The Biden administration is eliminating an office that was recently created to protect many millions of American graduates — including Biden’s young voters — from government-fueled corporate discrimination in hiring, pay, and workplace rights.
The worker-rights office was announced January 13 by President Donald Trump’s deputies and canceled January 26 by Biden’s deputies.
The short-lived office was intended to document and expose the corporate discrimination against Americans that is fueled by the huge Occupational Practical Training (OPT) program.
In 2019, the OPT program provided work permits to 400,000 foreign graduates so they can take the jobs and opportunities needed by graduates — including Biden’s voters — under rules that make foreign workers much cheaper to hire and easier to manage than American graduates are. OPT workers are foreign, temporary, contract workers — not immigrants.
The Biden cancellation is bad news for the many college students and graduates who pulled the lever for Biden in November 2020, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which fights the replacement of American graduates. “Biden was selected by the corporatocracy [which sees] no role for American graduates,” he said. American graduates “are not needed” by employers who can import many compliant, cheap, and disposable foreign workers, he said.
Correspondingly, the cancellation was celebrated by the immigration lawyers who help Fortune 500 CEOs import foreigners to take the jobs needed by young Americans, including many debt-burdened black and Latino graduates.
On the same day, the administration canceled another graduate protection plan leftover from the Trump administration.
The plan — which was blocked by corporate insiders in Trump’s White House — was to halt the award of work permits to the spouses of the almost one million H-1B foreign contract workers who have jobs in the United States. This H4EAD program was created by President Barack Obama — not by Congress — and it added another 250,000 foreign contract workers who compete for jobs against American graduates.
The cancellation was celebrated by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. He is a Twitter spokesman for the investor-backed American Immigration Council, which is a spinoff of the American Immigration Lawyers Association:
Biden’s officials have also canceled a recent move by the Department of Labor to limit the outsourcing of U.S. jobs via the huge H-1B program. They are also expected to undermine other Trump regulations that help protect American graduates from the H-1B program.
The administration’s actions match the demands of its corporate donors and cheerleaders, such as the major universities that help deliver the OPT work permit to fee-paying foreign graduates.
Biden’s team is also backed by many corporate employers of OPT and H-1B workers, including Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Apple, Amazon, Deloitte, Microsoft, and their trade groups. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group praised the preservation of the H4EAD program, which has helped keep married H-1B contract workers from leaving the United States:
We commend the Biden-Harris Administration for taking immediate action to turn the page from the Trump-Pence Administration’s disastrous immigration policies, and to do right by more than 100,000 hardworking immigrants who are contributing to the United States every single day in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
The FWD.us group also praised the Biden team for dropping a draft “unlawful presence” rule that would require the foreign student to go home after they get credentials from U.S. colleges. Without the rule, many foreign graduates overstay their visas and work as white-collar illegal aliens in the jobs needed by American graduates.
The Trump administration announced the OPT office on January 13.
The agency “is currently unable to evaluate the impact OPT has had on U.S. workers and foreign students who have obtained work authorization through the programs,” said the January 13 message from the Student and Exchange Visitor Program within the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
“To remedy this, SEVP is announcing the development of a new unit — the OPT Employment Compliance Unit — that will be dedicated full-time to compliance matters involving wage, hours, and compensation … the first report will be published on ICE.gov by July 31, 2021,” said the statement. It continued:
For example, if the unit were to detect evidence that an employer is using OPT in a discriminatory manner (e.g., as a means to hire only foreign nationals, or only individuals of certain nationalities to the exclusion of others), or in a manner that negatively impacts wages, this unit may notify DOL and the U.S. Department of Justice of such evidence, where HSI is unable to address such matters, so that the evidence can be investigated further.
…
The loss of employment many U.S. workers have faced since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as employers lay off significant portions of their workforce (while still, in some cases, seeking to hire more foreign workers), makes this work particularly timely.
On January 26, Biden’s deputies announced they would cancel the transparency program:
After conducting an additional review of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s optional practical training (OPT) compliance effort, the program determined that it is already performing much of the work outlined in the Broadcast Message. As such, the creation of the new unit is not necessary at this time.
