Sunday, March 29, 2020

With So Many Americans Hurting, President Trump Must Cancel The H-1B Visa Lottery

Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Nothing demonstrates the darkness of the liberal agenda in the shutting down of America’s economy than the push for more foreign labor. If they are saying we need to spend trillions of dollars to help hurting Americans who are out of jobs, you’d think it would be a no-brainer to cancel foreign worker visas, not talk about increasing them.
This week, President Trump has an opportunity to draw a bold contrast on rebuilding the country with American labor. The H-1B visa program and its lawless sister program, Optional Practical Training (OPT) work permits, have gerrymandered Americans out of entry-level white-collar jobs – from programming and engineering to pharmacy and nursing. They are also responsible for creating a brain gain for countries like China at our expense, leading to the offshoring that is exacerbating our crisis in the medical supply chain. Now is the time for Trump to finally end these visas, and next week he has the perfect mechanism to do so.
Every year, the government holds an H-1B lottery on April 1, in which USCIS randomly selects 85,000 foreign visa applicants to take basic white-collar jobs from Americans. Along with those visa winners are their spouses, who are given H-4 visas. Through a lawless administrative loophole, every year roughly 50,000 of the spouses wind up also receiving employment authorization documents enabling them to compete with American workers.
With everything being canceled for Americans, isn’t it prudent to cancel the lottery to bring in more foreign workers? Even before the crisis, 71 percent of jobs in Silicon Valley went to foreign workers, and 74% of American STEM graduates overall failed to land jobs in STEM fields. “Let’s be clear – these workers were never needed, and the law has never required employers asking for white-collar contract workers to show that they couldn’t find U.S. workers,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies in an interview with CR. “Most of these workers are brought in because they are cheaper, not because of a labor shortage or skills gap. They have already directly displaced hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers over the years.”
Vaughan noted that now is the perfect time to end the racket. “Now, the case for them is even thinner, with forecasts of double-digit unemployment rates due to the response to the pandemic,” said Vaughan, who has been studying this issue for decades. “How can anyone argue with a straight face that we need [foreign] workers of any kind right now, with so many American businesses shutting down?”
Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.

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