GOP 2016 candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee today denounced his own party elite as a destructive, wage-slashing, profit-grasping creature of wealthy donors.
“We’re really absolutely screwing lots of Americans and trying to bring in cheap labor at the expense of our long-term future economy,” Huckabee told Steve Bannon, host of the Breitbart News Daily show, on channel 125 of SiriusXM.
That policy is exemplified by the GOP leaders’ support for the H-1B program, he said. “It was fascinating listening to your previous guests,” he said, citing the prior segment in which two American professionals described how they were replaced by foreign professionals carrying H-1B guest-worker visas.
“What they telling us is that Republicans are going to have to step up and start being honest,” he said. “We’re really absolutely screwing lots of Americans… It makes no sense and I don’t understand why on God’s Earth,” he said.
Huckabee hit at other GOP 2016 candidates who have supported companies’ use of H-1B guest-workers, including Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz. “You’ve got Republican candidates for president who seem to be more interested in prospering foreign workers than they do the Americans… it just doesn’t make any sense at all except that they’re placating the donor class,” he said. “What a shame,” said Huckabee, who did not name the targets of his criticism.
Huckabee also slammed GOP leaders for supporting wage-cutting, free-trade treaties, including the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership. If approved by the GOP-majority Congress, he said, “this is going to be great for the donor class, extraordinarily lucrative for those on Wall Street, but it is going to be a gut-punch to people on Main Street.”
Under current rules, roughly 700,000 short-term and long-term guest-workers are imported each year for several months or several years. These foreign workers are willing and able to work for lower wages than Americans, who have to pay the higher costs of paying college debt, buying houses and raising kids in America.
The H-1B program brings in at least 85,000 foreign graduates each year. They can stay for several years, so the estimated population of resident H-1Bs is roughly 650,000. Other visa programs, including the L and O visas, and various free-trade treaties, are also used to import additional foreign professionals.
Currently, more than 800,000 foreign graduates are working as temporary ‘guest-workers’ in the United States. They’re in a wide variety of jobs — doctors, architects, accountants, designers, teachers, engineers and software experts.
That 800,000 number is roughly equivalent to the total annual output of skilled American graduates, but the guest-workers accept much lower pay than needed by experienced, middle-aged, child-rearing American professionals, including pharmacists, industrial designers, and software developers.
The guest-workers’ lower wages help spike stock values on Wall Street. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s stock-value in his company, Facebook, is worth roughly $45 billion.
Huckabee rival Donald Trump has taken a strong position against the H-1B program, free-trade treaties and against illegal immigration. Trump’s August labor-force plan is largely based in Sen. Jeff Session’s policies, which would boost jobs and wages for Americans by sharply reducing the annual inflow of 700,000 temporary foreign workers.
Trump’s populist, nationalist and pro-American stance has pushed him to the top of the polls, where he is challenged only by Christian brain-surgeon Ben Carson.
However, no candidate has put forward a plan to reduce the annual legal inflow of at least 1 million foreign migrants into the United States.
Currently, the inflow is swamping the labor market and forcing down wages — much to the benefit of companies.
In 2013, President Barack Obama and the 1965 immigration law added roughly two million new foreign workers, just as 4.4 million young Americans joined the workforce. That year, Americans’ wages stalled, and the stock market grew by roughly $5 trillion.
Wages have been stagnant for 40 years, Huckabee told Breitbart News. “We’ve created an economy in which we think the economy is great if it helps a few.”
Americans “have grown up here, have paid taxes here, their families have deep roots here, and they’re being shoved aside so we can import cheap labor to make rich people richer and poor people poorer,” he said.