Joe Biden Giving Companies Second Chance at Outsourcing U.S. Jobs

by JOHN BINDER 16 Mar 2021

President Joe Biden is giving companies a second chance at outsourcing American jobs to foreign H-1B visa workers.

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the agency will allow companies to reapply for foreign H-1B visa workers who were previously denied such visas when they applied for them over the last four years of former President Trump’s administration.

USCIS rescinded three reforms pertaining to the H-1B visa program, which has been readily used for years by companies to replace Americans in high-paying white-collar jobs. The reforms helped prevent multinational corporations from using Indian outsourcing firms to grab loads of foreign H-1B visa workers to fill U.S. jobs.

Now, eligible companies that were denied H-1B visas under each of the reforms can appeal the denial in the hopes of nabbing foreign visa workers. Lawyers who represented outsourcing firms told Law360 that at least 75 percent of H-1B denials in the last few years were a result of Trump’s reforms.

“Do we really need to invite the HCL, Tatas, and Wipros to reapply for all the H-1Bs that were rejected during the Trump years,” the group White Collar Workers of America wrote in a post online, referencing the Indian outsourcing firms set to benefit from the move.

“All of those H-1Bs were rejected for a reason, to fight outsourcing companies who abuse the H-1B lottery and game the system,” the group continued.

Last month, the Biden administration rescinded a Trump reform that prevented companies from bringing entry-level computer programmers to the U.S. to fill jobs on the H-1B visa, noting that the occupation did not meet the program’s “specialty occupation” requirement.

Soon after the 2020 presidential election, the business lobby began asking Biden to end Trump’s reforms to the H-1B visa program in the hopes they can maximize profits by outsourcing labor.

There are about 650,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in the U.S. at any given time. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.

Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...cing-u-s-jobs/