The new immigration battle in GOP circles among Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and Laura Loomer was an inevitable one. Those of us who have worked in corporate immigration in any aspect, even as a simple admin in a law office processing H1B visas for three years, can tell you that the president and his sidekicks do not have a real grasp of the subject at hand. H1-B visas are quite simple to understand if you consider the process and the facts.
Major corporations that require expertise in engineering and science need educated, degreed individuals to fill thousands of positions. Most of these jobs offer a 6-figure starting wage. These industries scour the nation to fill their gaps, offering relocation stipends and signing bonuses to sweeten the deal, yet they are still left with an abundance of empty chairs. After hiring efforts are exhausted, they are left to shop for staff in other countries where a university degree isn’t the same price as a house with an interest rate that will triple your original principal.
Compare a graduate from India where a bachelor’s degree costs around ₹87,500 Indian Rupe per year at a public college like Anna University in Tamil Nadu (that translates to about $1,019 USD), to a U.S. graduate with an bachelor’s degree that ranges in cost from $18,000 to $26,000 in tuition and fees per year. Both degrees unlock the very same employment doors in the United States.
America values the profit that universities and lenders both exploit from our high tuition and absurd interest rates, making school loans near impossible to pay and just plain out of reach for most to even consider. Like health insurance, we value the middle guy more than we value our nation’s independence, stability or success. As an American, you will likely put yourself in a mountain of debt to try to compete with workers who are coming from India without a balance owed.
Immigrants aren’t “stealing American jobs”; we are begging them to come, and we need them. Education is out of reach for many here, and we have a political party that decided that college degrees are for woke elites anyway.
Kristina Drake
Hamburg Township
This is a misleading and self-serving description of H-1B visas. The author omits that it is legal for employers to replace American with H-1B workers. Second, the H-1B program allows employers to pay H-1B workers extremely low wages. The employer, not the Labor Department, sets the prevailing wage for H-1B. The author’s claim that H1B workers are not taking American jobs is an outright falsehood. Add together legal replacement of Americans and low H1B wages and companies all over America openly replace hundreds of Americans at a time with H1B workers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html
No company has ever been sanctioned for doing this.
The only solution to the H-1B mess is to kill the program entirely.