Vice President JD Vance called out tech companies firing thousands of American workers and replacing them with more foreign-born employees on H-1B visas.
Many believe that tech companies abuse H-1B visas to import cheap labor, predominantly Indian, leaving many skilled Americans who incurred thousands of dollars in student debt unemployed and unemployable.
Vance appeared on “The All-In” podcast at the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington, D.C. He called out tech companies that claim they need visas to bring in international talent, while snobbing local experts.
The Vice President stated that he disliked seeing American companies firing thousands of American workers, then claiming there is a labor shortage.
“But I don’t want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then to go and say, we can’t find workers here in America.”
“That’s a bullsh*t story,” he said.
In July, Microsoft was criticized for reportedly applying 9,000 H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers, after laying off thousands of Americans.
“The actual data we have never supports the idea that we are terribly short of workers in the way that the business community says,” Steven Camarota, research director at Center for Immigration Studies, told Newsweek.
Vance noted that while some Silicon Valley tech jaggernaunts claim they need more overseas workers to address the deficit, the employment rate of American STEM graduates has steadily declined.
“And yet at the same time, the college-educated employment rate for STEM graduates in this country seems to be declining,” Vance noted.
He questioned how the companies intend to address the alleged labor shortages when they deliberately overlook skilled Americans.
“If you’re not hiring American workers coming out of colleges for these jobs, then how can you say that you have a massive shortage in these jobs?” Vance asked.
The Vice President also stated that importing foreign workers at the expense of Americans was worrying and counterintuitive. “That doesn’t totally make sense to me. That displacement and that math worries me a bit.” However, he said that the best international talent was welcome to build businesses and prosper in the United States. “And what the president has said, he said very clearly, we want the very best and the brightest to make America their home. We want them to build great companies and so forth.”
Nevertheless, the Vice President said he had not discussed the alleged replacement of American workers with foreign-born employees with the Redmond, Washington-based tech colossus. “So, I have not yet had that conversation with Microsoft. In my defense, I just found out.”
Meanwhile, creating jobs for American workers was a key priority in Trump’s America First agenda that aimed to bring back businesses and manufacturing to the United States.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has reversed the Biden era trend, where all new jobs went to foreign-born workers while more Americans exited the labor market.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, then-Republican candidate Donald Trump had proposed overhauling the job immigration system, including raising wages for H-1B workers to make Americans competitive.
According to the “Understanding the Economic Impact of the H-1B Program on the United States” study, H-1B visas reduced the salaries of computer scientists by 6.1% to 10%.
Not “the best and the brightest”. “The best and the cheapest”.
My daughter faced that exact thing while working for Citi bank and getting laid off. The department she worked in was 80-90 percent H1Bs and she felt like she was working in a foreign country.
Vance is right of course, but the question is what will Trump and congress do about it, because it seems like the Republicans all want to keep flooding the country with H1B workers. The program is supposed to be for highly specialized tech skills that can’t be found in the country, but in practice it means pretty much any IT job.
Gates and his democRat tools should repeal the Thirteenth Amendment…