President-elect Donald Trump says he has “always been in favor” of the H-1B visa program that imports hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily from India, to take white-collar American jobs.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas,” Trump told the New York Post of the H-1B visa program. “That’s why we have them.”
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B,” Trump continued. “I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
The remarks come after a weeks-long online debate that has divided proponents of the H-1B visa program, mainly billionaire Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other tech investors, and critics from the political right and left.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
Research published in the Journal of Business Ethics recently revealed that foreign H-1B visa workers are paid about 10 percent less than their American counterparts doing the same line of work.
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.
Trump, in particular, for years has been a critic of corporations abusing the H-1B visa program to hold down wages in white-collar industries by laying off American professionals only to replace them with foreign workers.
In 2015, Trump’s immigration agenda laid out key reforms for the H-1B visa program to prevent such gaming of the system by corporations, Breitbart News reported at the time:
[Trump] called for also increasing the prevailing wage when it comes to the issuance of H-1B visas so as to get Americans — especially Hispanics, blacks, and women — hired into corporate positions in Silicon Valley rather than foreigners. It is here where he points out that Rubio — who along with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is one of the two candidates in the Republican primary against Trump that the donor class is pulling for — has put forward legislation that would drastically harm American workers’ job prospects, and he’s done so on behalf of Zuckerberg and other donors. [Emphasis added]
“We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program,” Trump wrote. “More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant, instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.” [Emphasis added]
In 2020, Trump implemented such reforms to the program — requiring federal agencies to complete audits to assess their compliance with requirements ensuring only American citizens are given federal civil service jobs and ending the program’s lottery system, instead making companies offer the highest salaries when seeking to import foreign H-1B visa workers.
The move was celebrated by longtime Trump supporters who have helped represent Americans fired from their jobs and forced to train their foreign H-1B visa replacements.
“Outsourcing hundreds of workers is especially detrimental in the middle of a pandemic, which has already cost millions of Americans their jobs,” a White House statement said at the time. “President Trump’s actions will help combat employers’ misuse of H-1B visas, which were never intended to replace qualified American workers with low-cost foreign labor.”
Only months before, in July 2020, Trump issued the reforms, the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced an outsourcing plan whereby 200 American professionals would be laid off and made to train their foreign H-1B visa replacements.
By August, Trump stepped in and fired TVA Chair Skip Thompson. He also demanded that TVA CEO Jeff Lyash cut his salary to no more than $500,000 a year after learning that he had raked in $8 million at the time of the outsourcing announcement.
Most importantly, with the help of U.S. Tech Workers, Trump successfully lobbied TVA to abandon its outsourcing plan, thus saving hundreds of Americans from layoffs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jb*****@*******rt.com. Follow him on Twitter here.