South Bend, Indiana to Subsidize Importing Foreign H-1B Visa Workers for White-Collar Jobs

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City officials in South Bend, Indiana will help companies outsource employment by subsidizing the cost of importing foreign H-1B visa workers for white-collar jobs.

This month, South Bend officials announced a plan that earmarks $300,000 to go towards a “high-skill immigration fund” that will split processing fee costs with companies to import foreign H-1B visa workers for white-collar jobs.

Already, companies in South Bend have hired a handful of foreign H-1B visa workers for jobs such as development engineers and data scientists. The plan comes as joblessness in South Bend has grown since 2021 with the latest figures showing a 3.4 percent unemployment rate.

Likewise, average hourly wages in South Bend are lower than the national average.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), running for the United States Senate, has previously endorsed major reforms to the H-1B visa program to prevent companies from undercutting U.S. wages and laying off Americans to cut labor costs.

Others have suggested abolishing the H-1B visa program altogether.

For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. 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.

The outsourcing-offshoring business model has proven extremely lucrative for Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, JP Morgan Chase, and others as they often contract with “body shop” firms like Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys, Accenture, IBM, and Capgemini to lay off their American employees and replace them with tens of thousands of foreign H-1B visa workers primarily from India.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI) research has shown that most corporations importing foreign H-1B visa workers are making significant savings in wages paid by doing so.

Nearly all H-1B visa reforms imposed by former President Trump have been reversed by President Joe Biden. In 2021, for example, Biden allowed corporations that had been denied foreign H-1B visa workers by the Trump administration to reapply.

Americans, by a majority, agree that the U.S. has enough talent for white-collar jobs without having to import foreign visa workers. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 55 percent of likely voters prefer companies hire qualified professional Americans and college graduates over giving jobs to foreign visa workers.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here

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