Trump sells out American workers
President Trump defended abandoning his America First policies on restricting cheap foreign labor during an interview with Laura Ingraham on Friday by insisting foreign companies who've moved factories to America "can't get labor."
Transcript via Fox News:
INGRAHAM: Mr. President when you look at the trajectory of your administration, huge progress on trade, incredible progress on dealing with our political foes, ISIS, incredible deregulation, judges, you've done a lot. On the economy today, we found out that still added 146,000 jobs, unemployment historically low at 3.5 percent. But we do have a little bit of a stall out on wage growth, which you ran on, and we've seen some, 2.9 percent last year, 0.1 percent over the last month.
TRUMP: I know.
INGRAHAM: But we don't have a tight labor market. If we had a tight labor market, we'd be seeing real increases in wages. I hear that your team is planning on advocating more foreign workers coming in for some of these high-tech companies. I'm very concerned about that, as are a lot of your supporters.
TRUMP: And so is Mark Levin a little bit.
INGRAHAM: Yes, we are concerned, because Americans --
TRUMP: So is the great Lou Dobbs. Lou Dobbs is concerned, too. But I'll say, Lou, here is the problem. I am demanding that Japan and all these countries that have these massive, we have trade deficits like nobody has ever seen before. I said you have to open up. I call Prime Minister Abe, he's a friend of mine. I say Shinzo, you have got to open up more plants in the United States. And they tell me, we want to do it, we want to do it. They start opening. They can't get labor. We need help. Otherwise, we could just say don't open up --
INGRAHAM: If they couldn't get labor, wages would be going up. But wages aren't going up.
TRUMP: Wage are going up.
INGRAHAM: Not in the high-tech industry. We are seeing a plateauing of wages.
American workers telling their stories about how Big Business replaced them with cheap foreign labor using the H1B Visa program.
"It was the most humiliating & demoralizing thing I've ever gone thru."
President Trump promised to end this. pic.twitter.com/wc9GWad8EN
— The Columbia Bugle ???? (@ColumbiaBugle) January 11, 2020
TRUMP: It went up three percent and it went up 2.9 percent. In the last two year, wages have gone up more than they have 25 years.
INGRAHAM: But for Google, why reward Google? Google is working against you in the campaign.
TRUMP: I don't want to reward Google. I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of Google.
INGRAHAM: All they want is low skilled workers, low paid workers.
TRUMP: I'm not a fan of Google. I'm a fan of great companies, OK.
INGRAHAM: You did not run on bringing more foreign workers into the United States.
TRUMP: It's not foreign workers. We have to allow smart people to stay in our country. Your graduate number one in your class at Harvard. You graduate from the Wharton Schools of --
INGRAHAM: That's a small percentage of what they want.
TRUMP: No, it's not. It's a lot.
INGRAHAM: But you ran on people training their foreign replacements -- you ran against that. The Americans, it's humiliating for an American worked for a company for 30 years, now is told you have to train your foreign replacement, he's going to live in Korea, and you're going to pay him 20 percent.
TRUMP: No, no, that's different. I would never do that. But we do need workers in our country. And I do want immigration policy. Nobody's been better on immigration then me. By the way we won the funding for the wall, and the wall has been built anyway because I was taking it out of the military and everything else. And now it's easier. We need people come. I got Foxconn to go into Wisconsin. They have to get people. They spent a fortune, they built the most incredible plant I've ever seen in Wisconsin, Foxconn --
INGRAHAM: They why [shouldn't] we have American graduates of colleges and universities taking those jobs?
TRUMP: We do. No, we do, we do, but we don't have enough of them. We don't have enough of them. And we have to be competitive with the rest of the world, too. The companies want to hire these people.
INGRAHAM: They want to [hire] people they can hire for the cheapest amount because that's what they want.
TRUMP: I'm not talking about cheap. I'm talking about brainpower. They want to hire smart people. And those people are thrown out of the country. We can't do that.
INGRAHAM: You ran on America first.
TRUMP: No, this is America first.
INGRAHAM: All right, I'm going to keep going.
TRUMP: Excuse, I just have to finish this. If we tell smart people to get the hell out --
INGRAHAM: That's not what we are saying.
TRUMP: That's a bad thing.
INGRAHAM: There is a never-ending appetite on the part of corporate America to bring in as much cheap labor as possible to drive down wages. That's going to happen.
TRUMP: Laura, I have so many people coming into this country, you're not going to have to worry about it. It's always going to be a shortage. If somebody smart sitting in this position, we have so many companies coming in from Japan. Japan is doing many car companies. China now is going to start building a lot of things. They haven't been doing it too much. We have so many companies wanting to come in, and they don't have the labor. But they're coming in.
