Paul Craig Roberts – paulcraigroberts.org Jan 5, 2025

Divisions are already appearing in MAGA ranks. President-elect Trump and Elon Musk have aligned with the H-1B work visas that allow foreigners to be brought in to fill American jobs. This disappoints the Trump working class that believed making America great again meant they were going to get their jobs back.

American corporations, universities, and non-profit organizations like H-1B work visas for a variety of reasons. A H-1B visa recipient is an indentured servant. He or she is paid substantially less but cannot leave the employer for higher pay as the visa is tied to the specific employer. This also has the result of denying the indentured servant employment or protest rights as the indentured servant’s presence in the US is tied to the visa that is tied to the employer. For example, a H-1B visa holder cannot file a discrimination complaint.

As Senator Bernie Sanders puts it:

“The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.” https://www.rt.com/news/610400-bernie-sanders-elon-musk-visas/

The case for H-1B visas is fraudulent. The claim is that America’s huge numbers of universities are incapable of producing enough American graduates to meet America’s need for “highly educated individuals with skills critical to our country’s economic future,” to use the words of Todd Schulte, president of an immigrant advocacy organization with ties to big tech. Or as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas disguised the scam, “American businesses rely on the H-1B visa program for the recruitment of highly-skilled talent, benefitting communities across the country.”

Imagine, the United States relies on the Third World, not on its many world prestigious universities, to supply its need for “highly-skilled talent.” The communities are not benefitting. The American residents are losing the jobs. Wages and salaries are being paid to foreigners who have displaced Americans. The difference between the US wage and the H-1B wage goes to corporate profits and executive “performance bonuses.”

I pointed all of this out years ago and summarized it 12 years ago in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Disintegration of the West,(Clarity Press, https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-failure-of-laissez-faire-capitalism/ ).

It is a fairy tale told by shills to enhance corporate profits and executive bonuses that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, University of California, University of Chicago, and the large numbers of private and state universities cannot turn out enough educated people to fill the economy’s needs.

If Americans are not studying for careers in high tech it is because they know the jobs will be given to foreigners on visas. Moreover, Americans who prepare for these careers are hit again by the offshoring of many of the jobs.

During the early years of the 21st century when the “skills shortage” was being concocted to serve corporate profits, Business Week reported a 12.7% decline in computer science pay, a 12%decline in computer engineering pay, a 10.2% decline in electrical engineering pay. Professor Norm Matloff at the University of California, Davis, found that between 2001 and 2005 starting pay for master degrees in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering fell 6.6%, 13.7%, and 9.4% respectively.

As I wrote at the time, “Obviously, if these skills were in short supply, as corporations [and their economist shills] allege, the shortage would result in rising salaries as employers bid for scarce human resources.” How can economics account for a shortage of skills and a fall in pay?

H-1B visas have a statutory cap of 85,000 annually. The number consists of 65,000 visas plus 20,000 for foreigners who have an advanced degree from a US university. Over ten years, that comes to 850,000 foreigners brought into the US to take Americans’ jobs. These visas are sought by foreign students studying in America, because it is a way of staying in the country. At the end of the visa, H-1B holders can apply for a green card or permanent residence.

As few of the 85,000 per year return home to their countries, the obvious consequence is that some American occupations are being de-Americanized. This is also true of university faculties where H-1B visas are used to meet DEI quotas while large numbers of Americans with Ph.D. degrees are denied an academic career“`. Recently the Biden regime expanded or removed the limit on H-1B visas for universities and non-profits. Soon a student will be able to have the same professors at Harvard as he would have if he went to university in India. What does Harvard care? It trades on its name.

In addition to H-1B visas there are L-1 visas that allow multinational companies to bring foreign employees to the US for “training.” With extensions the visa can be good for seven years. Between 1997 and 2019 the US Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 1.5 million L-1 visas, according to Wikipedia. Citizens of India are the largest recipients of L-1 visas.

Allegedly, the H-1B visas were not to be used to replace US workers and are supposed to be paid the same amount as an American employee. But there are easy ways around these restrictions. Law firms are employed to advertise job openings in ways that disqualify Americans. You can read about that in my book. In 2007 the law firm, Cohen & Grigsby explained in a marketing video how the firm evades the restrictions for its clients. The firm’s marketing manager, Lawrence Lebowitz said, “our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested US worker.”

There are many ways around the various “restrictions” on the visas. During the bank bailout Congress forbade banks that received bailout money from hiring foreigners to replace Americans, but the H-1B lobby had a loophole inserted into the legislation. The loophole let banks hire contractors to supply “contract labor.” Consequently, the banks paid the contractor, and the contractor, not the banks, hired and paid the foreign workers. In 2009 Computerworld reported that the H-1B visas were becoming the property of Indian contract labor firms.

