Sen. Bernie Sanders: ‘Elon Musk Is Wrong’ on H-1B Middle-Class Outsourcing

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) slammed the government’s H-1B outsourcing program on Thursday, saying, “It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker.”

Sanders is an old-style left-winger more focused on economic redistribution than the diversify-and-rule progressives who now dominate the Democrat Party. He wrote on January 2:

Thirty years ago, the economic elite and political establishment in both major parties told us not to worry about the loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs that would come as a result of disastrous unfettered free trade agreements like NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China (PNTR). They promised that those lost jobs would be more than offset by the many good-paying, white-collar information technology jobs that would be created in the United States.

Well, that turned out to be a Big Lie. Not only have corporations exported millions of blue-collar manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, they are now importing hundreds of thousands of low-paid guest workers from abroad to fill the white-collar technology jobs that are available.

Sanders’ list of fixes overlaps with the reforms that President Donald Trump implemented in 2020 regulations:

Further, we must also significantly raise the minimum wage for guest workers, allow them to easily switch jobs, and make sure that corporations are required to aggressively recruit American workers first before they can hire workers from overseas. The widespread corporate abuse of the H-1B program must be ended.

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Other left-wing advocates — here, here, here, here, and here — are also spotlighting the damage done to American college grads by their replacement in massive numbers throughout the white-collar economy.

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