Federal Data Shows 2 Million+ Foreign Grads in U.S. White-Collar Jobs

graduation
AP Photo/Mel Evans
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s deputies are hiding a huge and growing population of at least 2 million foreign white-collar contract workers in the U.S. jobs needed by U.S. graduates and their families.

“Americans should be outraged that the federal government is not disclosing the number of long-term, so-called ‘temporary’ workers who are here,” Jessica Vaughn, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. She continued:

It almost seems as if the government’s actually trying to hide it from the public because these statistics are reported in such an opaque way and some of these numbers are never reported. You have to resort to detective work to figure out how many foreign workers are actually here.

The laws, regulations, and loopholes effectively allow U.S. companies to import are many foreign white-collar workers as they want, for as long as they want. This reality means that CEOs can easily import more foreign workers to prevent any rise in U.S. salaries.

For example, the U.S. economy is shedding white-collar jobs, but lobbyists and journalists are pushing “labor shortage” claims for new jobs in government-funded chip factories in the Midwest. So far, Republican senators have blocked industry efforts to expand the flow of foreign workers into those factories.

The State Department’s incomplete data reviewed by Breitbart News shows that a population of at least 1.5 million foreign workers arrived to take U.S. white-collar jobs in 2022. That huge population is the equivalent to the output from almost two years of American business, healthcare, and STEM graduates, and it allows major U.S. investors to hold down salaries and minimize the ability of U.S. graduates to enforce professional standards for quality and security.

“We have seen how it dilutes the clout of American workers because employers will either replace Americans who are doing certain kinds of work… and they can threaten to do so,” Vaughan said, adding:

It puts them in a weaker position with respect to their employment because they become afraid to complain because they don’t want to be replaced, right?  They just shut up and keep their nose down.

The huge inflow also skews the geography of wealth, she said. The foreign workers “are not evenly scattered across the economy,” Vaughan said. “They’re concentrated in certain sectors that have figured out how to manipulate the visa system — technology, physical therapy, accounting … [and] university science,” she said.

The inflow has also helped suppress the salaries of U.S. college graduates since the 1970s. For example, the inflation-adjusted hourly salary earned by U.S. graduates of four-year colleges has inched up from $32.21 in 1990 to $41.60 in 2022, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That’s an annual growth of just 0.9 percent, even as the cost of housing, education, and healthcare have climbed far faster.

Bloomberg.com reported in January:

In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.

Starting salaries for U.S. computer experts are also falling, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported in February: “The average starting salary for bachelor’s degree graduates studying computer science is expected to fall by 4.0% compared to a year ago.”

Most visa workers will work for lower salaries than American graduates. That is rational because any job in the United States is often better than a decent job in their home country. Moreover, CEOs know they can dangle the government subsidy of green cards and citizenship — easily worth $1 million — to extract the long hours of labor that they cannot extract from American graduates.

The hidden army of foreign white-collar workers mostly threatens new American graduates. The Wall Street Journal reported in March:

Jim Fish, chief executive of Waste Management Inc., described the situation this way: “We can’t hire a truck driver to drive a trash truck for $90,000 in Houston, Texas, but I can hire an M.B.A. from a small school for $60,000, and I can get them all day long.”

National Center for Education Statistics

The salaries lost by U.S. graduates have been mostly diverted to profits and stock values. For example, a group of economists estimated in 2021 that President Donald Trump’s short-lived 2020 curbs on corporate use of additional H-1B contract workers nicked the stock market value of Fortune 500 companies “by about 0.45% — representing a total loss of around $100 billion.”

Roughly 30 million Americans hold jobs in the healthcare, computer, engineering, science, or financial sectors. Many of these American professionals are swing voters, yet few politicians talk about the visa worker programs that take their wealth, careers, and jobs. Presidnet Joe Biden’s “approval among college grads slipped to 48%-42% in July from 52%-40% in June and 55%-37% in May,” Investors.com reported in July.

Numbers

The scale of the white-collar workforce inflow in 2022 is revealed by a State Department document. The document shows the number of 2022 work visas awarded to many categories of foreign graduates.

Breitbart News added the annual inflow of uncapped E-2, H-1B, H4, J-1, L-1,  O-1, and TN visas, to show roughly 543,000 arrivals in 2022.

Most white-collar arrivals are allowed to stay and work for several years. For example, H-1B graduates can stay for three years, so the total number of working H-1Bs in the United States should be about 550.000. The E-2 managers can stay for five years, so the 2022 inflow of 50,000 arrivals suggests a resident population of 225,000. The L-1 visas can stay up to years, prompting a 2021 population of an estimated of almost 340,000 workers.

Overall, the 543,000 arrivals in 2022 suggest a resident population of 1.5 million white-collar workers, not counting the workers’ spouses and children, and not counting the many workers who have converted their temporary visas into green cards.

