The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“Trump administration efforts to impose new H-1B visa restrictions face a surprising obstacle – the low unemployment rate among professionals in computer occupations in the United States. Trump officials hoped to use the current economic downturn to impose more immigration restrictions, but new data show the unemployment rate for individuals in computer occupations declined from 3 percent in January 2020 to 2.8 percent in April 2020, according to an analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).
“The new unemployment figures complicate the administration’s efforts to issue more measures aimed against high-skilled foreign nationals in science and engineering. ‘The data raise questions about the Trump administration’s ability to use the unemployment rate for computer professionals to justify the new restrictions being considered for H-1B visa holders and international students working on Optional Practical Training (OPT),’ notes the NFAP analysis. – Low Unemployment Rate in Tech Harms Trump H-1B Visa Plans, Stuart Anderson, Forbes, 5/18 [Link]
Fact Check of Quote Above: Stuart Anderson is a long-time propagandist for mass immigration. He is an “adjunct scholar” of the Cato Institute, a libertarian extremist organization that takes it as a matter of ideological faith that mass immigration is always an unmitigated blessing.
Anderson cites low unemployment figures in computer fields as proof that we can afford to hire more foreigners in those fields without greatly harming Americans who would like to do this kind of work. His article, published on May 18, cites unemployment statistics for April. Those statistics don’t reflect the skyrocketing of unemployment between those two months. With 38 million American now out of work due to the coronavirus crisis, it is reasonable to assume that some number of them are computer workers and that the official unemployment rate for them is higher now than in April.
In any case, the official rate is not a good indicator of the number of Americans who could do computer-related work, but don’t have it. The official rate doesn’t count them. They are the almost three-quarters of Americans with college degrees in computer technology and related fields who work in other occupations. And why don’t they have jobs for which they trained and are qualified to do?
The answer is that many U.S. companies don’t want them. Those companies prefer foreigners with visas because they can play them less than Americans and make more demands on them. As non-citizens, they can be exploited like the indentured servants of colonial America . In recent decades, the number of Americans working in computer-related fields has steadily declined.
When the United States negotiated free trade deals, their advocates said that Americans would not have to worry about the loss of manufacturing jobs because U.S. workers could retrain as computer programmers and still make a good living. Belying that promise were the H-1B and other visa programs that massively opened computer and other tech employment to foreign workers.
Many Americans wonder how we can remain a middle-class society when so many Americans are denied access to decently paying jobs. The propagandists at Cato and like-minded institutions don’t really seem to care.