The American Immigration Council, a lobby for H-1B visas, alleges that multiple studies have found that bringing in foreign workers on H-1B visas increases the employment opportunities for American workers. I exposed the fraudulent nature of these “studies” when they came out.

Matthew J. Slaughter, a member of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, mistakenly found an increase in American employment in an increase in multinational corporation employment that resulted from the multinational corporations’ purchases of smaller firms. Multinational corporation employment rose from the purchases of existing firms, not from jobs offshoring and H-1B visas causing more Americans to be employed.

Harvard professor Michael Porter concluded that America’s lead in GDP per capita, household wealth, and falling poverty rates were proof that the US was benefitting from jobs offshoring and all other foreign employment practices associated with globalism. What Porter did was to use a 20-year period so that the deterioration from globalism was softened by the stronger performance from earlier times.

My exposure of the fraudulent claims had no effect on policy. My voice was no match for the power of campaign contributions and the lobby groups. American corporations and “the people’s representatives” could not care less about the fate of Americans. The American corporations want profits and their executives want their “performance” bonuses. Congress wants campaign contributions and friends to look after them if they lose an election.

There is no one to look after the American worker, not even Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Trump and Musk think of greatness in terms of profits. If profits are great, the country is. Thus their policy will continue the shift in the distribution of income from the working class to the one percent. Really it is the one-tenth of one percent that benefits while all the rest lose.

The question America needs to face is how is there unity and a nation when economic prospects are limited to one-tenth of one percent of the population, when democracy represents only the elite and never the people, when the people’s protections guaranteed by the US Constitution are discarded by law schools, the US Department of Justice (sic), bar associations, and by judges themselves, when racial, gender, and sexual preference privileges overturn the Constitution’s requirement of equality under the law, when the Constitution’s requirements of due process, free speech, the right of assembly and protest are suspended because of false claims of “terrorism” and “misinformation.”

Terrorism and misinformation are Washington’s products. Terrorism originates not from Russia, China, Iran, Arabs; it originates from Washington. Just ask the Palestinians, the Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis. Misinformation comes from a domestic intellectual class that hates America. Misinformation is a domestic product from self-serving agendas and presstitutes that support the agendas. Official misinformation keeps Americans in a muddle so that they lack realization of their dispossession of their rights.

Tell me, how can a country in which the people have no voice be made great again.

Trump’s supporters believe that his election has solved the problem. They could not be more wrong. Indeed, when it comes to American employment, it looks like Trump is part of the problem.

If Trump demoralizes his supporters, the result will be a demoralized population. Where will the resistance to tyranny come from?

Andrew Anglin claims ( https://www.unz.com/aanglin/pyramid-schemer-patrick-bet-david-continues-deluge-of-shit-campaign-with-fraudulent-statistics/ ) that the statutory cap on H-1B visas is not enforced and that the US government “issues hundreds of thousands of exemptions” that resulted in 755,020 H-1B visas in 2023, 72.3% of them going to citizens of India. He attributes the data to the Department of Homeland Security but does not provide the source or URL.

My opinion based on what I know at this time is that Anglin was misled by reports on H-1B visa approvals and concluded that all of the annual approvals were for new H-1B visas, which would be a number in violation of law. As I understand it, the visas are good for six or seven years and must be annually approved to continue. If we take the annual approval for continuation of, say, 6 years of visas, it would come to 85,000 times 6 which comes to 510,000 visa approvals + the 85,000 newly approved visas for a total of 595,000. In other words, not all H-1B visa approvals are annual approvals of new visas. Most are continuations of the old. The articles are not clear about this, and I think misled Anglin.

There are other approvals associated with the visas. I forget what they all are, but perhaps for example a visa holder needs to go home for reasons, say, the death of a parent, and wants to return; a visa holder wants at the end of his six years to apply for a green card; a holder wants his visa extended to 7 years. I am confident that if the government was breaking the cap of H-1B visa issuance, H-1B opponents would have brought a law suit.

The H-1B legislation does not provide the executive branch with authority to override the law limiting the visas. If the US government is actually issuing almost 9 times the number of H-1B visas permitted by law, it would seem to be strong grounds for H-1B opponents to bring a law suit. I also wonder why Congress would stand aside while the government ignores the law. Is Congress that unconcerned with its authority? It is not characteristic of Washington for people to piss away their power. If Congress wants to make 755,020 H-1B visas annually available, it can do so and collect more campaign contributions as its price. The caps have been adjusted over the years reaching 195,000 annually during the presidency of George W. Bush, 2.3 times higher than under the open borders Biden regime.

The issue is the existence of the H-1B visa, not its numbers. The case for the visa is fraudulent. The visas benefit corporate executives and shareholders at the expense of the prospects of native-born American citizens and change the country’s cultural and racial character. H-1B visas are helping to transform the United States into a Tower of Babel with an economy dependent on cheap foreign labor for its profits.

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