Report: H-1B Employers May Begin ‘Recruiting’ Americans after Trump Order

[Christopher Marlowe]

Here's something Trump did right: he's cutting back on the H1-B visa program.

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2017/05/01/report-h-1b-employers-may-begin-recruiting-americans-trump-order/

by John Binder1 May 2017Washington, D.C.699

A new report suggests that the mere threat of President Donald Trump's executive order to investigate abuses to American workers due to the H-1B visa is making U.S. companies rethink their hiring practices.

In a piece by POLITICO, the news agency noted that since Trump's order demanding a "full legal review" into the H-1B foreign guest worker visa by the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Justice (DOJ) and Labor (DOL), some companies are considering hiring more American workers.

"Businesses that use foreign workers, worried they'll get singled out by federal agents during a visa review, are starting to explore the possibility of recruiting domestic labor," POLITICO stated in the report.

As mentioned by NumbersUSA's Jeremy Beck, the move by U.S. companies directly contradicts the open border lobby's and tech industry's longtime claim that there are not enough high-skilled Americans to fill jobs in the country.

According to Beck, the H-1B visa "has become part of the domestic hiring problem," with big businesses and outsourcing firms often times using the foreign guest worker visa to fire American workers and have them train their foreign replacements, who end up costing the business less in compensation.

Trump's legal review will include tracking down abuses within the H-1B visa program where more than 85,000 Americans are either replaced or passed over for jobs by foreign nationals.

While immigration hawks and American worker advocates praised Trump's move to investigate the H-1B visa and its negative impacts, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which supports amnesty for illegal immigrants, panned the executive order, as Breitbart Texas reported.

If the H-1B visa program had never been introduced and enacted, computer science job availability in the labor market would be up 11 percent and wages in the tech industry would have increased by five percent, Breitbart News reported.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Study: H-1B Visas Reduced Computer Programmer Employment by Up to 11%
by Lucas Nolan14 Feb 201782
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/02/14/study-h-1b-visas-reduced-computer-programmer-employment-by-up-to-11/

A report claims that job availability in the computer science field would be up by as much as 11% and that wages would have increased by 5% if the H-1B visa system allowing companies to employ foreign workers in high-skilled fields had not been introduced.

The report, by John Bound and Nicolas Morales of the University of Michigan and Gaurav Khanna of the University of California, San Diego, studied the economy between 1994 and 2001, known as the Internet boom era. This period was also the time when H-1B labor was close to its cap, before the start of the IT sector in India. The study states that in 2001, the number of US computer scientists was between 6.1% and 10.8% lower than it is now and that wages were between 2.6% and 5.1% lower.

The report description reads, "Over the 1990s, the share of foreigners entering the US high-skill workforce grew rapidly. This migration potentially had a significant effect on US workers, consumers and firms. To study these effects, we construct a general equilibrium model of the US economy and calibrate it using data from 1994 to 2001."

Silicon Valley companies have benefited from the use of H-1B visas for some time. The Trump administration has many tech companies on edge as rumors of an executive order aimed to stop the H-1B visas surfaced last month. Bloomberg Technology reported in January that the Trump administration had drafted a new executive order reportedly aimed at tightening and re-working the H-1B visa system, which is used by many Silicon Valley tech companies to hire workers from overseas.

The use of H-1B visas has been a subject of debate for some time, as many believe that the overuse of these visas has lead to white collar Americans being pushed out of the workforce. In some cases, former American employees were forced to train the H-1B visa workers that would be replacing them.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com