{"id":821917,"date":"2025-01-22T10:12:47","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T16:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/22\/president-elect-donald-trump-i-have-always-been-in-favor-of-h-1b-visas\/"},"modified":"2025-01-22T10:12:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T16:12:47","slug":"president-elect-donald-trump-i-have-always-been-in-favor-of-h-1b-visas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/22\/president-elect-donald-trump-i-have-always-been-in-favor-of-h-1b-visas\/","title":{"rendered":"President-Elect Donald Trump: ‘I Have Always Been in Favor’ of H-1B Visas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President-elect Donald Trump says he has \u201calways been in favor\u201d of the H-1B visa program that imports hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily from India, to take white-collar American jobs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas,\u201d Trump told<\/a> the New York Post<\/em> of the H-1B visa program.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s why we have them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cI have many H-1B visas on my properties. I\u2019ve been a believer in H-1B,\u201d Trump continued. \u201cI have used it many times. It\u2019s a great program.\u201d<\/p>\n

The remarks come after a weeks-long online debate<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

For years, Breitbart News\u00a0has chronicled<\/a>\u00a0the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are\u00a0about 650,000 H-1B visa\u00a0foreign<\/a>\u00a0workers\u00a0in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are\u00a0often\u00a0laid off<\/a>\u00a0in the process and\u00a0forced<\/a>\u00a0to train their foreign replacements, as\u00a0highlighted<\/a>\u00a0by Breitbart News.<\/p>\n

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Research published in the Journal of Business Ethics recently revealed that foreign H-1B visa workers are paid about 10 percent<\/a> less than their American counterparts doing the same line of work.<\/p>\n

Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that\u00a071 percent<\/a> of tech workers\u00a0in 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\u00a099 percent<\/a>\u00a0of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In 2015, Trump\u2019s immigration agenda laid out key reforms for the H-1B visa program to prevent such gaming of the system by corporations, Breitbart News reported<\/a> at the time:<\/p>\n

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[Trump] called for also increasing the prevailing wage when it comes to the issuance of H-1B visas so as to get Americans \u2014 especially Hispanics, blacks, and women \u2014 hired into corporate positions in Silicon Valley rather than foreigners.<\/strong> It is here where he points out that Rubio \u2014 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 \u2014 has put forward legislation that would drastically harm American workers\u2019 job prospects, and he\u2019s done so on behalf of Zuckerberg and other donors. [Emphasis added]<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d Trump wrote.<\/strong> \u201cMore than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program\u2019s 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\u2019s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.\u201d [Emphasis added]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 2020, Trump implemented such reforms<\/a> to the program \u2014 requiring\u00a0federal agencies to complete audits to assess their compliance with requirements ensuring only American citizens are given federal civil service jobs and ending the program\u2019s lottery system, instead making companies offer the highest salaries when seeking to import foreign H-1B visa workers.<\/p>\n

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The move was celebrated<\/a> by longtime Trump supporters who have helped represent Americans fired from their jobs and forced to train their foreign H-1B visa replacements.<\/p>\n

\u201cOutsourcing hundreds of workers is especially detrimental in the middle of a pandemic, which has already cost millions of Americans their jobs,\u201d a White House statement said at the time. \u201cPresident Trump\u2019s actions will help combat employers\u2019 misuse of H-1B visas, which were never intended to replace qualified American workers with low-cost foreign labor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only months before, in July 2020, Trump issued the reforms, the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced<\/a>\u00a0an outsourcing plan whereby 200 American professionals would be laid off and made to train their foreign H-1B visa replacements.<\/p>\n

By August, Trump stepped in and fired<\/a> TVA\u00a0Chair 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.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, with the help of U.S. Tech Workers, Trump successfully<\/a> lobbied TVA to abandon its outsourcing plan, thus saving hundreds of Americans from layoffs.<\/p>\n

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at\u00a0jb*****<\/span>@*******<\/span>rt.com<\/span>.\u00a0Follow him on Twitter\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President-elect Donald Trump says he has \u201calways been in favor\u201d of the H-1B visa program that imports hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily from India, to take white-collar American jobs. \u201cI\u2019ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas,\u201d Trump told the New York Post of the H-1B visa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":821918,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1146,43435],"tags":[5435,43434],"class_list":{"0":"post-821917","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-donald","8":"category-president-elect","9":"tag-donald","10":"tag-president-elect"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}