But many temporary workers can stay forever once their employers file a request for a green card. This wait-and-work population of visa workers has reached 700,000, according to a 2022 report by the pro-migration Cato Institute.

The State Department, however, does not manage the Optional Practical Training or the Curricular Practical Training work programs. In 2022, those two programs provided work permits to an additional workforce of roughly 350,000 foreign graduates, including many working in Fortune 500 jobs. Many additional students take jobs within universities, such as in university laboratories.

The data also excludes the inflow of TN workers from Canada. This loophole allows Canadians — including recent immigrants — to get approval at the U.S. border to take a wide variety of jobs via a little-recognized section of the NAFTA treaty.

The department’s data also excludes the number of migrants who take white-collar jobs after overstaying their visas. Those numbers are difficult to track because the federal data does not hide white-collar overstays from blue-collar overstays. But the 2022 overstay report shows that officials allowed 50,000 foreign graduates and short-term workers in 2022 — such as H-1Bs workers — to overstay their visas.

The State Department also does not track the number of people who take white-collar jobs after arriving with B-1/B-2 visitor visas.

However, Breitbart News has learned from U.S. professionals and from Indian visa workers that many Indian graduates enter as tourists to get jobs in the layers of subcontractors working for Fortune 500 companies. Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security largely ignore this large population of white-collar illegals, even when their employers are exposed.

City Journal reported in May 2023:

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers authorize most foreign tourists who arrive with B1/B2 visas for a six-month stay, and some can legally extend their stays for up to 18 months. They can’t work legally, but many work anyway …

It’s also legal for foreign “tourists” to come here and interview for jobs. If they find one, their employer can file an adjustment-of-visa-status request for them. The bottom line is that the U.S. is likely the only Western country where one can arrive as a tourist and never go home—all legally.

Many companies, particularly those that can’t capture as many H-1B visas as they want, send employees here with B1/B2 visas, claiming that they’re here for training when in fact they work here. The government doesn’t have the manpower to investigate what foreign employees on B1/B2 visas actually do when they set foot in offices.

President Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, has tried to grow the population of foreign white-collar contract workers. For example, he expanded the J-1 program to let companies — not just universities — employ J-1 visa workers.

He has also twice expanded the OPT program to let companies hire foreign child psychologists, landscapers, accountants, and many other categories of white-collar workers.

He accelerated the award of work permits to the spouses of L-1 white-collar workers and E-2 managers. Many of the beneficiaries then take white-collar jobs alongside their spouses but are not included in the state department’s account.

Mayorkas also discarded the 2020 reforms of the H-1B program that would have opened up more starter jobs to American graduates.

The vast majority of the imported white-collar visa workers are lower-skilled migrants who are slotted into the career-starter jobs needed by young U.S. graduates. In many cases, foreign workers use the Internet to hire very cheap home-country experts who can do their daily workload in the United States — even when they are working with private data.

Without starter jobs, many American graduates are sidelined into lower-pay, low-promotion jobs while foreign workers are promoted via kickbacks and ethnic hiring networks. For example, a 2021 study by the Census Bureau reported:

The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling. In addition, 10% of STEM college graduates worked in STEM-related occupations such as health care.

The path to STEM jobs for non-STEM majors was narrow. Only a few STEM-related majors (7%) and non-STEM majors (6%) ultimately ended up in STEM occupations.

Some of the OPT and J-1 white-collar workers do not take jobs, or get sidetracked into menial jobs, such as in a dog-food factory.

The total inflow of blue-collar visa workers is also huge — and even more difficult to track.

They arrive via the H-2B seasonal program for about 120,000 workers, the uncapped H-2A program for agriculture workers, and the J-1 program for seasonal workers.

Many white-collar E-2 foreign managers also import blue-collar workers via various illegal routes. These home-country illegal workers allow the E-2 managers to profitably operate their franchise hotels, 7-Eleven stores, and other retail outlets — while also paying high franchise fees to the investor-owned companies that own the brand names.

Worse, the State Department data shows about 1.2 million active “border crossing cards.” They allow people who live in Mexico to work in U.S. jobs within 75 miles of the border. In 2020 Reuters reported:

While such B1/B2 “border crossing cards” are officially recreational, Reuters spoke to nearly two dozen residents of Tijuana, Nogales and Ciudad Juarez who use their cards to reach jobs or to care for relatives on the U.S. side of the frontier.

All said they could no longer make the crossing, dealing another blow to businesses already suffering from shutdowns on the U.S. side of the border, including vital industries like agriculture.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without money. I’m just waiting for a miracle,” said 28-year-old Rosario Cruz, a mother of two young children who works for a cleaning company that subcontracts with major retailers in California.

“We have no idea how those cards are being used because [the government] doesn’t track them,” said Vaughan.

Extraction Migration

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.

Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.

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