Big Tech, Chamber of Commerce, Outsourcing Industry Unite to Keep Foreign Workers in American Jobs
The nation’s biggest tech corporations joined forces with the United States Chamber of Commerce and the outsourcing industry to keep foreign visa-holders in American jobs even as about 16.4 million Americans remain jobless.
Executives with Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, HP, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Microsoft Corporation, Twitter, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, Michael Bloomberg’s New American Economy, and other corporations have filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit to ask a federal court to keep more than 90,000 foreign visa-holders in the U.S. workforce.
The lawsuit was first filed in 2015 by Save Jobs USA, a group of former American workers at Southern California Edison who had their jobs outsourced to foreign visa workers, to block the Obama administration from giving work permits to H-4 visa-holders who are the spouses of H-1B visa workers.
The outsourced American workers argue that the executive action by Obama wrongly gives the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the authority to provide work permits to tens of thousands of H-4 visa holders. Congress, they argue, did not authorize such authority to DHS and thus, the agency does not have the authority to provide the work permits.
“There is no statutory authorization for an alien possessing an H-4 visa to work,” Save Jobs USA’s initial complaint states.
Today, close to 100,000 foreign spouses of H-1B visa-holders have American jobs in the U.S. labor market thanks to the H-4 visa work permit authorization that the Obama administration began. That has been continued throughout the Trump and Biden administrations.
The cheap foreign labor pipeline, Save Jobs USA argues, unjustly increases foreign labor market competition against America’s white-collar workforce who are forced to compete for jobs against such visa-holders.
“Save Jobs USA members are injured by DHS’s new H-4 Rule because they will compete with H-1B and H-4 guest workers for jobs,” their complaint states. “DHS’s findings for the H-4 Rule repeatedly state that it will increase the number of Save Jobs USA’s H-1B competitors.”
The corporate alliance between tech conglomerates, the Chamber of Commerce, and the outsourcing industry, though, is hoping to convince the court that throwing out work permits for H-4 visa-holders will “undercut” the American economy.
The H-4 visa, like the and Optional Practical Training (OPT) program and the H-1B visa program, helped flood the U.S. white-collar labor market by providing a constant flow of foreign workers to which corporations can outsource jobs rather than hiring Americans. In many cases, American workers who already hold the job and are merely fired, replaced, and forced to train their foreign replacements.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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