As Progressives for Immigration Reform revealed last week, Donald Trump Jr echoed Trump's push to import foreign labor in his book "Triggered" by bashing American college students and singing the praises of H-1Bs as the world's "best and brightest.".
Ivanka has also been out shilling for the mass importation of cheap foreign labor....
Jared Kushner, who Trump has reportedly put in charge of "running everything," unveiled an immigration plan which will "set in stone the legal immigration level of 1 million-plus each year" but shift the focus to "high-skilled" immigrants -- i.e. take jobs from middle and upper class workers....
Last year, Trump said he wanted a pathway to citizenship for "H1-B [sic] holders."...
Trump Says We Don’t Have Enough American Workers to Fill Skilled Labor Jobs, Neil Munro, Breitbart, January 13, 2020:
... In fact, the government does not require U.S companies to hire Americans first, and it does not screen out unskilled foreign workers. The government does not cap foreign hires and does not enforce the loopholed rules which supposedly require foreign workers to be skilled and to be paid market-level wages. Nor does the government even try to curb the large scale nepotism that allows foreign born managers in the United States to import huge numbers of foreign workers who will kick back some of their salaries to their bosses....
For example, the “Optional Practical Training” program was expanded by President G. Bush and President Barack Obama to provide employers with an extra stream of foreign graduates. Foreigners get these OPT work permits by simply enrolling in U.S. colleges, ranging from the elite Stanford University down to the so-called “visa-mill” colleges where many students can speak little English and may do very little study....
Federal agencies have never released a full count of the resident H-1B workforce, but federal data shows that a huge percentage are not valedictorians and that many come from no-name universities in India.
The federal data for 2017, for example, shows that 39 percent of the H-1Bs sought by New York employers were rated as “entry-level” workers, similar to U.S. graduates. Another 26 percent were rated as just “qualified,” and only six percent were rated “competent.” These cheap workers have pushed hundreds of thousands of American professionals out of jobs...
Notably, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, has dismissed employers’ demands for more workers and insists they step up their training programs....
December Data Shows Trump Triumph On Immigrant Population, Worker Displacement—But Will He Throw It Away?, by Edwin S. Rubenstein, VDare, January 12, 2020:
It’s real: the December job report, released Friday January 12 [PDF], shows once again that the immigrant workforce population is falling. And immigrant displacement of American workers declined. Wage growth was still relatively weak, but overall this a Trump triumph—which, typically, he seems inclined to undermine, given his recent silly noises about increasing skilled immigration....
Trump’s Blind Spot on Immigration, by Mark Krikorian, January 18, 2020:
A more moderate level of immigration is both good policy and good politics. Cheap foreign labor is cheap foreign labor, whether it’s legal or illegal, permanent or temporary, blue-collar or white-collar....
If the problem were a shortage of skilled labor, why is one of the chief uses of the H-1B visa the replacement of existing American workers with cheaper foreigners on work visas?...
Donald Trump Jr Bashes American College Students, Praises H-1Bs As World's 'Best And Brightest', by Chris Menahan, Information Liberation, January 9, 2020.
CAIRCO Notes
H-1B high-tech worker job displacement
Remember the Beatles song "It was 20 years ago today that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play"? I wrote another verse to the tune: "It was 20 years ago today that my employer gave my job away."
I was an IT consultant. I watched as a dozen Tata's (cheap H-1B foreign workers from India) were brought in as an IT team to replace American workers. They lived six to an apartment and saved their lower pay so that they could return to India relatively rich.
Most of them were decent individuals. But they were not better and brighter than American workers. Their masters-level education was sub-par as compared to American educational standards.
Then I was told that I had to train my foreign H-1B replacement....
- Fred Elbel, Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform
See these videos on H-1B abuse and how Disney forced American workers to train their foreign replacements:
H-1b Visa Use and Abuse - Miano: John Miano, with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), discusses H-1b Visa Use and Abuse and how the H-1b system is being used to outsource and displace American workers. The ultimate objective is to offshore and export American jobs overseas.
H-1b Visa Use and Abuse - Moore; Dena Moore, ex-Disney worker, discusses H-1b Visa Use and Abuse and how the H-1b system is being used to outsource and displace American workers. The ultimate objective is to offshore and export American jobs overseas.
H-1b Visa Use and Abuse - Blackwell: Sara Blackwell, Protect US Workers, discusses H-1b Visa Use and Abuse and how the H-1b system is being used to outsource and displace American workers. The ultimate objective is to offshore and export American jobs overseas.