts, with little notice or compensation to the disposable workers.

In contrast, American professionals speak their minds, push for high-quality products, ask for higher wages, change employers, collaborate to develop innovative products, complain about workplace discrimination, sue their employers, and testify in court. This professional pressure on executives spurs innovation and quality gains, U.S. experts and managers tell Breitbart News. But corporate executives are rewarded for raising near-term stock values, not for developing new and better technology.

Once executives get comfortable with compliant visa workers, innovation declines because American professionals are “supposed to answer in a very subservient way,” Mary from central New Jersey, a foreign-born software expert, told Breitbart News. She added:

I would tell [the female executive] professionally what the issue was, and she didn’t like that. You can’t oppose her in any way. If she tells you, “It is black,” it has to be black even if it is white. [The Indian contractors] will feed her what she wants to hear … They cater specifically to that [attitude].

When the information given to that manager is wrong, and that manager does not care, the professionalism of the field is gone.

Most of these green card workers are also part of the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. The outsourcing economy allows U.S. investors to boost stock values by hiring blocs of cheap Indian graduates for U.S. jobs. It also allows investors to transfer jobs to India by first importing Indians to get trained by the Americans who are getting replaced. It also funds India’s economic growth and appetite for American imports.

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