American workers need to be protected from “the ravages of global wage competition,” former Breitbart News Executive Chairman and White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon says in a new interview with GQ magazine.
While railing against the mass importation of foreign workers to supply Silicon Valley, California’s tech industry hub and its corporations with cheap labor, Bannon said that, specifically, the H-1B visa is contributing to pushing working-class Americans out of the tech industry.
A partial transcript of the interview follows:
GQ: You’ve mentioned your unhappiness that there are so many Asian and Indian executives in Silicon Valley. But if the U.S. is going to win any kind of tech race, will it really be done exclusively with white guys from, say, Richmond? Doesn’t the country need all hands on deck?
BANNON: Yes, I do believe you need all hands on deck. When I made that comment, I made that comment about the H1-B visas. I have absolutely no problem with American citizens—if they’re American citizens—being heads of companies, regardless of their ethnicity. I have a big problem with foreign nationals coming into the country to be to be CEOs of companies. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News reported, the H-1B visa has been quietly used by tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook to import a cheaper, foreign workforce to take highly coveted jobs in the white-collar workforce. The H-1B visa allows for Americans to be displaced from their white-collar jobs, and sometimes they are even forced to train their foreign replacements as a stipulation of their severance.
Oftentimes, importing a foreign worker on the H-1B visa is the first step in a multinational corporations’ effort to outsource the American job, as the foreign worker arrives in the U.S., is trained in the job, and then is eventually sent back overseas with the job.
Silicon Valley’s mass importation of foreign nationals to take high-paying tech jobs is responsible for Americans now being a minority in the industry, as Breitbart News reported:
The growing foreign-born population taking jobs in Silicon Valley comes as nearly 500,000 Americans graduate in the STEM fields every year who are forced to compete with a booming foreign-born population in the U.S. and foreign workers who are imported by outsourcing firms and major tech conglomerates.
Even employers say that reforming the H-1B visa, or even getting rid of it entirely, would result in more U.S. jobs for American workers.
Tom Broadwater of the group “Americans4Work” has echoed Bannon’s concern over Silicon Valley’s mass immigration practices, as Breitbart News reported.
“H-1B visas enable tech companies to look racially diverse, even as they crowd out American women and workers of color,” Broadwater says. “Last year, 72 percent of H-1B visas went to Indian workers, and most of the rest went to Chinese workers.”
The Washington-imposed cheap labor economic model of importing millions of foreign workers to compete with working and middle-class Americans for U.S. jobs has helped keep U.S. wages stagnant for decades:
Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers, 15 years and older, 1960 to 2016.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s economic nationalist model has already resulted in history-making wage growth for American workers in the construction industry, the garment industry, for workers employed at small businesses, and black Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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