Before Trump’s arrival, the federal government released minimal information about the huge OPT program. In 2018, Trump’s deputies released some limited information, allowing Breitbart News and the FBI to expose widespread fraud.
But the federal government provides little information about the jobs and wages lost to the OPT program. The federal website provides some basic data about annual numbers, the major OPT employers, that the universities which profit from the OPT program. But the agency provides little data about the operation of the program, the wages paid to OPT, workers, the many small companies that use OPTs to fill Fortune 500 outsourcing contracts, or about reported hiring discrimination against Americans.
However, many foreign and American workers tell Breitbart News that the OPT program — and its sister program, the Curricular Practical Training (CPT) program — provides the workforce for the lowest level of the Fortune 500’s labor pyramid.
The OPT and CPT workers — plus many white-collar illegal aliens and overstays — work long hours at meager pay because they hope to get promoted into full-time jobs and then into the H-1B program. They want to get into the H-1B program because it allows them to eventually get green cards.
The one million-plus foreign workers in this Green Card Workforce displace many American graduates from vital gateway jobs in science, software, accountancy, or health care. The flood of labor in this hidden pyramid also cuts salaries for college graduates — and boosts stock prices for investors and older Americans — including the parents and teachers of the American graduates.
For example, a group of economists estimated in January that Trump’s recent curbs on corporate use of H-1B contract workers nicked the stock market value of Fortune 500 companies “by about 0.45% — representing a total loss of around $100 billion.”
Other evidence suggests that the Fortune 500’s reliance on many foreign contract workers is sidelining qualified Americans, damaging corporate innovation, helping China, and also diverting investment, jobs, and wealth from central states to the coastal states.
But this hidden labor market is rarely covered in corporate media, such a Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, or in the pro-migration New York Times.
However, Lynn and his member of American professionals are trying to raise awareness of how the OPT program pushes young Americans out of good careers.
“The OPT work permit masquerades workers as ‘students,’ so employers are under no obligation to pay them fair market wages,” Lynn noted, adding:
The Biden Administration is under the false delusion that these international students are the best and brightest in the world, so deserve to stay here permanently. Research by the [left-wing] Economic Policy Institute shows that the majority of these students are not the best and brightest, and are entering low-ranked US universities with low entrance requirements [to get work permit]. Universities profit because international students pay full freight tuition, while American students are graduating with immense student loan debt and having to now compete with OPT work-permit holders.
The ICE data shows that the OPT program delivers many foreign workers into Fortune 500 jobs, where managers have a lot of freedom to hire within their own ethnic networks. For example, since 2003, Amazon has hired 12,173 people via the program, while Deloitte has hired 5,799 foreign graduates, and Apple has hired 2,667 people.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, nonracist, class-based, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
Migration allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, and impose tight control pay cuts on American professionals.
Migration also helps corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.
President Joe Biden, as soon as Monday, will restart the unpopular but business-backed inflow of Central American consumers and replacement labor that President Donald Trump had shut down, according to Reuters.
The extra workers and consumers will help CEOs and investors, even as millions of Americans have been pushed into the unemployment line and poverty by the coronavirus crash and by prior migration.
Biden is expected to end the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) agreement with Mexico, to tear up asylum deals with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and even open a new route for migrants to fly from U.S. embassies into homes through the United States, according to the article. Trump’s MPP program deterred unsafe migration by denying U.S. jobs to migrants before their asylum claims were approved by courts.
Biden will also sign an order directing officials to prepare for a future inflow of 125,000 refugees imported from Africa, Asia, and other regions, according to Reuters. Trump cut the refugee inflow down to 15,000, which pressured companies to raise wages for Americans and to invest in wealth-producing, labor-saving machinery.
The executive orders will also begin the process of killing Trump’s “Public Charge” regulation which denies entry to legal migrants who are too poor to support themselves without aid from Americans. Poor migrants are valuable to Wall Street, which scoops up the profits from additional government-funded aid and welfare, such as food stamps and Medicare.
