The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is suing the administration to block President Donald Trump’s emerging curbs on the H-1B outsourcing program.
But the lawsuit is also part of a larger lobbying campaign to import many more foreign workers, renters, and consumers for the white-collar and blue-collar jobs and homes needed by Americans. The pro-migration campaign would sideline many Americans, further cut wages, push up housing prices, and also reduce pressure on companies to divert some of their profits towards improving productivity and research.
“This year, there were over 470,000 petitions for [white-collar] visas under the H-1B program … many of them wish to stay here and contribute to our economy,” the chamber’s top lobbyist, Neil Bradley, wrote on October 16. The annual limits ensure “these skilled workers are forced to take their talents elsewhere,” he lamented, adding:
Unfortunately, the Trump Administration’s recent decision to impose a $100,000 fee on all H-1B applicants moves us in the wrong direction by making it cost prohibitive for many businesses, especially small business and start-ups, to utilize the program. This is not only bad policy, it exceeds the authority the administration has in the law, which is why we filed a legal challenge to it.
We are also calling on Congress to update other visa programs that don’t meet the needs of our current economy. Programs like H-2A designed for seasonal [manual] labor prohibit certain industries … from accessing visas due to their year-round need for a qualified workforce.
Bradley also called for an amnesty, saying, “Policymakers must find a reasonable path forward for those [illegal migrant] individuals who have been contributing to our economy and our communities in some cases for decades now.”
The chamber’s goals are included in the amnesty-and-cheap-labor “DIGNITY” bill now being pushed by pro-investor groups and Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL).
The chamber’s leadership includes many companies that use H-1Bs, including Microsoft, IBM, Comcast, and Elevance Health, as well as the Indian-owned Wipro and Cognizant white-collar staffing firms.
If enacted, the Salazar bill would reverse progress won by Trump’s zig-zag move towards a low-migration, high-productivity economy. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. government impoverished many Americans by extracting vast human resources from poor countries to inflate the U.S. economy, housing market, auto sales, and the stock market.
On October 16, the chamber filed its lawsuit against Trump’s decision to levy a $100,000 fee on a few of the H-1B white-collar workers. The lawsuit says:
If implemented, that fee would inflict significant harm on American businesses, which would be forced to either dramatically increase their labor costs [such as wages] or hire fewer highly skilled [foreign] employees.
The lawsuit includes several arguments that Trump’s agency is not allowed by Congress’s law to enforce his $100,000 charge. For example, it says:
Congress explicitly determined that notice-and-comment rulemaking—with the attendant protection for the public via arbitrary-and-capricious review—is requisite to set the appropriate fee. 8 U.S.C. § 1356(m). The President cannot disregard these requirements and change the mechanism by which fees are set, drastically reducing protections for the regulated public.
But the lawsuit is based on a false claim, says a response from the Immigration Accountability Project:
The President’s Proclamation relies on 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) which gives the President the power to restrict only the entry into the United States of aliens or classes of aliens. In other words, the Proclamation does not—and cannot—impact employers petitioning for aliens who are already inside the United States to get H-1B status.
Trump’s plan does not enforce the $100,000 charge on H-1B migrants who enter the United States on other visas, such as student visas and L-1 visas for transferring employees within a multinational company.
The chamber’s economic criticism of the plan, said the IAG, “is the fox saying we have a hen shortage.”
So far, Trump and his deputies are showcasing the huge scale of visa migration and the alternative of greater productivity. On September 19, for example, Trump signed a proclamation saying:
Some employers, using practices now widely adopted by entire sectors, have abused the H-1B statute and its regulations to artificially suppress wages, resulting in a disadvantageous labor market for American citizens, while at the same time making it more difficult to attract and retain the highest skilled subset of temporary workers, with the largest impact seen in critical science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
Breitbart News has extensively covered companies’ unpopular use of the allegedly nepotistic, fraud-ridden, criminal, discriminatory, incompetent, costly, and counterproductive H-1B program.
The huge inflow of foreign graduates into white-collar careers is also wrecking American-style professionalism, corporate innovation, citizens’ privacy, regulatory enforcement, and the federal government’s alleged national security priorities.
American tech workers are speaking up against the program — and are using their hard-earned familiarity with the visa worker system to expose the mass replacement of American graduates, the damage to innovation, and the declining U.S. technological lead over China.
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