Each year, American tech workers are laid off in masses across the United States, successively forced by their companies to train lower-wage and often less-skilled foreign workers to replace them, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said Thursday.
Malkin slammed the United States’ H-1B visa program for driving American workers to “dig their own graves” for “cheap” foreign replacements while discussing her latest book, “Sold Out,” during a panel hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The H-1B visa program was initially created to allow companies to hire temporary foreign workers with college degrees and “highly specialized knowledge” if no one in the U.S. is qualified for the position. Further, the law states that hiring foreign workers cannot “adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans.
Malkin and co-author John Miano, a fellow with CIS, dug into H-1B’s complexities and found that claims from tech companies arguing there is a “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workers in the U.S. is false.
Instead, Miano said the opposite is true. He cited a CIS study based on 2012 census data that found that only a third of Americans who graduated with STEM degrees work in a related field.
A primary reason for this, he continued, is that Congress codified the ability of tech firms to pay foreign workers roughly $20,000 less per year than their American counterparts through updates to its H-1B program.
“This isn’t by accident,” Miano said. “Replacing Americans with foreign workers is a deliberate part of the H-1B program[.] … So when you hear these complaints from Congress that we need to do something, it’s Congress that needs to do something and stop being beholden to the industry lobbyists.”
The federal government caps the number of visas at 85,000 per year, resulting in about 650,000 H-1B foreign workers in the country today, Malkin noted.
The New York Times has noted in multiple articles that the H-1B program has shifted from its original intent.
“Global outsourcing and consulting firms have obtained thousands of temporary visas to bring in foreign workers who have taken over jobs that had been held by American workers,” Times reporter Julia Preston wrote in September.
To restore the program’s original purpose, Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Dick Durbin of Illinois introduced legislation earlier this week that would require employers seeking to hire foreign workers through the H-1B program to first make a “good faith effort” to recruit American workers.
“The H-1B visa program was never meant to replace qualified American workers, but it was instead intended as a means to fill gaps in highly specialized areas of employment that cannot be filled by Americans,” Grassley said in a statement.
“There’s a sense of urgency here for Americans who are losing their jobs to lesser skilled workers who are coming in at lower wages on a visa program that has gotten away from its original intent.”
