Biden Backs Off Wage Protections for Americans Facing H-1B Outsourcing
President Joe Biden, who recently met with India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is seemingly delaying wage protections for American white-collar workers at risk of being laid off and forced to train their foreign replacements, primarily from India, through the H-1B visa program.
In January 2021, just before leaving office, then-President Trump issued an updated Department of Labor rule to protect the jobs and wages of American professionals and graduates from low-paid foreign H-1B visa workers imported by United States companies to replace them.
“The U.S. Department of Labor is taking these steps to strengthen wage protections, address abuses in visa programs, and protect American workers from being undercut by cheaper foreign labor,” former Labor Department Secretary Eugene Scalia said at the time.
The rule set wage floors so that U.S. companies importing foreign H-1B visa workers would have to do so by paying them at prevailing wage rates. The goal was to stop outsourcing schemes by such companies designed solely to cut labor costs at the expense of Americans.
A report from SHRM.org notes that Biden’s Labor Department, in recent weeks, has moved the wage rule “to its long-term agenda, historically the first step to a proposal being shelved permanently.”
“The gutting of the wage reform is just part of this administration’s plan to please the Chamber of Commerce. American workers be damned,” Kevin Lynn with U.S. Tech Workers, which advocates on behalf of American white-collar professionals facing layoffs and wage cuts as a result of mass legal immigration, told Breitbart News.The move indicates that the Biden administration is delaying the rule in a win for U.S. companies using the H-1B visa program and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ,which has long opposed pro-American worker reforms to the program.
“Biden ran on a pro-worker platform. The prevailing wage reforms were listed in his policy proposals regarding immigration,” Lynn said. “But what Biden says and his admin actually does are worlds apart because ‘Bidenomics’ is a two-step scam: Claim you’re bringing industries back to America, but then having cheap foreign labor filling these jobs.”
The rule’s delay comes as Biden held a state dinner at the White House for Modi. The H-1B visa program continues to prove profitable for India’s outsourcing lobby, as well as China.
In Fiscal Year 2022, the federal government allowed U.S. companies to import more than 442,000 foreign H-1B visa workers to take white-collar American jobs — more than 85 percent of which arrived from India and China. Men from India were given 76 percent of the H-1B visas allotted to all Indian nationals last year.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
The Department of Justice (DOJ), in April, found that a company had discriminated against American job applicants in favor of foreign H-1B visa workers whom they could hire more cheaply.
In recent months, Breitbart News reported how Silicon Valley’s biggest tech corporations continued to lay off tens of thousands of Americans as they imported more than 34,000 foreign H-1B visa workers to take U.S. science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs.
Likewise, in February, State Farm announced that it would lay off more than 450 of its American employees in a move that outsources its Information Technology (IT) work to HCL Technologies, an India-based outsourcing firm that imports foreign H-1B visa workers to do much of the work.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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