Number of U.S. College Students Losing Jobs to Migrant Workers Still on the Rise
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March 15, 2017
The lamestream media often tells us that the U.S. government only approves 85,000 H-1B (non-immigrant work visas) every year. Yet, according to Goldman Sachs, there are around 1 million H-1B workers employed in the United States.
Breitbart reports:
Goldman’s February estimate of the huge H-1B population also ignores multiple other visa programs which invite foreign graduates to work in the United States. These other temporary work visas are used to employ an additional 470,000 foreign college graduates in the United States, according to a study released on March 7 by the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute.
The EPI study, titled “Temporary foreign workers by the numbers” discloses how the U.S. continues to give jobs to foreign immigrants by giving them other, more obscure visas.
This is from Breitbart:
The EPI study, titled “Temporary foreign workers by the numbers,” says U.S. companies employ roughly 470,000 foreign professionals via the little-known O, L, J, OPT, and TN visas.
The EPI study estimates that the H-1B population at a much lower level of only 460,000 employees, partly because EPI says many H-1B workers quickly get permanent green cards, which converts them into legal residents, not contract workers.
If Goldman’s estimate of almost one million H-1Bs is combined with the EPI’s estimate of various other skilled white-collar visa programs, then the government data shows that U.S. companies employ roughly 1.4 million lower-wage college-graduate temporary workers in the United States. The imported workers are not immigrants, citizens, legal residents or green card holders, but are supposed to return home after several years.
Companies have used them to fill enough outsourced jobs to fully employ nearly all Americans who graduated from college with skilled degrees in 2015 and 2016. This population of white-collar temporary workers has pushed many established U.S. workers out of jobs, partly because none of the visa programs require that Americans be hired before foreigners.
“I’m working at one of the Home Depot [hardware store] … there’s a lot of people in my position,” said Les, a former New York City technology worker for Disney, Pearson publishing, and other U.S. companies. He was pushed out of the business when companies outsourced their U.S. workplaces to Indian companies, many of which need U.S-based H-1B workers to link their U.S. clients to outsourcing offices in India. Les has a 13-year-old teenager to raise, and would return to the sector if he got a job offer, he said. “That’s what I know– it is not like I could go back to school to become a dentist or lawyer or a teacher,” he told Breitbart News.
The two new reports also that U.S. companies also employ roughly 185,000 foreign blue-collar temporary workers, plus roughly 200,000 foreign white-collar temporary workers. The EPI report also says the population of agricultural contract-workers is roughly 75,000, or just seven percent of at least 930,000 university trained guest-workers resident in the United States.
Campaign Promises
The huge U.S.-based population of professional-grade foreign contract workers—ranging from 1.4 million up to 1.8 million—is a problem for President Donald Trump, who repeatedly promised to reform the H-1B program during his 2016 campaign.
“I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program,” said a Trump statement in 2016. “No exceptions.” In his inauguration speech, Trump declared his national economic policy is: “Buy American, Hire American.”
So far, Trump has not revamped the H-1B program, although his deputies have temporarily ended a fast-track H-1B approval process supported by business groups. That change was adopted amid intense lobbying by brand-name companies—including Google, Microsoft, Facebook—to preserve the annual inflow of cheap white-collar workers.
On April 3, the Department of Labor will start distributing another 85,000 H-1B visas to companies, as required by law.
Statements from White House officials suggest that a reform of the H-1B program will be linked to a larger plan to comprehensively reform the nation’s family-chain immigration system into Trump’s proposed merit-based immigration system.
Democrats like to say migrant workers take the jobs Americans don’t want. So, does it improve America’s dignity to give migrant workers jobs we allegedly don’t want?
Yet, that isn’t the case. I’m pretty sure the American IT workers at Disney and UC Berkeley still wanted their jobs before they were ousted in favor of low-wage H-1B workers.
http://downtrend.com/katrina/number-...ll-on-the-rise
