Trump Keeping His Word on H-1B Work Visas
By Karin McQuillan
The pro-immigration lawyers are apoplectic, which is always
a sign for celebration. As in other Trump achievements during his first year,
the President is accomplishing a cutback on foreign tech workers displacing
Americans entirely on his own. The Republican Congress remains stubbornly
opposed to the immigration restrictions Republican voters want.
The main tool at President Trump’s disposal is the
appointment of a new agency head, in this case Francis Cissna as director of
the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), who came on board in
October, followed in swift order by the novel idea of actually following the
law and scrutinizing visa applications.
Unsurprisingly, the law calls for high-skilled visas for
foreign workers to fill critical jobs. Instead, Silicon Valley and the Obama
Administration abused the privilege and used it to import cheap STEM workers to
replace higher-paid Americans.
H-1B
visas are heavily used by outsourcing firms. First, they bring a worker here to
be trained by skilled Americans. Then they shut down the American facility and
outsource the jobs to India.
Not a nice policy for the U.S. government to
actively support.
Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s,
but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides
with the rising number of guest workers on temporary visas.
Companies so
routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement
of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it
is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly
recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced
employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other
labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age
discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.
Controlling the abuse of H1-B visas is a core part of
Trump’s agenda to bring jobs of American companies back home.
Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring
workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move
to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B
visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of
shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously
labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”
These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career
prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman
Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more
promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.
Under Trump, our immigration agency is doing its job, to
protect American jobs. More than a
quarter of the applications are being sent back for further proof of
necessity. Most of the refused visas are
for programming jobs at the low end of the pay scale, unlikely to be critical
skills Americans can’t supply.
More immigration restrictions are expected soon. Obama’s
Immigration service automatically granted wives of H-1B visas the right to work
here, taking American jobs. That regulation was challenged in court, and the
Trump DOJ is expected to drop the defense and allow it to become illegal.
Obama also instituted a program giving green cards to every
foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field
-- even though hundreds of thousands of STEM graduates are unemployed or
underemployed, and are being forced to leave science and engineering fields.
The Wall Street Journal:
Two big regulatory changes are looming that would undo
actions by the Obama administration that eased the way for high-skilled foreign
workers… the Optional Practical Training
program, which allows foreign graduates from U.S. colleges in science and
technology an extra two years of work authorization, giving them time to win an
H-1B visa. The Trump administration could kill that benefit or reduce the
two-year window, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Including subcategories, we have 185 different visa
programs, a rich field for abusing the law and American workers by large
multinational and IT firms. Another
section of the swamp is being drained, one destructive regulation at a time.