White House Touts H-1B Visa Worker Reforms

Indian software developer and entrepreneur Nischal Shetty at his office in Mumbai, India,
PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

The White House is touting President Donald Trump’s curbs on the mass replacement of Americans by H-1B visa workers, raising some hopes among reformers that the President may push the issue in the final weeks of the campaign.

“They understand they need to advertise what they’ve done,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers.

A top official may travel to Tennessee to talk up the reforms, Lynn said. Also, Trump is going to Pittsburgh this week, and may talk about his reforms to help white-collar workers, Lynn said.

The White House tweets prompted positive reactions, although Twitter’s software — or its content monitors — displayed only a small fraction of the responses.

“Huge win for engineers!” said a tweet from Linda. “When big companies say they can’t find qualified engineers, they often mean they don’t want to pay prevailing salaries and/or they want to bring their friends to the U.S.”

“Good, I’ve been laid off twice,” said Lousie. “These folks don’t like America, just our jobs. I’ve also had to train workers in India to do my job. This happens a lot … This happened to me at Warner Brothers, just as an example! By the way I’m college educated and a salaried worker.”

“Thank you Mr. President,” said a tweet from “God Chaser.” She continued: “My husband lives in fear of losing his job to outsourcing. He’s older and he’s a computer programmer. Is there anyway you can bring those jobs back too?”

“The h1b visas are endless job killers for Americans,” said a tweet from Grace. “The H1b visa employers should pay extra education tax, so that Americans can get the knowledges of the skill sets which the h1b employers were looking for.”

“For once, I agree with Trump,” said a tweet from “@OlamaAlex.” He continued,” If you’re in I.T., it’s hard for an American citizen to secure a job because of offshoring.”

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, CPT, 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 jobs in science, health care, management, accounting, recruiting, marketing, and other white-collar jobs.

The foreign graduates accept 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 CPT and 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.

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

This shadow employment sector is also shaped by India’s workplace practices. They include job-selling by managers, wage theft, use of fake resumes and corrupt “family and friends” to win contracts with major firms, workers’ kickbacks to hiring managers, disregard for U.S. privacy and security rules, plus routine discrimination against Americans and immigrants who do not accept the Indian workplace rules. Few Indian managers will hire Americans for these jobs because they expect Americans will file lawsuits against the Indian practices, Indian workers tell Breitbart News.

This Green Card Economy includes at least 1.3 million foreign graduates who arrived via the H-1B, J-1, L-1, OPT, CPT, or H4EAD workforce pipelines. For example, the H-1B program includes at least 600,000 workers; the H4EAD program is comprised of 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 professional degrees in health care, engineering, business, math, science, software, or architecture. Many skilled American graduates are forced into other lower 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 working with U.S. professionals to develop novel or reliable technology. One result is that many self-serving groups of visa workers from India and China dominate the technical workforce and management in many West Coast tech firms that were ordinally launched and staffed by open-minded, trusting Americans.

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 buying and selling blocs of cheap Indian graduates for U.S. jobs. It helps investors 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, including products and services provided by Apple, Walmart, and Amazon.

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