President Trump has extended an executive order to prioritize unemployed Americans for jobs in the United States rather than allowing businesses to import foreign visa workers.
In June 2020, Trump signed an executive order halting H-1B visas, H-4 visas, H-2B visas, L visas, and J-1 visas while tens of millions of Americans were jobless or underemployed due to economic lockdowns as a result of the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
The order was set to expire at the end of 2020, but Trump intervened to extend the order to continue prioritizing U.S. jobs for unemployed Americans instead of allowing businesses to import foreign visa workers in a struggling labor market.
The extension of the order reads:
The effects of COVID-19 on the United States labor market and on the health of American communities is a matter of ongoing national concern. The current number of new daily cases worldwide reported by the World Health Organization, for example, is higher than the comparable number present during June, and while therapeutics and vaccines are recently available for an increasing number of Americans, their effect on the labor market and community health has not yet been fully realized.
The order will now expire in March 2021.
RJ Hauman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which had requested Trump extend the halt on foreign visa workers to the U.S., said the order continues to be critical in a labor market where 17.8 million Americans are jobless today.
“While the unemployment rate has fallen, too many Americans are still looking for work and the economic outlook remains bleak,” Hauman said.
“If this proclamation was allowed to lapse, then companies could easily return to exploiting cheap foreign labor,” Hauman continued. “If President-elect Biden quickly rescinds, the country should take note — he doesn’t stand with American workers.”
Kevin Lynn of U.S. Tech Workers, who represent Americans that have had their jobs outsourced and offshored by visa programs, called Trump’s decision “great news” during “a time of severe economic depression.”
“It will put Joe Biden in a tough spot should he try to lift the restrictions at a time when the economy is crumbling and unemployment is sky-high,” Lynn told Breitbart News. Lynn, though, said he was concerned that the order will now expire just as the H-1B visa program’s lottery will take place in April 2021.
Today, there are 24.5 million Americans who are either unemployed or underemployed, all of whom want full-time jobs and whose labor market prospects are crushed when forced to compete against foreign workers.
Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants on green cards to permanently resettle in the country. In addition, another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are admitted every year to take U.S. jobs. Often, Americans are fired and replaced by these workers. Many are forced to train their foreign replacements.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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