Flashback–Biden: U.S. Needs More H-1B Foreign Workers for Corporations

In 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden advocated for bringing more H-1B foreign visa workers to the United States to compete against American graduates and professionals in high-paying science, technology, and engineering jobs.

Biden told attendees of the Export-Import Bank’s 2013 Annual Conference that not only did the U.S. need to bring more H-1B foreign visa workers to the country for corporations, but that foreign students graduating from American universities should “literally” be given green cards to permanently stay in the U.S.

Biden said:

We also think its essential to reform the immigration system. Every year … our university system generates roughly 40,000 people with PhDs and master degrees in areas of science and technology that we need and we make sure that they’re promptly escorted back to their country. At the very same time, we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on STEM education. It makes no sense in my humble opinion. [Emphasis added]

Sending them back to their country denies them a visa even when they have a job waiting for them. Instead of sending them home, we should be a stamping a green card on their diploma as they walk across the stage. Literally, I mean this literally, not figuratively, literally. If they have a job here, they should be able to stay here. We should want them here. [Emphasis added]

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve also proposed adding additional H-1B visas so that American employers can hire the best and the brightest no matter where they come from if they can’t be found here. [Emphasis added]

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. Nearly 70 percent of all H-1B visas are rewarded to Indian nationals.

More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program. 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.

While Biden advocated for more labor market competition against America’s professionals and graduates, foreign workers have already crowded out Americans in the tech hub of Silicon Valley, California.

Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.

Last year, U.S. businesses and corporations attempted to outsource nearly 420,000 American jobs to foreigners through the H-1B visa program — a number that outpaces the population of Tampa, Florida.

As Breitbart News previously reported, more than 2.7 million H-1B foreign workers have been approved to come to the U.S. to take American jobs between 2007 and 2017. During that same period, businesses tried to outsource almost 3.5 million American jobs to foreign workers instead of hiring Americans.

About four million young Americans enter the workforce each year, many looking for white-collar jobs in the STEM fields. Those Americans’ prospects of finding work are crippled by the country’s legal immigration process, which admits more than 1.5 million immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers annually.

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