It's Time to Hire American
President Trump recently suspended the entry of some guest workers into the United States. And he ordered federal officials to stop issuing green cards for the rest of the year, with limited exceptions.
These are bold first steps towards halting the massive, harmful influx of foreign labor into the United States. American workers — especially the nearly 50 million who've lost jobs during the pandemic — should be thankful. President Trump made this decision knowing it would displease big business and would garner further attacks in the press, but he stood firm.
But there's still far more progress to be made.
Corporate executives use cheap foreign labor to boost shareholders' short-term gains — with little regard for the impact on America as a whole. The laid-off Americans, including minorities and women, are forced to take jobs beneath their education and training, or worse, file for unemployment.
Lobbyists will try to persuade that using foreign workers boosts the economy and keeps America competitive. But in reality, as Harvard economist George Borjas calculated in 2016, importing cheaper foreign workers transfers $500 billion a year from American workers to corporate bottom lines.
Decades of historically high immigration have displaced millions of American workers. Roughly 1.1 million new lifetime work permits issued in 2019 alone. Hundreds of thousands more came on temporary guest-worker visas.
In 1990, Congress created the H-1B program, a guest worker program supposedly designed to supplement America’s workforce by bringing the rare person of talent from overseas to the burgeoning tech industry in the United States. Instead, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals have seen the pervasive use of foreign labor destroy countless careers and lives.
Proponents of the program often misleadingly point to the annual cap of 85,000 on new H-1B visas as evidence that the program has a limited effect on the labor market.
But because these visas last for multiple years and are renewable — and there is an unlimited number available to non-profit institutions (including universities) — the number of H-1B workers is actually much higher. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service estimates that more than 580,000 H-1B holders currently work in the United States.
The vast majority of H-1B workers don't have any special skills — they're just willing to work for lower pay. Forty-one percent of approved H-1B applications are for "Level 1" workers — which the Department of Labor defines as "beginning level employees who have only a basic understanding of the occupation." And another 37 percent are for Level 2 workers, who generally have skills equivalent to a recent bachelor's degree holder with only two years of work experience.
The intentional fallacy that H-1B holders are the world's best and brightest — and that Americans can't do the jobs — simply isn't factual, as the Americans who have suffered the indignity of training their foreign replacements have reported. America put the first man on the moon. Are we really to believe Americans are so incompetent now that we can't run a database?
Most citizens don't think so. Fifty-four percent of likely voters, including 65 percent of Blacks, believe that Americans would fill jobs currently occupied by foreign workers, including in tech fields, as long as the pay and working conditions were fair, according to a new Rasmussen poll. Just 33 percent of likely voters disagree.
If President Trump's suspension of most guest-worker programs remains in effect for its duration, half a million American workers or more will take jobs formerly reserved for foreign workers each year. That will cause American employment in STEM fields to boom.
However, there's more work to be done. The president's executive order didn't end the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program for foreigners entering the United States on F-1 student visas. OPT allows foreigners to parlay their student visas into one year of employment — and as long as three years or more for STEM students. Employers particularly love hiring these cheap workers because both parties are exempt from Social Security and Medicare taxes.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service approved over 223,000 applications from employers for all types of OPT participation in 2019. Nearly a quarter of a million American graduates could have filled those positions.
Today's college graduates face the worst jobs market in generations. It makes no sense to pit them against hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates.
Americans of all backgrounds are still pursuing STEM degrees, but fewer than 50 percent of them are landing jobs in their fields of study. This is its own pandemic, and the vaccine is available: Expand the ban on immigration to force businesses to hire Americans.
Marie Larson is co-founder of the American Workers Coalition.
