Pro-migration groups have begun pushing a “wage floor” fix to the public anger over their discovery that the H-1B visa program uses low-wage Indians to sideline millions of ordinary American college grads.
The H-1B fix “is just a fake,” outsourcing expert Ronil Hira told Breitbart News. The advocates “believe that people are suckers … it is a bad-faith proposition,” he added.
The proposal would raise the wage floor for a subset of H-1Bs from $60,000 to $120,000, but otherwise leave the uncapped outsourcing program unchanged.
In contrast, President-elect Donald Trump’s 2020 reform regulations “were good ideas,” said Hira, who is a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC:
They would have done a lot … so that you were bringing in much higher skilled [H-1B] people, and not just ordinary workers. That doesn’t mean it would have fixed it completely, but it would have been an improvement on the disaster that we have now.
Trump’s 2020 fixes allocated visas to the highest-paying employers, likely ending the use of migrants to take jobs from young, lower-wage American graduates. The reforms were strongly opposed by business groups and were quickly killed by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
The “wage floor” proposal was floated on December 29 after a week of furious online debate about Silicon Valley’s use of l0wer-skill Indian college graduates to covertly replace myriad American professionals in a wide variety of mainstream jobs.
Those multiple programs annually import more than 500,000 cheap foreign white-collar workers into jobs that would otherwise have helped young Americans build their skills, wealth, families, and potential for industry-shifting innovation. The Christmas debate has released a torrent of testimonials about the personal damage to Americans, as well as corporate excuse-making, law-breaking, discrimination, and deception.
The program is great for investors and their management teams. It subordinates professionals to C-Suite directives and spikes the stock prices that expand executives’ bonuses.
For example, Tesla’s stock value is more than 100 times its annual profits, ensuring that every dollar saved by the use of cheap H-1Bs helps to rocket its stock value. In 2020, pro-migration advocates at the Brookings Institute argued that investors lost $100 billion when Trump temporarily blocked the inflow of H-1B workers.
The Wage Floor Proposal
The wage-floor proposal was floated on December 29 by the Institute for Progress, which is funded by pro-migration advocates. The plan was quickly backed by investors, investor lobbies, and Elon Musk, who has supported and slammed a chaotic variety of proposals since the debate exploded over Christmas.
“Finding a change that can pass through reconciliation is key — that way, you only need 50 votes in the Senate,” said Alec Stapp, who posted the proposal. The reconciliation plan was endorsed by Kumar Garg, a former official in President Obama’s administration.
The “wage floor” plan was endorsed by the president of FWD.us, which is a leading lobby group for West Coast investors.
“We can improve H1-B visas by raising the wage floor, but also improving 1) the renewal process … 2) improving portability so people can change employers more easily and 3) streamlining the process … to an employment-based green card,” president Todd Schulte tweeted on December 29.
The FWD.us group was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other consumer-economy investors in 2013 to promote the “Gang of Eight” bill for amnesty and more migration.
Hira’s Response
The December 29 “wage floor” proposal is a replay of the early 1990s debate when Americans were horrified to see ordinary Americans being forced by Disney and other companies to train their Indian replacements, Hira said:
Congress said, “Okay [we need to deal with this] and Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor, said, “We need to fix this program — it’s out of control, and the [Bill] Clinton administration decided that they wanted to fix it program. But the industry came with an alternative [saying], “There’s just a few bad actors, and we can identify these bad actors because a sizable share of their workforces are on H-1Bs.”
So what [Congress] said is the threshold should be 15 percent [H-1B workforce] and then these [above-threshold] H-1B- dependent firms will have to go through a couple additional hoops in order to get their [subsequent] H-1Bs approved.
They’ll have to do good faith recruiting [of Americans] — because there were stories about bypassing U.S. workers — and they have to attest that they’re not displacing US workers.
So industry lobbyists added two loopholes in the 15 percent calculation that quickly gutted the protections, he said. The loopholes exempted H-1Bs from the 15 percent if they have Masters Degrees or get paid more than $60,000 a year.
Since then, the companies have made sure that many migrants have master’s degrees from low-quality universities in India or the United States or else paid their H-1Bs just above the $60,000 “wage floor.”
Those dodges minimized their costs as they imported at least three million more H-1B migrants for Americans’ jobs.
The “wage floor” proposal is an update of the 15 percent rule, said Hira:
It’s not going to raise the minimum wage. It has nothing to do with the way Facebook abuses the program, or some universities abuse the program, or any non-dependent company [such as] Accenture which won’t be hit by those rules in any way, and the large players would be able to figure out workarounds.
The proposal “shows … that they believe people are suckers … and they know [this fake offer] can work — Congres might bite,” said Hira.
The proposal also shows the investors’ groups plan to drag out the debate until Americans get distracted by the next drama, he said, adding:
I think their goal will be to run out the clock and ensure that nothing happens — because the status quo is better than this kind of action. But if something happens, they want to shape what happens.
“I think they expect that all this will just blow over,” he added.