The outrage over H-1B isn't going away

I appeared on Real America's Voice late last week to discuss

Though Elon Musk has now turned his attention to the organized gang rape coverup scandal in the United Kingdom, the outrage here in the United States over Musk’s support for the H-1B worker visa is not going away.

I appeared on American Sunrise on Real America’s Voice late last week to discuss. I’m also set to appear on the Elizabeth Farrah Show on Rumble later this week for a longer, in depth discussion on the issue.

In the meantime, I thought I would share three interesting facts related to the H-1B that I’ll be expanding upon in that interview. Some Americans might understand why the H-1B visa hurts American workers. But my hope is that facts like these will only help further inform Americans about why the H-1B is nothing but a cheap labor program for major corporations.

The H-1B was created after U.S. science organizations created the appearance of a labor shortage to undermine American scientists’ economic bargaining power

As I have pointed out repeatedly on this issue, there is no skilled labor shortage in the United States. In order to believe that talking point, which is often pushed by H-1B proponents, then you would have to believe that America, its education system, and our people are just less sophisticated, less educated, and less intelligent than the rest of the world. That point is obviously untrue, and it has been for decades. As famed mathematician and venture capitalist Eric Weinstein has noted, this lie was pushed for the benefit of employers.

Eight years ago, Weinstein published a piece in Institute for New Economic Thinking where he examined how government, universities, and the science industry colluded to create this false idea of labor shortages to undercut American scientists and PhDs.

“Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies,” Weinstein wrote. Thus, Weinstein explained, “it became increasingly clear that the groups purporting to speak for US scientists in Washington DC (e.g. NSF, NAS, AAU, GUIRR) actually viewed themselves as advocates for employers in a labor dispute with working scientists and were focused on undermining scientists’ economic bargaining power through labor market intervention and manipulation.”

How did they do this? In part, with an undated, anonymous study published by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It was called “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” Weinstein discovered the study after researching a Congressional investigation into the NSF over concerns that politics played a role in the its labor shortage claims.

“As the study makes clear, the problem being solved was not a problem of talent but one of price: scientific employers had become alarmed that they would have to pay competitive market wages to US Ph.D.s with other options,” Weinstein wrote of the study. “The study’s aim was not to locate talent but to weaken its ability to bargain with employers by using foreign labor to undermine the ability to negotiate for new Ph.D.s”

Weinstein argued this study, along with others, helped push Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1990, which created the H-1B. “Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor,” he said. “They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers.”

Weinstein authored an entire study about this, which is eye-opening. You can read that, here.

Tech wages have not kept up with the growth of tech jobs

One way to factcheck pro-H-1B narratives about the shortage of tech labor is to compare the growth of tech wage and the growth of tech jobs. H-1B proponents argue there is a very high demand for tech jobs and not enough workers to fill those jobs. If that were true, in a free market economy, wages for tech jobs would increase along with that demand. But they haven’t. That’s because, as many of us who have criticized the H-1B have pointed out, there is actually an overabundance of cheaper tech labor. Here’s one example.

According to data compiled by Rutgers University Professor Hal Salzman, employment in information technology jobs surged by nearly 20% over a five year period from 2014-2019. But wages for those jobs, despite surging demand, only rose 3 percent. Between H-1B visa workers and another guest worker program called Optional Practical Training, foreign workers took two-thirds of all IT job openings.

Companies that bring the most H-1B workers are actually foreign

When most Americans think of companies that are bringing in H-1B workers, they think of Silicon Valley tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google etc. And they’re not wrong to think that per se; these companies do hire H-1B workers.

However, most Americans would be surprised to know that it’s not Silicon Valley tech companies that are bringing in the most H-1B workers. It’s India-based IT services firms that basically outsource their services to American corporations. The contracted workers are the H-1B recipients.

According to Howard University Professor Ronil Hira, almost a third of all H-1B visas went to these foreign outsourcers. And according to the Economic Policy Institute, 17 of the top 30 H-1B employers were outsourcing firms.

In layman’s terms, foreign companies are exploiting and profiting from our immigration system by applying for foreign work visas and then subcontracting out those foreign workers to American companies. These workers are paid lower salaries than full-time American workers would command.

No company should be allowed to build a business model on abusing America’s immigration system and punishing American workers. These companies are abusing our laws, our goodwill, and our economy to make a profit at the expense of our workers. At a very minimum, this loophole should be ended immediately.