White House deputies are quietly gutting a little-known regulation that protects American graduates from the fly-in migrants who use temporary visas to take and keep U.S. jobs, say advocates for U.S. employees.
“It’s going to wreak havoc on American professionals,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers.
The suggested changes to the “Schedule A” regulation will not increase the annual number of legal migrants, he told Breitbart News. But they will help companies employ foreign graduates long after their temporary visas have expired, ensuring the displacement of more American graduates, Lynn said:
All [American] professional white-collar workers can be displaced by fly-in migrants. Any barrier to entry that would prevent [foreign graduates] from getting on a plane and flying to America to take the job of an American will be gone if this [draft Schedule A] rule goes into effect.
Business advocates say a regulation change will help companies quickly fill tech jobs. “The Biden administration should resume regular updates … so that qualified immigrants can more quickly get to work, particularly in critical and emerging industries,” said a January statement from FWD.us, an advocacy group for West Coast investors.
But any regulatory shift against American graduates may spotlight the growing damage of white-collar fly-in migration on middle-class prosperity.
Migrants in the White-Collar Economy
Current rules have allowed Fortune 500 employers to import and keep an army of at least 1.5 million short-term, mid-skill visa workers in U.S. white-collar jobs. Those workers are imported via the rarely supervised, supposedly temporary, and mostly uncapped H-1B, J-1, TN, L-1, B-1/B-2, OPT, and CPT programs. A separate O-1 visa program exists for high-skill migrants.
This inflow has already added one foreign tech worker for three U.S. graduates in the sector, according to a June 2022 report by the American Immigration Council.
The vast majority of these foreign visa workers are used to fill mid-skill jobs in the sweatshop subcontractors beneath the Fortune 500 companies. These ordinary jobs once served as a critical stepping stone for mainstream American graduates.
The foreign workers are supposedly temporary. However, they work closely with their CEOs to extend their visas or to jump from one visa to another. Some CEOs also turn a blind eye when white-collar migrants overstay their legal status and become illegal workers.
The imported visa workers also lobby their managers to file for one of the 140,000 green cards that are annually offered to foreign employees (and family members) of U.S. companies.
The green cards are hugely valuable because they allow foreigners to stay and work anywhere in the United States. Once a manager’s green card request is approved, the supposedly temporary foreign worker is allowed to stay and work in the United States until they reach the head of the line for green cards.
The resulting wait and work process can take many years — especially for Indians, who comprise roughly 70 percent of all visa workers. Their waiting line for green cards is backlogged because there is no cost for CEOs who request more green cards than the annual cap of 140,000 cards.
So this work-and-wait process creates a huge population of cheap and powerless foreign graduates who dare not contradict, anger, or disappoint the CEOs who can cancel their legal status and green card requests for any cause. That work-and-wait population includes at least 1 million white-collar workers — in addition to the existing population of more than 1 million foreign workers on short-term visas and work permits that last from 1 year to 6 years.
The CEOs at Fortune 500 companies rationally grow their populations of indentured foreign workers to help curb salaries, suppress workplace pushback by U.S. professionals, and spike short-term stock values.
The result is that many workplaces in name-brand U.S. companies are filled with foreign workers. “If you factored out administrative people, executive assistants, marketing people, project managers, and all of that, the number of Asians would probably be 90 percent … [in] the division that makes the core products,” a senior tech professional told Breitbart News about his West Coast company.
The Indian visa workers also bring their home cultures into U.S. office politics, he said, in part, because they have a huge personal incentive to collectively oppose the return of fellow Indian visa workers back to India. Most are “aggressive and predatory … they will sacrifice any [company goal] to promote themselves and they never admit their mistakes,” the senior professional said.
The low-trust, hierarchical, caste-divided Indian workplace culture, he said, is very different from the free-speaking, merit-based, professional culture sought by most native-born U.S. graduates.
Chinese visa workers, he said, are more cooperative and focused on business goals.
The result of these office politics, the senior professional said, is that top-tier executives at many Fortune 500 companies now use Indian and Chinese managers to manage the competing populations of diverse imported workers.
The reliance on foreign managers creates a black market where foreign managers can sell Americans’ jobs to eager migrants with temporary work permits, according to many American and visa workers. Indians “told me that at places where they [worked] before here, the hiring manager would expect a cut up to 20 percent of the paycheck,” Rex from Dallas told Breitbart News in May 2024.
