Amazon’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Support Clashes with Policy Importing Foreign Workers Over Hiring American

Billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Amazon is pledging its support to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement with $10 million in funding for social justice advocacy while importing foreign workers over hiring qualified Americans.

In the midst of rioting, looting, and arson in the nation’s largest cities over the death of George Floyd, Amazon threw up a banner on its online marketplace vowing support for BLM and donating millions to left-wing groups like the ACLU, the Brennan Justice Center, and the NAACP.

“Together, we stand in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice,” Amazon executives wrote in a statement.

Simultaneously, Amazon has not made it any easier for black American STEM graduates to secure jobs at the multinational corporation by ending its use of thousands of foreign H-1B visa workers every year.

In a given 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.

Since 2017, Amazon executives have sought to import nearly 12,000 foreign H-1B visa workers to fill tech jobs that could otherwise go to American STEM graduates, many of which are black Americans.

“We know anecdotally that Amazon has little to no regard for its workers with their God awful work rules and constant video surveillance and monitoring that suck out the soul of a human being,” U.S. Tech Workers Executive Director Kevin Lynn told Breitbart News.

“And let’s not forget the lower wages they pay,” Lynn said. “For instance, in 2019, the median pay of Amazon employees in the U.S. was just over $35,000 compared to UPS that is over $53,000.”

The H-1B visa program is immensely discriminatory, according to the federal government’s annual data. Nearly 70 percent of all H-1B visas given out annually are rewarded to Indian male nationals. Lynn said:

While Amazon and other big corporations virtue signal about Black Lives Matter, their policies in the grand scheme of things do little to move black Americans out of poverty, or provide them the kind of educational opportunities that will eventually lead to advancement to the C-Suite.

Grassroots organizations like the American Workers Coalition and more than 30 college student groups have urged President Trump’s administration to temporarily halt corporations from being able to outsource American jobs to foreign workers while 30 million Americans remain unemployed — including nearly 17 percent of which are jobless black Americans.

Over the last three decades, STEM employment for Black Americans has hardly budged. In three decades, STEM employment for black Americans has been largely stagnant, growing by only two percent. This is a slower employment growth rate than Hispanics, who once accounted for four percent of all STEM workers and now account for about seven percent of the industry.

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