Trump Rewrites H-1B Program to Help American White-Collar Workers
President Donald Trump’s deputies have launched a fundamental reform of the H-1B visa system to protect American graduates from outsourcing — despite furious opposition from donors and leaders from Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 companies, and coastal investors.
The reform will end the annual award of 85,000 H-1B visas by lottery, which has been gamed by companies to import foreign workers at wages far below the salaries needed by American professionals. Instead, the visas will be offered to the companies that compete to offer the highest salaries, preventing employers from undercutting American graduates.
“The Trump administration is continuing to deliver on its promise to protect the American worker while strengthening the economy,” said Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli. “The current use of random selection to allocate H-1B visas … hurts American workers by bringing in relatively lower-paid foreign labor at the expense of the American workforce.”
“We have seen more progress in the last few weeks than we’ve seen in the last 30 years,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which opposes the H-1B and other visa worker programs. He continued:
If you look at it on the whole, Trump is side with working Americans. Look at the beginning of his administration when he canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All the elites wanted that — he said no. He allowed labor into [negotiations about] NAFTA II — the USMCA — and they made a better deal for working man and women. On August 3, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, he used the authority he had to protect those white-collar jobs [from H-1B outsourcing]. So he’s clearly made a choice between the elites and working men and women.
Trump has pushed forward with popular and dramatic reforms of the visa worker programs since June, with additional actions taken in August and early October.
The actions may be helping his poll ratings among vital white-collar graduates in two critical states: North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
For example, Monmouth University’s early October poll showed Trump getting 38 percent among white college graduates, while Biden had 57 percent. That is down slightly from a September 2 poll that showed Trump was getting 40 percent but is above Monmouth’s July poll that showed Trump getting only 34 percent of white college voters.
On October 13, Monmouth showed Trump was getting 48 percent of white college graduates in North Carolina, up from 42 percent on September 3.
Both states have been hit hard by H-1B outsourcing, giving Trump a chance to champion the very popular economic self-interest of college graduates.
“There are many financial institutions in North Carolina that are abusing cheap labor and H-1Bs,” Jay Palmer, a civil rights activist who works with abused visa workers, told Breitbart News. He continued:
Charlotte, N.C., is the hotbed of visa fraud. They’re laying off American workers left and right because there is so much cheap [foreign] labor in North Carolina … They’re hiring anybody through third-party consulting companies, and they are paying them on 1099s [as gig workers] to work at the financial institutions. They’re replacing American workers such as risk managers and actuaries — any jobs they can fill with cheap labor. It’s horrible. You don’t even know how bad it is.
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2020/10/28/trump-rewrites-h-1b-program-help-american-white-collars/