“Just wrong”: Todd Shulte.
By Sujeet Rajan
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NEW YORK: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, a technology industry advocacy group, has lambasted Donald Trump’s plan to limit legal immigration by making it harder for US-based companies to hire foreign workers on H-1B visas, terming it “just wrong”.
Addressing Trump’s grandiose statement that “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities,” FWD.us President Todd Shulte in a blog has pointed out all the flaws in Trump’s policies on legal immigration, especially to curtail the allocation of 65,000 annual H-1B visas that go to workers settled overseas and wishing to emigrate to the US.
An additional 20,000 H-1B visas are allocated annually to students who graduate from US universities. Trump is in favor of US trying to retain foreign students who graduate from US colleges and universities.
Trump, however, has not laid out his plans on how he intends to go about it: if he is in favor of increasing the annual H-1B quota of 20,000 for students on F1 visas, or to increase the length of time of work permits for students who wish to work in US industries once they graduate, but are bounced out of the lottery system that decides on who get to work here in the US, and who has to pack his or her bags and head back home.
The Obama administration has already indicated that they want to increase the span of time for work permits for students on F1 visas, bring it at par with H-1B visa workers. At present, H-1B visa holders can technically work for six years in the US, with an extension of their visa after an initial period of three years.
“The idea we should radically restrict pathways for highly skilled immigrants to come and stay here is — again — just wrong,” writes Shulte, in a pointed reference to Trump’s plan to hike the fees for H-1B visas and also to raise the minimum salary for such workers to ensure that more US-based legal residents are employed.
Shulte added: “We need to fix our nation’s badly broken immigration system so that more highly skilled immigrants can create jobs here in the United States – and that we can continue to be a magnet for the best and the brightest from all over the world; our global competitors aren’t waiting while we waste time.
“That means creating a Startup Visa to help entrepreneurs create the next generation of innovation here in the U.S.; it means clearing the green card backlog to allow those who qualify and want to stay here to build their lives and grow our economy, and it means increasing the numbers of H-1B visas and reforming the program so that we don’t run out of spots in the current yearly allotment for this critical program within only a few days every year. Additionally, these programs need to be modernized to ensure they are working appropriately – something that hasn’t happened because Congress has not taken action in decades.
“The U.S. now issues only 65,000 new general H-1B visas a year, plus another 20,000 for foreigners with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.
“Fields with high percentages of H-1Bs not only have unemployment rates substantially lower than the national average, but those geographic areas with more H-1Bs have lower rates of unemployment and higher economic growth,” he writes.
Numbers from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggest that Trump’s statement that US companies overlook US-born STEM students in favor of foreign workers, presumably to hire them at lower wages, does not stand to reason, and is not substantiated by fact.
The Chamber has pointed out that unemployment rates for U.S.-born professionals in the most prominent STEM occupations are remarkably low: 1.2 percent for electric engineering, 1.5 percent for mechanical engineering and 1.9 percent for computer hardware engineering.
Trump may have popular appeal at present with the core base of the Republicans as he continues his tirade on limiting legal immigration, but if such a policy is indeed implemented, it may also have adverse business effect for the US. India-based companies, for example, may pull out of projects within the US, leading to loss of jobs for local economies.
A report released by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Grant Thornton (GT), on Capitol Hill, last month, pointed out that India-based companies are responsible for creating 91,000 jobs and more than $15 billion in investments across the United States.
That report, “Indian Roots, American Soil,” also pointed out that New York, Trump’s home state, is one of the big beneficiaries of that.
The top five states in which Indian companies have generated maximum employment are: New Jersey (9.278 jobs), California (8.937 jobs), Texas (6,230 jobs), Illinois (4,779 jobs) and New York (4,134 jobs).
Also, the top five states in which Indian companies have contributed the highest foreign direct investment are: Texas ($3.84 billion), Pennsylvania ($3.56 billion), Minnesota ($1.8 billion), New York ($1.01 billion) and New Jersey ($1 billion).
The report also said that the average amount of investment received from Indian companies per state is $443 million, and 84.5% of the Indian companies plan to make more investments in the United States. The report suggested that Indian companied were upbeat on their plans for investment in the US: 90% of the companies plan to hire more employees locally in the next five years.
Read that full report here: Indian companies invested $15 billion, created 91,000 jobs in United States
Trump needs to lay out plans, as Shulte has pointed out, to fix the broken legal immigration system. He needs to address the issue of how to to increase the number of Green Cards for legal immigrants who are waiting in line for it, but are getting disillusioned by the fact that the wait could last for two decades or more.
The last thing that such immigrants want to hear is Trump bouncing around the idea from city hall to city hall that Green Cards are going to be stymied in the future.
5 Comments
This article conveniently omits that most (more than half) of all H-1b visas are taken up by Offshore Outsourcing companies.
Offshore Outsourcing companies remove jobs, indeed whole departments, from the United States.
Offshore Outsourcing companies have internal programs to discriminate against any U.S. citizen that applies. They deliberately discriminate against U.S. citizens for jobs on U.S. soil, but we still give them most of the H-1b visas, how insane is that?
It is exactly the kind of insanity that is bought and paid for by billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg. Who wine, dine and bribe because they don’t want to deal with actual free market forces.
Why can’t we just kick the Offshore Outsourcing companies out of the H-1b system, they don’t need a Federal hand-out to enable them to force better qualified, more experienced U.S. citizens, to train their H-1b replacement. AS A PRELUDE TO MOVING ENTIRE DEPARTMENTS OFFSHORE.
If Offshore Outsourcing companies were barred from the H-1b U.S. Federal Government program, we would never have seen a year since inception where we ran out of H-1b visas.
Companies that refuse to hire Americans and that in fact destroy jobs should be permanently kicked out of the H-1b system. Such companies can use the American free labor market, you know Capitalism, they don’t need to be on the Federal dole.
zuck facebook.
The OPT program locks out U.S. students from entry level jobs. That is not right. OPT should only allow 20 hours per week max.
Anyone who is in favor of H1-B is an enemy of the United States.
Mark Zuckerberg bought all the properties surrounding his home so that he could control the neighborhood. I think it’s safe to say there won’t be any illegal aliens moving in.
Most Americans do not have that luxury. We can’t choose our neighbors.
We can, however, as a country, control our borders. We can also rid ourselves of the illegal aliens already here. Once we get serious and make it impossible for them to work here, many will self deport.
I have no more concern for the welfare of illegal aliens than they had for our laws when they came here, nor should you.
As far as the H-1b goes, Why not raise the minimum wage of H-1Bs to the 50th percentile of their classification? According to Zuckerberg and the other elites, these third worlders are better than their American counterpart. Shouldn’t they then pay a premium for their services? That’s really the core of Trump’s proposal.
The fact is that the real reason H-1Bs are so popular is because they are cheap. Most aren’t even that good, but they will work 60 hour weeks for the equivalent of 30 hours pay for an American. They do so because the company that brought them here can send them back, and they don’t want to go back. It is indentured servitude on a massive scale.
This is America. It was built by Americans. It belongs to Americans, and we should only allow others in if they are truly and asset to our society, not because they satisfy some cause of the elites.
It’s time to Make America Great Again, and the first order of business is to take out the garbage!