Indian managers commonly refuse to hire the best candidates because they fear the new hires may outshine them, Rex told Breitbart News. Indian hiring managers “have influence in the entire market in America,” Aabha, an Indian in North Carolina, told Breitbart News in 2021:
Every position that is a manager position or at least senior president position in every company that I’ve interviewed, it’s an Indian. For sure it’s an Indian, and they do not take the people that are qualified now, they are taking people who they can get [faked] reference from and … get some sort of kickback from.
Those office politics prevent innovative American professionals from being hired or promoted into management, the senior professional told Breitbart News. “Most of the managers [at Intel] are Indian so it is very hard for an American to get hired over there,” an American professional told Breitbart News, adding:
I’d go into a room of 30 people and 15 to 17 of them are from India … They all come from the same area [in India], they all know each other, they all hang out together … The Indians are a very, very tight group. They automatically know the caste system … The guys at the bottom, they know to suck up to the caste guys above them.
The result is that many U.S. companies are run by foreign managers under the direction of a small group of American MBAs, “who have a degree in business but don’t actually understand our [technology] business,” the senior professional said.
“Which is also why smaller companies tend to innovate more,” he added.
This anti-merit process has played out at many once-great companies, including Twitter, IBM, Google, and Intel Corp.
Many CEOs “only want to keep Americans in the storefront roles” where they can provide an American face for a foreign workforce, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. She added:
The Biden administration sees no downside whatsoever in white-collar migration. They are in denial about any disadvantaging of U.S. workers, so they see the protection as obstacles for employers and immigrants, [and] as some obsolete provisions to be discarded.
Biden’s deputies “are dismantling the legal protection for American workers that used to be baked into our legal process,” she added.
The PERM Rule Change
The federal government does little or nothing to protect American graduates from the ruthless office politics created by its visa worker rules.
For example, the Department of Justice rarely enforces civil rights laws against racial and national discrimination in hiring. If CEOs face possible discrimination lawsuits, the senior professional told Breitbart News, they comply with diversity hiring quotas by hiring the Indian wives of the Indian visa workers.
But Americans still have some protections when visa workers want to apply for green cards, said Lynn.
Federal rules require employers to show that they cannot hire Americans for particular jobs before they can ask permission to legally immigrate a person — such as a visa worker — for the job.
This rule is often described as the “PERM Labor Certification” process and was established in 2005.
Major U.S. companies — Facebook and Apple, for example — have skirted this process as they tried to get green cards for their visa workers. Both of those companies were given kid-glove treatment by Biden’s Department of Justice.
Also, prior lobbying has declared there is a permanent labor shortage for some categories of jobs, allowing companies to skip the PERM test when giving green cards to workers. Those exemptions are written into “Schedule A” of the PERM rules, which ease the hiring of foreign nurses, physical therapists, and workers who possess “exceptional ability in the sciences, arts, or performing arts.”
This loophole is widely used by healthcare CEOs to quickly hire and import cheap and compliant foreign nurses with offers of green cards and citizenship.
Fortune 500 companies are now lobbying to expand the Schedule A list of exemptions, and so declare permanent labor shortages for a wider variety of jobs. “Although far from perfect, this Labor Condition test that they have to do in the PERM current process was the last barrier to just displacing Americans willy-nilly with foreigners, ” Lynn told Breitbart. “They want to take that barrier away,” he added.
In December, Biden’s Department of Labor took the first step in rewriting the PERM regulation by asking lobbyists, employers, advocacy groups, and U.S. professionals for comments:
Beyond the parameters discussed for STW occupations, should the Department expand Schedule A to include other non-STEM occupations? If so, what should the Department consider to establish a reliable, objective, and transparent methodology for identifying non-STEM occupations with a significant shortage of workers that should be added to or removed from Schedule A?
The request shows that officials are looking for ways to end the PERM test for tech jobs usually filled by Americans with “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” (STEM) degrees, Lynn told Breitbart.
But the language also shows officials want to remove protections for the jobs filled by Skilled Technical Workforce (SKW) technicians with two-year degrees, Lynn told Breitbart.
Officials are also looking for ways to end the PERM test for many non-STEM jobs sought by Americans with humanities and arts degrees, he added.
Business groups responded with calls to radically expand the list of exempted jobs. For example, a recruitment firm named Talent Beyond Boundaries endorsed a proposal from pro-migration advocates at the Institute for Progress.
That proposal targets Americans getting pay raises, and sacrifices Americans’ right to a level playing field in their national labor market to aid two powerful groups: Investors and federal economic planners. It says:
the Schedule A shortage occupation list has not been updated in over three decades, leaving it totally disconnected from current labor market conditions.
…
satisfying the PERM process can be costly and redundant, unnecessarily burdening both the incoming immigrant workers and wasting valuable DOL resources … There are many aspects of it that are confusing for employers and immigrants, so much so that it can convince people to not even apply [for green cards].
