President Donald Trump’s top civil rights deputy defended the H-1B outsourcing program Saturday night as many Americans angrily slammed a Republican representative’s call for the importation of more foreign doctors.
“My father was a foreign medical graduate … Perhaps we can address the problems with American medical education and the artificial supply limitations without scapegoating the foreign-born doctors who provide a critically necessary service throughout the country,” wrote Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. She added:
Lying about and generalizing concerning the quality of their care (all board certified doctors have to pass the same tests every 10 years) or falsely claiming that H1-Bs are taking the medical school places of Americans, doesn’t advance any intelligent discussion about the issues.
Dillon’s defense of the program — and her breezy dismissal of critics — prompted a second wave of online criticism from Americans who are very familiar with the damaging impact of H-1B migrants and related corporate fraud on American graduates.
“Harmeet, your father’s and uncle’s contributions aren’t in question, they came here under an entirely different immigration and licensing system, long before the H-1B even existed,” noted Nick Plumb, a former tech executive at Amazon and Walmart. He added:
The H-1B visa was created in 1990; your family’s path was likely through older physician exchange or residency visa categories … Today, U.S. medical schools graduate more doctors than there are residency slots. Those slots are capped by law, and every one filled by an H-1B or J-1 physician is one fewer available to a qualified U.S. graduate. Hospitals choose visa-dependent doctors because they’re cheaper and less likely to leave for better offers.
So yes, some foreign-born, board-certified doctors can and do provide excellent care. But that doesn’t erase the displacement happening now, nor does it justify a residency bottleneck that leaves Americans unmatched while we import labor. The honest debate is whether we should fix the pipeline for our own graduates first, not whether your father was a good doctor.
If we want a real path forward, the H-1B program needs a complete overhaul. Right now, it’s a loosely monitored, easily abused catch-all, covering everything from physicians to yoga instructors. That’s how its defenders get away with emotional arguments while sidestepping the facts.
There is vast government-confirmed local and systemic fraud throughout the visa worker programs, for decades, both by U.S. companies and by foreign employees. Much of the fraud is hidden within Indian societies, partly because India’s government relies heavily on visa workers to grow its economy.
The growing use of imported white-collar workers pushes many American STEM, business, and healthcare graduates out of the middle class and far from entrepreneurship and management careers. The replacement inflow also helps the corporate directors shift more investment and middle-class jobs to India, regardless of the damage to critical national strengths, including professionalism, innovation, privacy, and national security.
“In the medical sector, officials have purposely decided not to invest in more doctors,” said Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Techworkers, and an advocate for U.S. medical graduates.
The issue blew up on Friday when Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) reversed his July opposition to the use of migrant doctors:
“H1-B Visas are critical for helping alleviate the severe physician shortage this nation faces,” Doctor Murphy tweeted August 8. “We cannot train enough American Doctors fast enough. We can’t let lack of knowledge of the importance of this program affect patient care.”
Three weeks prior, he had tweeted:
Extremely disturbing trend is allowing physicians trained overseas to practice in the US wo American training. Medical Education overseas is NOT of the same quality as that in the US. Patients will suffer.
The tweet was swamped by angry criticisms and accumulated 5.4 million views.
In response, Murphy defended his pro-H-1B tweet, prompting more pushback from Americans who have worked as managers and professionals within companies that use the H-1B program to hire no-rights workers from India and China.
But Murphy admitted that the U.S. government turns to H-1Bs because it has not trained enough Americans:
But H-1B workers are hired by U.S. executives for multiple reasons.
The H-1B workers accept lower wages than Americans because they prefer to work in the United States and because they hope that their employers will nominate them for the government-granted prize of citizenship.
They are also preferred because they have little legal or cultural authority to argue against C-Suite managers or company policies, such as hospital rules against expensive treatments. “American doctors have more control,” said Jay Palmer, an expert on the day-to-day operation of the visa programs. U.S. companies “are controlling them, they’re telling them what to do … they are robots of corporate America.”
In many large hospital chains, the professional power of American doctors has been destroyed by the arrival of dispassionate doctors from non-Christian societies, he added. “Immigration has destroyed [workplace] professionalism, destroyed [workplace] ethics” because the companies control their immigration status, he said.
A central issue for Congress is whether or not to allow hospital chains to import doctors and nurses from foreign countries, such as India and China, or to produce more U.S. doctors. The production of doctors is expensive, partly because the federal government funds a limited number of hospital “residencies” where newly qualified American doctors must begin training for their careers with patients.
Trump’s DOJ deputies have promised to sharpen their focus on white-collar migration crimes.
So far, Congress has chosen not to fund additional residencies — or even to train all the people who wish to become nurses.
Last week, Trump said the nation needs more automation to grow the economy amid less migration. “We’re going to need robots… to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” he told Breitbart News, adding:
We don’t enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient… we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically — it’s going to be robotically… It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself… we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
“This is complicated,” said Lynn.
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