Biden has already killed several of Trump’s protections for many American graduates and employees.
The barrage of presidential orders may also reopen the flow of white-collar contract-workers into the job needed by U.S. college graduates, according to Reuters, whose reporters listened to a recording of a January 23 speech by Esther Olavarria, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council:
Olavarria said on Saturday that Biden would rescind several Trump proclamations. She appeared to reference one that barred certain visa applicants who could not prove they had health coverage and two others that banned the issuance of many work and immigrant visas, which Trump said would protect American jobs during the coronavirus pandemic.
Olavarria’s comments suggest that Biden may next allow U.S. companies and universities to restart the import of H-1B, J-1, and L-1 contract workers for jobs needed by American graduates.
In 2020, Trump temporarily blocked the inflow of the contract workers in a partial effort to win 2020 votes from college graduates. However, Trump was far more successful in his campaign to block the movement of blue-collar labor from Central America.
The median income for families rose five percent from 2016 to 2019, according to a September 2020 government report titled, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019.” The median people in the bottom quarter of personal wealth gained 11 percent in income, while people in the top quarter gained six percent, the reserve reported.
But U.S. college graduates did poorly from 2016 to 2019 as companies imported more workers via the H-1B and OPT programs for foreign contract-workers. The median or midpoint income of college graduates fell two percent, according to the report, even as the family median income level of high school graduates rose six percent.
Biden is likely to obscure his giveaway to Wall Street by also announcing a plan to reconnect roughly 600 children and youths who were separated from their parents when the parents were charged in court with illegal entry.
The “separated kids” theme plays well with progressives, including progressive reporters who cover immigration issues. Reporters rarely mention the reality that many of the kids are separated because the foreign parents decided their children and teenagers would be better off living with relatives in the United States than returning home to Central America.
First lady Jill Biden will aid with the “separated kids” distraction.
“As the first lady remarked on a ‘Charla’ with young Latinos earlier this week, her chief of staff, Ambassador Julissa Reynoso, will monitor the federal reunification effort given her background as a lawyer,” Biden spokesman Michael LaRosa told CNN.
“It’s heartbreaking. It’s really heartbreaking,” Biden gushed about migrants’ camp, according to Border Report:
Across the river is the flag of the United States. The flag of the United States offers people hope. They’re bringing their families and their loved ones here for hope of a better future and a better life for themselves.
However, millions of Americans are facing unemployment, poverty, and humiliation while the president’s wife displays her progressive support for foreign economic migrants. For example, KQED.org reported January 27:
Jean Kendrick stood in the rain outside the duplex she had shared with her disabled son as movers wheeled boxes filled with their belongings onto a truck headed for storage.
“It was like a nightmare,” Kendrick said. “I wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone.”
It was the second week of December. Kendrick, 70, and her 42-year-old son, Stanley Jackson III, were being evicted from their home in Richmond, even as a deadly surge in coronavirus cases was sweeping through the Bay Area and the country. “In the middle of a pandemic, on a rainy Sunday morning, we wind up having to move,” Kendrick said.
…
Kendrick and her son are among at least 527 individuals and families in the Bay Area who were evicted between the start of the statewide coronavirus lockdown, on March 19, and the end of December. That’s according to data from sheriffs’ offices in the Bay Area’s nine counties, collected by KQED and CalMatters through public records requests.
Biden’s officials, however, are putting migrants ahead of Americans. CBS News reported:
The upcoming order, Olavarria said, “would rescind the Trump proclamations that precluded the admission of immigrants and non-immigrants either deemed to be a financial burden on our health care system or deemed to present a risk to U.S. labor markets.”
“These were policies that ignored the decades, and centuries actually, of contributions that immigrants have made to our economy, to our society, to our culture,” Olavarria said during the United States Conference of Mayors’ 89th winter meeting. “So we would rescind those policies and return to a country that welcomes immigrants and acknowledges their contributions.”
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, solidarity-themed, and priority-driven opposition to labor migration coexists with favorable feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory.
The opposition is rational: Migration allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, and impose tight control pay cuts on American professionals.
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