But “the concept of a “labor shortage” is unfounded in a free market economy as large as that of the United States,” said the Center for Immigration Studies, which also submitted comments.
STEM salaries are drifting down, CIS said, adding “only 37.8 percent of all U.S.-born and immigrant workers with a STEM degree are employed in a STEM occupation … [and] 9.4 million workers with STEM degrees are not employed in a STEM occupation.”
“Allowing DOL to exempt employers from testing the labor market before hiring foreign workers puts a finger on the scale in favor of employers’ bottom lines to the detriment of workers’ interests,” CIS said.
But if officials and lobbyists can rewrite the rule to favor employers, said Lynn, “pretty much every [white collar] job will be on Schedule A.”
Migration Policy and Politics
But the little-known rules change is part of a deliberate strategy by the White House to accelerate the flow of foreign workers into a wide variety of jobs needed by American college graduates.
For example, Biden’s officials have repeatedly eased employers’ use of O-1, H-1B, and J-1 foreign contract workers, B-1/B-2 business visitors, and foreign students with CPT and OPT work permits.
Meanwhile, more American graduates are losing jobs and careers amid Biden’s growing inflow of visa workers. Yahoo.com reported on May 13:
Mass layoffs across the technology sector have continued throughout 2024 following a tumultuous year of layoffs during 2023.
In 2023, nearly 2,000 tech companies made significant layoffs, resulting in over 260,000 tech workers out of their job by December that year. According to online tracker, layoffs.fyi, job cuts have continued to plague the industry with over 81,000 employees laid off in 2024 already.
Many Americans are also being pushed out of tech-related careers. For example, a 2021 study by the Census Bureau reported:
The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling. In addition, 10% of STEM college graduates worked in STEM-related occupations such as health care.
… Only a few STEM-related majors (7%) and non-STEM majors (6%) ultimately ended up in STEM occupations.
The white-collar policy has a broad economic and technological impact because it shifts much white-collar wealth to Wall Street investors.
For example, in 2020, when President Donald Trump announced he would block the arrival of new H-1B and L-1 visa workers, pro-migration advocates claimed the curbs cut $100 billion from companies’ stock values on Wall St. “Firms that relied more on foreign employees took almost twice as great a hit in the wake of the announcement,” lamented the researchers.
Economic data shows falling salaries for U.S. college graduates in a wide variety of STEM and non-STEM careers:
Source: NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
U.S. graduates are already burdened with college debt, high housing prices, and stalled salaries. They are also facing the threat of losing more wealth and jobs to the expanding reach of artificial intelligence software.
Biden’s airport inflow also damages business innovation because it shrivels the workplace clout of professionals vis-a-vis the C-suite executives who are picked by profit-maximizing investors. This trend is accelerating as China invests heavily in high-tech manufacturing centers instead of using migrants to inflate their consumer economy.
Unlike investors and blue-collar workers, white-collar professionals do not have any political organizations or special interest groups to fight for their workplace interests. Worse, merit-oriented professionals are personally reluctant to engage in the office politics needed to prevent their replacement by diverse foreign migrants.
Lynn is trying to change that passivity via his U.S. Tech Workers group, which has been urging American professionals to submit formal criticism of the proposed changes.
Here is our submitted comment on @USDOL’s proposed rule to “Modernize the Schedule A Occupation List”.
— U.S. Tech Workers (@USTechWorkers) May 13, 2024
Today is the last day to submit comments. If you haven’t already done so, see the follow up tweet for a link to where you can submit your comment. pic.twitter.com/Mpo0l2BTdI
Few GOP or Democratic politicians even recognize the damaging impact of Biden’s migration on the professional sector. In contrast, many politicians recognize the political clout of manufacturing workers, and on May 14, Biden’s deputies announced plans to protect U.S. auto and steel workers from China’s high-productivity factories.
Still, in 2020, Trump did block a C-Suite plan to replace some U.S. white-collar workers with foreign replacements.
Also, in 2022, Republicans and Democrats united to block the “EAGLE Act” which would have provided an end-run around the annual limits on the award of green cards to imported visa workers.
The growing flood of Biden’s fly-in-migrants has been almost entirely ignored by journalists at establishment media outlets who prefer — and are pressured — to only provide sympathetic coverage to poor migrants crossing the southern border.
The media and political silence about the growing damage to the U.S. professional class is a disaster for Americans and America, said Lynn. “This administration is out to destroy the American professional white-collar class,” said Lynn. “This is insane.”
