Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is introducing legislation that would end colleges and universities’ unlimited pipeline of foreign H-1B visa workers whom they can import instead of hiring qualified Americans.
The H-1B visa program allows American companies to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers every year, primarily from India, to take white-collar American jobs. Such companies seeking new H-1B visa workers are subject to an annual cap of 65,000, but colleges and universities are exempt from this cap.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, there is widespread abuse and fraud within the H-1B visa program — companies regularly lay off Americans after forcing them to train their foreign visa worker replacements.
On Thursday, Cotton introduced the Colleges for the American People (CAP) Act, which is being sponsored in the House by Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) . The CAP Act would require colleges and universities to compete for foreign H-1B visa workers under the program’s 65,000 annual cap.
“College and universities shouldn’t get special treatment to bring in more woke administrators and professors from around the world,” Cotton said in a statement. “In addition to securing our southern border, it’s also past time to fix our broken legal immigration system. Getting rid of this loophole is a good place to start.”
“Instead of importing foreign labor, American universities need to invest in developing their own students for roles in leadership and teaching,” Tiffany said of the bill. “The CAP Act makes sure American graduates get those opportunities.”
Most recently, Vice President JD Vance called out multinational tech corporations like Microsoft for laying off thousands of Americans while at the same time petitioning to import more foreign H-1B visa workers.
“You see some big tech companies where they’ll lay off 9,000 workers, and then they’ll apply for a bunch of overseas visas,” Vance said at a recent business conference. “And I sort of wonder; that doesn’t totally make sense to me. That displacement and that math worries me a bit.”
Indeed, as Breitbart News reported earlier this month, Microsoft announced more layoffs of Americans, with about 9,000 employees being cut in the latest round. Meanwhile, the tech company continued applying for up to 6,000 foreign H-1B visa workers to take American jobs.
There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment.
Research published in the September 2024 issue of the Journal of Business Ethics reviewed wage data comparing starting wages for foreign H-1B visa workers with those of their American counterparts. The data showed that foreign H-1B visa workers were paid 10 percent less than Americans doing the same work.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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