Investors Push H-1B ‘Wage Floor’ Fix for White-Collar Outsourcing
Neil Munro, Breitbart, December 30, 2024
Pro-migration groups have begun pushing a “wage floor” fix to the public anger over their discovery that the H-1B visa program uses low-wage Indians to sideline millions of ordinary American college grads.
The H-1B fix “is just a fake,” outsourcing expert Ronil Hira told Breitbart News. The advocates “believe that people are suckers … it is a bad-faith proposition,” he added.
The proposal would raise the wage floor for a subset of H-1Bs from $60,000 to $120,000, but otherwise leave the uncapped outsourcing program unchanged.
In contrast, President-elect Donald Trump’s 2020 reform regulations “were good ideas,” said Hira, who is a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC:
They would have done a lot … so that you were bringing in much higher skilled [H-1B] people, and not just ordinary workers. That doesn’t mean it would have fixed it completely, but it would have been an improvement on the disaster that we have now.
Trump’s 2020 fixes allocated visas to the highest-paying employers, likely ending the use of migrants to take jobs from young, lower-wage American graduates. The reforms were strongly opposed by business groups and were quickly killed by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
The “wage floor” proposal was floated on December 29 after a week of furious online debate about Silicon Valley’s use of l0wer-skill Indian college graduates to covertly replace myriad American professionals in a wide variety of mainstream jobs.
Those multiple programs annually import more than 500,000 cheap foreign white-collar workers into jobs that would otherwise have helped young Americans build their skills, wealth, families, and potential for industry-shifting innovation. The Christmas debate has released a torrent of testimonials about the personal damage to Americans, as well as corporate excuse-making, law-breaking, discrimination, and deception.
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The wage-floor proposal was floated on December 29 by the Institute for Progress, which is funded by pro-migration advocates. The plan was quickly backed by investors, investor lobbies, and Elon Musk, who has supported and slammed a chaotic variety of proposals since the debate exploded over Christmas.
“Finding a change that can pass through reconciliation is key — that way, you only need 50 votes in the Senate,” said Alec Stapp, who posted the proposal. The reconciliation plan was endorsed by Kumar Garg, a former official in President Obama’s administration.
The “wage floor” plan was endorsed by the president of FWD.us, which is a leading lobby group for West Coast investors.
“We can improve H1-B visas by raising the wage floor, but also improving 1) the renewal process … 2) improving portability so people can change employers more easily and 3) streamlining the process … to an employment-based green card,” president Todd Schulte tweeted on December 29.
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