Trump’s ‘Hire American’ Policy Slows Outsourcing of U.S. Tech Jobs

President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy initiative is making it harder for outsourcing firms like Infosys, Capgemini, and Cognizant to readily layoff American workers and give their jobs to imported foreign workers.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.

The Trump administration — and specifically United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Lee Francis Cissna — has sought to reverse this outsourcing course for American professionals and U.S. graduates.

In newly released USCIS data, the total approval rate for employers getting to import foreign workers for American jobs through the H-1B visa program dropped to 75 percent — a far decline from the 92 percent approval rate of the same period in 2016.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, about 60 percent of U.S. businesses seeking to import H-1B foreign workers were asked to provide more information as to why they could not find American workers for the jobs. During this same period in 2016, only about 28 percent of businesses were required to provide this additional information.

“As part of our efforts to fulfill President Trump’s ‘Buy American and Hire American’ executive order, USCIS has made a series of reforms designed to protect U.S. workers, increase our confidence in the eligibility of those who receive benefits, cut down on frivolous petitions and improve the integrity and efficiency of the immigration-petition process,” USCIS spokesman Jessica Collins told the Wall Street Journal in a statement.

The “Hire American” policy is mostly hitting Indian outsourcing firms like Infosys, Cognizant, and Capgemini, all of which are contracted by multinational companies to outsource Americans’ jobs to imported H-1B foreign workers.

But while outsourcing firms’ collective approval rate for H-1B foreign workers has fallen, the largest multinational tech corporations are continuing to be approved to outsource American jobs to foreigners.

For example, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google, Intel, and Microsoft Corporation have all continued to enjoy an H-1B approval rate of about 99 percent. Likewise, Amazon and Cisco Systems Inc. get approved 98 percent of the time to import foreign workers to displace American professionals, while JPMorgan Chase has enjoyed a 97 percent approval rate.

The subtle reforms from Cissna have made the official a target of the corporate-friendly, donor-class wing of the Trump administration that favors mass legal immigration to keep U.S. wages low, insiders have previously told Breitbart News.

Last year, alone, U.S. businesses attempted to outsource nearly 420,000 American jobs to foreign workers, a population that exceeds the total population of Tampa, Florida.

Currently, the U.S. admits more than a million legal immigrants annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.