The administration’s decision to reverse President Barack Obama’s expansion of the H-1B program has been met with criticism by advocates for cheap foreign white-collar labor.
The pro-American decision by President Donald Trump’s deputies will launch a lengthy regulatory process which will open up roughly 80,000 jobs to Americans graduates over the next two years.
In 2015, Obama’s deputies began awarding H4 work permits to the spouses of H-1B guest-workers who manage to get into the line for residency and green cards. The H4 program did not have any approval from Congress but was one part of Obama’s pro-immigration strategy.
Most of the H4 recipients are Indians because the per-country annual caps for green cards ensure that the many Indians in line must wait for several years while jumping from the H-1B program to green cards.
Todd Schulte, the director of Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobbying group, Tweeted his opposition to the promised change:
The FWD.us group was created by investors to raise the supply — and thus, lower the costs — of white-collar labor for the information technology industry. The investors include Bill Gates.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The spouses of highly skilled foreign workers would no longer be able to work legally in the U.S. under a regulatory change proposed by the Trump administration on Thursday …
“This announcement places into jeopardy thousands of hardworking, contributing individuals who have started their own businesses—and often have U.S. citizen children—who will needlessly be forced to revert to a status of inactivity,” said Leon Fresco, an immigration attorney who worked for the Obama administration.
The promised change was revealed in Donald Trump’s report on planned regulatory changes.
The end of the H4 program will nudge down the annual award of “Employment Authorization Document” work permits to roughly 2 million foreigners. In combination with Trump’s decision to close Obama’s DACA program, the 2018 number may drop down to 1.5 million.
However, some observers criticize the move as too slow, and too limited.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.
Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a large percentage of the nation’s annual income has shifted to investors and away from employees.