With respect to the recent debate on H-1B visas, many Americans don’t remember the promises both Republicans and Democrats made around three decades ago when trade agreements were enabling U.S. companies to ship their plants abroad to exploit cheap labor and less stringent labor laws.
This bipartisan chorus told Americans not to care about the loss our factory jobs because the rising tech industry in America would provide new employment to offset the loss. Commonly we heard at the claim that unemployed U.S. factory workers could retrain as computer programmers.
But amid all this happy talk, the H-1B program was beginning to unfold. As it allowed companies to bring in foreign workers to do jobs in the U.S., it allowed U.S. companies to exploit a lower-wage foreign workforce at home, as well as abroad. Americans from the Rust Belt had to forget about computer programming.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) summed up well this trail of broken promises about tech jobs for Americans: “Thirty years ago, the economic elite and political establishment in both major parties told us not to worry about the loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs that would come as a result of disastrous unfettered free trade agreements like NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China (PNTR). They promised that those lost jobs would be more than offset by the many good-paying, white-collar information technology jobs that would be created in the United States.
“Well, that turned out to be a Big Lie. Not only have corporations exported millions of blue-collar manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, they are now importing hundreds of thousands of low-paid guest workers from abroad to fill the white-collar technology jobs that are available.”
Read more at sanders.senate.gov