Bringing in More Foreign High-Tech Workers Further Erodes Immigration System

By: Art McGrath

January 26th, 2015

It’s time to stop bringing foreign workers to the United States under the false premise that there are not enough Americans with STEM degrees (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to fill high-tech jobs. There are.



An aspect of the immigration debate that is widely misunderstood even among many who oppose amnesty is the push to bring in large numbers of foreign STEM graduates, supposedly because there are not enough Americans to fill these positions.

The truth is that there are many more Americans with STEM degrees ready to fill these jobs than there are open positions. Unfortunately, like the drive to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens ready to take lower paying jobs at salaries that would undercut Americans looking for work, the impetus for foreign STEM grads is a desire by large companies to fill positions at incomes lower than many Americans were paid to fill the same positions.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, has issued an immigration handbook for this session of Congress that many of his colleagues would be wise to read and heed. The section on the move to bring foreign STEM workers to this country is particularly illuminating.

He pulls no punches. Right in the title of the relevant chapter he calls it the Silicon Valley STEM Hoax and that, it seems, is just what it is.

Sessions notes what many have been saying for the past few years—that the desire to bring in foreign workers under the H-1B visa program is predicated on a false conclusion—that there are not enough American graduates in STEM fields. In fact the opposite is true. There are many more STEM graduates than open jobs in their fields and many cannot get jobs in their fields of study. Information released by the Census Bureau last year revealed that only one in four college graduates with a STEM degree actually had a job in their field.

The call for more guest workers has come from large corporations and their allies in Washington on both sides of the aisle. President Obama called for hiring more STEM teachers in a State of the Union speech several years ago. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has called for more foreign high tech workers. In this session of Congress, a bill has been sponsored in the Senate by, among others, Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida, Orrin Hatch of Utah, and Jeff Flake of Arizona, to bring in more high tech guest workers using H-1B visas.

Last summer Bill Gates wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for more H-1B guest workers. As Sessions noted, however, Gates’ call for more workers came at the same time Microsoft announced it was going to lay off 18,000 workers. Microsoft was not the only large high tech company to lay off thousands of workers in recent years. If they can’t employ the workers they have, what is the point of bringing in thousands more?

The point is that newly arrived foreign workers are generally paid less than American workers doing comparable work. Like the illegal aliens who supposedly “do the work Americans won’t do,” or not at the same wages at any rate, these guest workers will do the same work for far less than their American predecessors were getting paid.

[excerpt, rest at link above]

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Tell Bill Gates to go to Hell!!

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