H-1B workers built this country, says Democratic presidential candidate.
Amid mounting criticism of President Donald Trump’s new curbs on H-1B visas from tech leaders in India and the US, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has come out in all out support of skilled foreign workers.
The former Vice President has even vowed to immediately lift the curbs on H-1B and other work visas extensively used by Indian professionals if he wins the race to White House in November.
Trump “ended H1B visas [for] the rest of this year,” Biden said in a June 27 digital town hall meeting organized by NBC News focusing on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) issues.
“That will not be in my administration,” he said adding, “The people coming on these [H-1B] visas have built this country,”
Biden also promised to “make it easier for qualified green card holders to move through this backlog.”
Thousands of Indian professionals are stuck in decades long green card waiting lines due to per country caps, which is seven percent for India.
He also vowed to send an immigration reform bill to Congress on his first day in office to provide a roadmap to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants including an estimated 600,000 Indians.
“On day one, I’m going to send the legislation for an immigration reform bill to Congress to provide a roadmap to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants who contribute so much to this country, including 1.7 million AAPI people,” Biden was quoted as saying by NBC.
“My immigration policy is built around keeping families together, modernizing the immigration system by keeping families [together], unification, and diversity as pillars of our immigration system, which it used to be,” he said.
“Ending Trump’s cruel, inhumane policy at the border to rip children from their mothers’ arms,” he said. “Take immediate action to protect [younger illegals] Dreamers — including the more than 100,000 eligible Dreamers from East and South Asia.”
Rescinding the un-American Muslim ban immediately and streamlining the naturalization process were among other points of Biden’s proposed immigration reforms.
Former Guam Governor Eddie Baza Calvo, who participated in the town hall as a Trump campaign surrogate said the president’s “number one goal is to move to merit-based immigration.”
Trump put a pause on new visas for foreign workers until the end of the year in a June 22 proclamation describing them as “a risk to the US labor market following the coronavirus outbreak.”
Calvo said the order would prioritize “bringing in high-skilled workers to grow our nation.”
“It’s not about the immigrants, they’re important,” Calvo said as cited by NBC. “But his first and foremost priority is getting Americans back to work.”
Reacting to Biden’s stance on H-1B workers, Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUS, said: “He said the H-1Bs built this country? So the country didn’t exist before 1990? That is interesting.”
If Biden is elected, said Jenks as cited by far-right Breitbart News, “he would reverse the whole thing…I have no doubt the people he would put into [the Department of Homeland Security] will be more than happy to rewrite the regulation to bring in as many foreign workers as possible.”
2 Comments
Biden wants to give our country away to foreigners. Sounds like treason.
But, the executive order has a provision to change from a lottery system to a system where awarding of the H-1b visas will be based upon salary. With higher salaries getting the preference.
Why get rid of that provision? That provision will allow our Tech companies to get more H-1b visas, since they tend to pay far higher salaries than Offshore Outsourcing companies. Also, salary is a good proxy for experience, and we will get more experienced and skilled engineers into our economy and fewer trainees and freshers.
The OPT program should be extended to all students. Right now, with companies laying off people they aren’t going to hire many people. We need to encourage hiring of everyone, and giving a tax break just to people because they are not of U.S. nationality is insane. It creates incentives to hire only foreign students and U.S. citizens are left out of that all-important starter job.
Tech companies are only now starting to lay people off. It is inevitable as profits at companies are reduced. Tech, because it is development oriented, is a lagging indicator of our nation’s economic health. Companies take 6 month to a year to implement changes in development crews. Retail and restaurants, were immediately shut down.
Even people here on an H-1b visa, and are presumably skilled workers, are having trouble finding jobs. So I believe it will be very difficult to find a STEM or Tech job over the course of the next year. Oddly, I have read comments that this is because Zoom is not adequate for interviews. I find that insane when we are talking about hiring for a software engineering position. Theoretically, you don’t even have to see the person. You could use a shared computer screen and discuss any almost any software engineering topic remotely. Companies are doing this all the time. Hey, I am doing this all the time on Zoom.
If anything points to the biases people have, insane biases, it is comments that Zoom is inadequate for determining candidate. One guest, on KQED Forum, said “Body-language” is hard to determine using Zoom, this was during a segment on problem people here on an H-1b are having getting hired. How insane, how absolutely insane. Will someone please use their frontal lobes?