H-1B visas are used by large corporations to bring into the United States cheap foreign workers who typically have college degrees. Corporations like this because they can control these foreign workers, and keep wages low for Americans by hiring foreigners. H-1B visas are a big reason why real wages in our country have not increased for the average worker.
Each year, companies are allowed to import 65,000 new hires from foreign countries, plus another 20,000 who have received a degree from an American university. The result over the past decade has been to staff corporations with hundreds of thousands of foreigners in good jobs that should have gone to Americans. Many middle-aged Americans with families to support, particularly in hi-tech fields such as computers, are unable to find a good job today because of this terrible program. Now things are getting even worse. Some companies are misusing this program in order to lay off American workers and send their jobs overseas, after the foreigners are trained here in how to do the work. This results in an offshoring of thousands of jobs, which are then permanently lost to our country.
Despite this, misguided candidates for president support expanding H-1Bs, which would take even more jobs away from Americans. Marco Rubio, for example, introduced a bill earlier this year in the U.S. Senate that would triple the number of new H-1B visas allowed annually. Any economist will confirm that as unemployment decreases in our country, real wages should be increasing. But this is not happening and the H-1B visa program to bring cheap foreign labor into our country is the reason why. It is time to end H-1B visas, not expand them.
