President Donald Trump’s deputies announced Friday that they had begun the process of importing 85,000 H-1B gig workers to take white-collar jobs that will be needed after October by the millions of American graduates who are now losing jobs in the coronavirus crash.
“This is just an unspeakable action,” said Marie Larson, a co-founder of the American Workers Coalition, which opposes the many visa worker programs that have transferred at least one million white-collar jobs to foreign workers. “I don’t believe President Trump ordered this — the swamp went ahead with this,” she said.
“If the H-1B program is just for filling jobs that Americans cannot fill amid for labor shortages, then this would not be happening,” said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Reform Institute. “But it is not a labor-shortage program — it is a cheap labor program to displace Americans,” he said.
The 2020 lottery “is in your face that that is the purpose of the program.”
The agency announced Friday that it had received enough corporate requests to snatch up all of the 2020 supply of H-1B visas.
This annual supply includes 20,000 visas for foreigners who pay for graduate degrees at American colleges, plus 65,000 visas for graduates who are directly imported from India, China, and other countries. Non-profits — such as hospitals and universities — are allowed to also import an unlimited number of “cap-exempt” H-1Bs for white-collar jobs.
Roughly 100,000 new H-1B workers arrive each year. But they are allowed to stay for many years, so companies have gradually built up a resident workforce of roughly 900,000 H-1B workers, alongside several hundred thousand additional white-collar workers carrying L-1, OPT, CPT, E-3, B-1, TN, H4EAD documents.
The annual application and lottery process are managed by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS] agency, which announced Friday afternoon:
USCIS has received enough electronic registrations during the initial period to reach the FY 2021 H-1B numerical allocations (H-1B cap). We randomly selected from among the registrations properly submitted. We intend to notify petitioners with selected registrations no later than March 31, 2020, that they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition for the beneficiary named in the applicable selected registration.
The work visas will not be sent to the lottery winners for several weeks after the companies submit petition packages with justifications for each visa. The deadline for submitting the petitions is June 30.
Those justifications include a so-called “Labor Condition Application” document approved by the Department of Labor. The LCAs describe the intended job for each H-1B worker. Business advocates use the LCA process to claim that imported workers do not displace Americans.
But the LCA process does not require the companies to show that Americans cannot be hired for the job. Also, the LCA documents are rubber-stamped by the department. A department spokesman told Breitbart News:
Under current law, “[t]he Secretary of Labor shall review such an [LCA] application only for completeness and obvious inaccuracies” and, unless the application is incomplete or obviously inaccurate, the Department must certify the LCA within seven days of receiving the employer’s application. [Emphasis added.]
Trump’s deputies now know which companies asked for 2020 visas and how many visas they won in the lottery, said Larson.
Those companies can tell Americans why they are hiring foreign workers when so many American graduates are jobless amid the coronavirus crash, she said:
We want USCIS to name the companies that have won the lottery to bring in foreign workers for American jobs. What specific specific skills do these people have that American workers supposedly do not have?
All Americans must demand that these companies make public why they need these people and why they could not hire American workers. We need the media to question each and every one of these companies to ask them why they could not hire Americans for these jobs. We need Americans to stand up during this massive unemployment — which is unprecedented even under the Great Depression and we have not hit the peak. This is a time for everyone to rise up.
It is incumbent on President Trump to ensure that he keeps his [2016] campaign promise to put American workers first. One way he can do that is to ensure the American public gets the answer it deserves on why Americans are not getting these jobs.
Trump’s failure to set curbs on the H-1B program has angered many of the swing-voting university graduates who supported him in 2016. In March 2016, after much zig-zagging, Trump declared:
The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.
“The people surrounding President Trump don’t have his back — they are not helping him keep his campaign promise,” Larson said.
In February 2020, a U.S. judge struck down the token H-1B curbs set by USCIS managers since Trump’s election.
The current head of DHS, Chad Wolf, formerly served as a lobbyist for the NASSCOM outsourcing industry, which imports most of the H-1B gig workers. The group’s mix of Indian and U.S. companies use the H-1B program to extract salaries and wealth from the American college graduate class, and they split the gains among both countries’ executives and investors, plus the visa workers and India’s government.
Some of the H-1B workers are experts hired by elite software and banking companies.
But many of the H-1B visa workers are hired by Indian-run staffing companies to quickly fill open slots in a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies. For example, many of the contract jobs are in technology, accounting, health care, design, banking, finance, engineering, science, teaching, and insurance, and even in the fashion industry. The companies include Tata, Infosys, HCL, and Tech Mahindra.
The little-publicized outsourcing industry boosts investors’ stock prices by cutting salaries for millions of American graduates. It also pushes many older American professionals out of jobs and prevents millions of American graduates from getting on the first rung of their career ladders.
The H-1Bs and staffing companies are often used by American executives and hiring managers out of sheer laziness, insiders tell Breitbart News.
The gig workers provided by the staffing companies are often unskilled, unproductive, and expensive, said a former executive assistant at a banking company who helped managers replace many American professionals with Indian H-1Bs. But they are compliant because the jobs pay far more than Indian or Chinese jobs and because they hope to win green cards, she said.
American executives do not want to go to the trouble of hiring and managing independent and innovative American professionals — but do want to promise short-term cost savings during their periodic calls with Wall Street investors, she said. “It was not about [workers’] skills, not about anything else, it was about money,” she said. “They want credit for saving the company money, so they won’t look at anything that goes against the [cost saving] narrative.”
Multiple lawsuits and testimony from Americans show how the H-1B program undermines professionalism, innovation, and Americans’ careers.
The 2020 lottery was applauded by immigration lawyers who import H-1B workers for business groups.
“I’ll keep you posted on when I start seeing updates for my registrations!” an immigration lawyer told her clients. “Yes, we had a substantial increase in submissions compared to last year,” she told one questioner.
“NewsFlash! H1B Registration Cap Hit, USCIS to Post Results by March 31st,” said a post by the Murthy Law Firm, which has offices in Indian, Seattle, and Maryland.
American professionals have organized to lobby against the H-1B program via several groups, including the American Workers Coalition, U.S. TechWorkers, and ProUSworkers, and White Collar Workers of America.
The new TechsUnite.US site was created to help U.S. graduates anonymously collaborate.
In turn, these groups are backed up by a few sites that track the scale and location of the outsourcing industry in each legislator’s district. “The scope of this thing is really unbelievable,” said one researcher.
Other sites document the conflicts created by diverse foreign business practices in the United States. The non-political MyVisaJobs.com site also provides much information about H-1B outsourcing and green card rewards in multiple industries.
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.