In another example of why many Americans believe that elites are not concerned with the average citizen, The White House, supported by academia and big business, is loosening restrictions on noncitizens holding Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) jobs.
The controversy concerns H-1B visas, described by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as being used “to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require the theoretical or practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge, including but not limited to: scientists, engineers, or computer programmers.”
In a press release strategically timed during the holidays to avoid much attention, DHS said that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Agencies (USCIS) has proposed a rule “that would modernize and improve certain aspects of employment-based nonimmigrant and immigrant visa programs. USCIS is also proposing regulatory amendments to better enable U.S. employers to hire and retain certain foreign workers who are beneficiaries of approved employment-based immigrant visa petitions and are waiting to become lawful permanent residents (LPRs).”
According to The Hill, “The agency said the rules are primarily aimed at helping high-skilled foreign workers who have been approved for a permanent work visa but are still waiting for their green card because of the backlog.’ Simply put, many workers in the immigrant visa process are not free to consider all available employment and career development opportunities,’ DHS said in the proposed rules.”
The Hill reports that DHS believes the change is necessary to “allow certain temporary workers who are on track to become permanent residents to stay beyond the 6-year limit of the H-1B program. The changes would also allow those temporary visa holders and certain other foreign workers to more easily change jobs without fear of losing their spot in line for a green card. The DHS says the current backlog can delay permanent residency for high-skilled workers from a few months to as much as a decade. Because of country-based caps, the delays have hit foreigners from China and India the hardest, where demand is high.”
The move is supported by powerful interests. Zerohedge reports that “High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.
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“Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce.”
The Columbia Journalism Review reports that “President Obama supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers…Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.”
Reaction has been harsh. Breitbart contends that “ Industry executives and university advocates have successfully duped nearly every reporter, editor and anchor nationwide about the scale and purpose of the H-1B professional outsourcing program. The journalists–and Americans—have been kept in the dark while universities and many allied name-brand companies have quietly imported an extra workforce of at least 100,000 lower-wage foreign professionals in place of higher-wage American graduates, above the supposed annual cap of 85,000 new H-1Bs.Less than one-sixth of these extra 100,000 outsourced hires are the so-called ‘high-tech’ computer experts that dominate media coverage of the contentious H-1B private-sector outsourcing debate. These white-collar guest-workers are not immigrants — they are foreign professionals hired at low wages for six years to take outsourced, white-collar jobs in the United States. Many hope to stay in the United States, but most guest-workers return home after six years.”
An analysis from Zerohedge reveals that “since December 2007, according to the Household Survey, only 790,000 native born American jobs have been added. Contrast that with the 2.1 million foreign-born Americans who have found a job over the same time period.”
Writing for the Center for Immigration Studies, Steven Camarota asks “Does it make sense to continue to admit a million new permanent immigrants each year, along with several hundred thousand guest workers, given the enormous pool of people not working or trying to find full-time work?”