President Donald Trump’s reform of the H-1B visa-worker program will raise wages for American graduates, ease corporate hiring, and raise the quality of imported workers, said Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“This regulation is a no-brainer: It’s really a good idea for [U.S.] workers, businesses, and the American economy as a whole,” he told reporters on Friday, October 31. “This is truly a win-win-win.”

But Fortune 500 companies bitterly oppose the Trump reforms. On October 3o, many of the largest fortune 500 companies joined a lawsuit against two H-1B reforms announced October 8, declaring:

The new DHS and DOL [Labor Department] Rules will dramatically reduce U.S. businesses’ ability to hire foreign-born employees … [and] there are not enough U.S. workers with STEM knowledge to satisfy U.S. companies’ continually increasing demand for employees with these skills.

The October 28 reform championed by Cuccinelli would allocate the annual supply of 85,000 H-1B visas to the companies which offer the highest wages. This would be a big shift from the current practice of using a lottery to award the visas to Fortune 500 companies and their cheap-labor subcontractors.

The lottery “has worked for the great detriment of American workers,” Cuccinelli said Friday, adding:

And not only American workers. Currently the use of the random selection to allocate H-1B visas for its American workers to bring in relatively low paid — at least, lower than they would otherwise be paid — foreign labor, which drives [down wages for] the American workforce and undercuts people farther down the professional chain who are here legally — Americans and LPRs [Legal Permanent residents] who are here. It also makes it harder for businesses to plan their hiring — they put in for petitions that are awarded on a random basis. They’re literally playing a lottery with their employment needs in any given year.

It also fails to leverage the H-1B program and really compete for the world’s best and brightest, the most highly skilled workers — something the President talks about all the time, wanting to compete for the the best and the brightest. Going from a random selection to a wage-based selection, as I noted, will have those coming in as H-1B recipients [who are being] paid more and thus will be bidded up and those dollars will be reserved for highly skilled workers — which is exactly what the President is seeking. It will  to do reduce or eliminate the downward pressure on Americans’ wages that the random lottery has imposed.

In this regulation — if it’s finalized because this is drafted as an NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] — we countered that downward pressure on wages and better protect the economic interests of American workers by incentivizing employers to offer more competitive wages.

That’s a good thing for everyone in this country. And with the planning advantages for businesses, they benefit too. This is truly a win-win-win.

“The NPRM, if finalized as proposed, would lead to an increase in employment opportunities for unemployed or underemployed U.S. workers,”  said Joe Edlow, the deputy director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. He added:

This is also consistent with the president by American higher American directive instructing DHS to protect the interests of us workers, and the President’s June 2020 proclamation directing the Department of Homeland Security to ensure the presence in the United States of each one be non immigrants does not disadvantage United States workers.

The companies who filed a legal brief supporting the October 30 lawsuit against Trump’s reforms include Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. They are backed up by the Semiconductor Industry Association, Mike Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New American Economy Action Fund, and the Society for Human Resource Management.

DHS estimates that H-1B visa workers hold almost 600,000 white-collar jobs. But other estimates say 900,000 jobs are allocated to H-1B workers and their spouses in the H4EAD program. In addition, at least another 600,000 foreign workers hold white-collar jobs after being imported via other pipelines, dubbed Optional Practical Training (OPT), L-1, J-1, TN, Curricular Practical Training (CPT).

Some of these million-plus foreign workers stay in the United States until they are trained by Americans and can take the white-collar jobs back to India.

But many of these foreign workers work long hours to stay in the United States — usually for lower wages in mid-skill jobs — in the hope or expectation of getting the green cards and citizenship that are dangled by their employers. For example, at least 300,000 Indian H-1B workers are now working while waiting for green cards.

This hidden “green-card workforce” is a boon for CEOs at Fortune 500 companies.

It allows the CEOs to quietly outsource many of their full-time jobs to little-known subcontractors who can deliver and discard blocs of cheap white-collar labor without worrying about federal workplace rules or anti-discrimination laws.

But the hiring managers in the green-card workforce must exclude American graduates because the Americans have the motivation and legal standing to blow the whistle on the Fortune 500’s labor market. This exclusion denies Americans the starter jobs they need to pay their debts and advance their careers.

Also, the Fortune 500 outsourcing pushes many experienced American professionals from mid-career jobs, while millions more face lower salaries and persistent job insecurity. From 2016 to 2019, the median or midpoint income of college graduates fell by two percent, according to a survey released in September by the Federal Reserve banking system.

The result is that corporate diversity reports, university reports, and census data show that large slices of the nation’s technology workforce now consist of ill-paid, ill-treated, and ill-trained graduates from low-tier universities have the same job security and professional clout as migrant stoop-workers in U.S. fields.

But this visa-worker labor policy delivers a tied and cheap workforce — and higher stock values — to the executives and leading shareholders of the Fortune 500 companies.

Yet the CEOs’ preference for workers with limited skills and few workplace rights also reduces national productivity, the quality of software, and competitiveness with China.

Overall, open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and get many progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.