Teamsters Union President Sean O’Brien said the H-1B visa program is “displacing” Americans from their jobs while allowing billionaires at the helm of corporations to exploit foreign workers.
Amid debate over the H-1B visa program, which allows companies to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily from India, to fill white-collar jobs in the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders ( I-VT) blasted the program as nothing more than an H-1B visa program. an outsourcing project.
“The primary function of the H-1B visa program and other guest worker initiatives is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace high-paying American jobs with indentured domestic workers at low wages coming from abroad.”
The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make,” Sanders wrote:
If there truly is a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, why has Tesla laid off more than 7,500 American workers this year? – including many software developers and engineers at its Austin, Texas factory – while being allowed to employ thousands of H-1B guest workers? (emphasis added)
In response, O’Brien addressed X and said he “100 percent” agreed with Sanders.
“The H-1B guest worker visa program displaces American workers and allows billionaire tech employers to exploit foreign workers,” O’Brien wrote.
The H-1B visa program, as research has repeatedly shown, is often used as a huge labor savings program for Fortune 500 companies.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled abuses against American white-collar professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. Americans are often fired and forced to train their foreign replacements, as Breitbart News points out.
There are approximately 650,000 foreign workers on H-1B visas in the United States at any given time.
A study published in the September issue of the Journal of Business Ethics examined salary data comparing the starting salaries of foreign workers on H-1B visas to their U.S. counterparts. Data showed that foreign workers on H-1B visas were paid 10 percent less than Americans doing the same work.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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