President Joe Biden’s deputies have a new plan to help more H-1B foreigners take the white-collar salaries and opportunities that are needed by millions of indebted middle-class American graduates.
The planned giveaway was acknowledged on Friday night when few people were paying attention to the news. Biden’s officials also used the same Friday-night tactic to hide their record-breaking inflow of blue-collar southern migrants during 2023.
But the white-collar giveaway is also a golden opportunity for GOP candidates to win votes from swing-voting graduates with a promise of pro-American reforms to the H-1B program.
The program now keeps roughly 600,000 mid-skill foreign graduates in an expanding variety of non-technical and technical white-collar jobs. So far, few 2024 GOP candidates have mentioned the program, despite the GOP’s weak support among college grads.
Many CEOs prefer mid-skill H-1Bs over American professionals because the no-rights H-1B workers dare not complain about lower wages or managers’ unethical or illegal demands. The H-1Bs remain subservient because they do not want to be sent home and because they hope to get hugely valuable green cards as a deferred bonus.
The H-1B visa program also helps the companies’ stock prices, because it allows them to pocket the profits of converting many Americans’ full-time professional jobs into outsourced gig jobs for Indian-born workers.
Outsourcing also protects industry consolidation because it reduces the number of American professionals who gain enough experience to form rival companies.
The giveaway is being slammed by advocates for U.S. professionals who have long opposed the establishment’s step-by-step expansion in the number of non-immigrant contract workers who are being imported into U.S. jobs.
“This [H-1B] rule stretches definitions to get around numerical limits and dumbs down the eligibility criteria,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The program is already a scam and this rule will make matters worse.”
The changes are intended to help the Fortune 500 investors who are now “making a killing off of killing off the American workforce,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “There is no [visa worker] number that they will be satisfied with … despite the fact that there are Americans currently doing those jobs,” he added.
The new giveaway is included within a draft regulation released Friday by the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
His regulation would somewhat reduce rampant fraud by the many Indian-run “body shop” companies that import Indian graduates for Fortune 500 subcontracting jobs in the United States.
But the Mayorkas rule would also allow Fortune 500 companies to import extra H-1B workers above the much-touted 85,000 cap each year.
The higher inflow is enabled by a decision to widen a prior loophole.
The loophole has quietly exempted purported nonprofits — such as universities, corporate research centers, and government agencies — from the annual 85,000 caps on for-profit companies. For example, the federal government imported 138,297 H-1B workers in 2019. The inflow was 53,000 workers above the claimed 85,000 annual cap that is misleadingly cited in nearly all media coverage of the program.
The agency’s new language says:
DHS proposes to modernize the definition of employers who are exempt from the annual statutory limit on H-1B visas to create more flexibility for nonprofit and governmental research organizations and [foreign workers] who are not directly employed by a qualifying organization. Specifically, DHS proposes to change the definition of “nonprofit research organization” and “governmental research organization” by replacing “primarily engaged” and “primary mission” with “fundamental activity” to permit a nonprofit entity or governmental research organization … where research is not a primary mission,[emphasis added], to meet the definition of a nonprofit research entity.
This provision would allow many more organizations to displace U.S. professionals if they perform some research.
The draft regulation says:
Additionally, DHS proposes to revise the requirements for beneficiaries to qualify for H-1B cap exemption when they are not directly employed [emphasis added] by a qualifying organization, but still provide essential work, even if their duties do not necessarily directly further the organization’s essential purpose.
That provision would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to sideline American professionals and instead hire foreign workers for HR and accounting jobs — via a contractor — because the agency researches Medicare and Medicaid spending patterns.
“There are Americans that can do these, are doing these jobs — they’re just not going to be going on for much longer,” said Lynn.
The huge annual inflow of visa workers excludes a huge number of American STEM graduates from jobs. The surplus U.S. tech professionals flood into the broader white-collar labor markets and then flatline wages for many graduates, including journalists.
In turn, the many mid-skill H-1B workers have created ethnic hiring networks that carefully exclude high-skilled Americans from career-starting jobs in favor of less qualified foreign graduates.
U.S. companies likely employ about 2 million white-collar visa workers via the H-1B, L-1, J-1s, H4EADs, OPT, and CPT programs.
The huge inflow of H-1B workers has also allowed Wall Street investors to grow a new management class of Indian-born CEOs, including the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and IBM.
The rule would also help foreign students at U.S. colleges from the huge “Optional Practical Training” work program into the H-1B program. The OPT program keeps roughly 400,000 foreign graduates into American jobs each year, so making it more difficult for American graduates to get their first step in the career ladder.
The rule does not include any of the fundamental reforms launched by President Donald Trump. Those incomplete reforms included a rule that blocked abuse by allocating H-1B visas to U.S. employers who were willing to pay the most.
The rule is being lauded by advocates for U.S. employers, such as Davier Bier at the business-backed Cato Institute:
I'm shocked by my inability to say anything negative about what's in the new H-1B reg so far. The most negative thing is that it doesn't go nearly far enough to rethink the H-1B visa at a time when we will have people living on it for decades. https://t.co/fZvj0EuPsB pic.twitter.com/ur3NhFFt69
— David Bier (@David_J_Bier) October 20, 2023
The government’s announcement of the H-1B expansion was retweeted by Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us.
The group was founded by West Coast investors to push business-friendly migration rules, and it has a huge influence in President Joe Biden’s West Wing. The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in 2021. But copies exist at the other sites.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say immigration under President Joe Biden is making life harder for all, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,415 adults in September. That number is up from 48 percent in July 2023. Fifty-seven percent of independents agree with the “harder” view, while just 17 percent “strongly” disagree.
