Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Friday called the H1-B Visa program “horrible” in an interview of Breitbart News. DeSantis said:
Here’s the thing, when the corporation brings them in, the H-1Bs, they work for less. They’re basically indentured servants. If Google brings you in, you can’t then just show up and work for Microsoft because they pay you more — you’re indebted to [Google]. So I think it’s been a horrible program in terms of how it’s done.
The H1-B and other visa programs are clearly preventing American graduates with STEM degrees from acquiring work in their fields. Though high-tech employers keep insisting that the US has a shortage of such graduates, that is simply not the case. Although only 100,000 graduated with such degrees in 2000, by 2022 that number had increased to 230,000. Yet a 2021 government study found that half of those graduates would not find starter jobs. The reason: employers sought instead permission to hire foreign workers who would work more cheaply and remain more compliant.
Breitbart quotes American employees who have witnessed the displacement first hand. Describing one Silicon Valley firm, one tweeted:
Everyone, literally, is Indian, with a smattering of Chinese. Just recently I was at a meeting of all director and above leaders for my product, and I was the only one (of about 25) who was not Indian male. Picking a random senior director of engineering at random from our corporate directory, who is Indian, he has 36 US-based employees. Of them 2 are American, 2 are Chinese, the rest Indian. All of his bosses up to the CEO are Indian. This is not an outlier. This is a typical director and I could pick virtually any in our engineering org and see the same thing. If you walk into our San Jose cafeteria at lunch time, you’d think you’d been magically transported to Bangalore. You would see almost nobody but Indians.
DeSantis added:
So H-1B visas have been used to bring in people who can perform tasks at much cheaper rates than American workers. So we’ve had situations where companies will bring in H-1B [workers], the U.S. workers will train their own replacements, and then they fire the American workers. How is that something in the best interest of the American people?
The governor has helped open a vital debate that has too often been overshadowed by the debate over illegal migrants. Legal immigration, through such mechanisms and H1-B, needs a close look by the incoming administration.
For more, see Breitbart News.