The United States Chamber of Commerce is cheering on President Joe Biden’s expansion of a visa pipeline set to deliver more foreign competition against American professionals while cutting costs for the nation’s largest multinational corporations.
As Breitbart News’s Neil Munro reports, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the expansion of the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program whereby corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and BlackRock hire foreign students over American STEM graduates at a 15 percent discount by avoiding tens of billions in FICA taxes.
Specifically, Biden expanded the OPT program to include 22 fields of study from which corporations can hire foreign students at American universities for coveted white-collar, entry-level jobs.
Those new fields of study include bioenergy, climate science, earth systems science, economics and computer science, mathematical economics, general data analytics, and research methodology.
The Chamber of Commerce, representing corporate special interests, cheered the move as “one of a series of key actions needed to address the workforce shortage crisis” even as American college students have urged the federal government to end the program.
“We welcome the Biden administration’s announcement on international STEM talent,” the Chamber’s Jon Baselice said in a statement:
Much more needs to be done to update and modernize our nation’s immigration system, and those types of changes require congressional action. The Chamber will continue to push Congress and the White House to work together and address these pressing issues, as the workforce challenges impacting many businesses today won’t be abating anytime soon. [Emphasis added]
The Chamber’s vision, as recently detailed by CEO Suzanne Clark, includes flooding the U.S. labor market with twice as much foreign competition against America’s working and middle class.
During a policy speech this month, Clark called on Congress to double legal immigration levels — which would bring anywhere from two to four million foreign nationals to the U.S. annually — and provide amnesty to most of the nation’s 11 to 22 million illegal aliens.
Such a policy would bring a foreign-born population nearly six times the size of Boston, Massachusetts, to the U.S. every year. The goal, Clark said, is to provide corporations and big businesses with as much readily available foreign labor as possible without having to compete for American workers with higher wages and better benefits.
The expansion of foreign competition against white-collar American workers is likely to hugely benefit the top employers of OPT visa workers. In 2020, Amazon ranked as the top outsourcer to foreign students for American jobs, followed by Apple, BlackRock, Facebook, Microsoft, Accenture, Oracle, Bank of America, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, Citigroup, eBay, Google, Goldman Sachs, Hewlett-Packard, Infosys, JP Morgan, McKinsey & Company, Tata Consultancy Services, Wayfair, and Yahoo, among others.
Annually, more than half a million American STEM graduates enter the white-collar workforce looking for entry-level jobs. Those prospects are crushed by foreign visa worker competition that allows corporations to import foreign nationals on cheaper salaries before securing them green cards to permanently remain in the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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