Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street banking giant, says almost one million individuals from foreign countries are taking college-level contract American jobs using H1B visas. But John Miano says that might be an underestimate. “I always say it’s certainly over a million. And more than by what Goldman says. Not by a whole lot, but certainly more than what they’re saying,” he tells KTRH News. Miano is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington D.C. He says if you add up all the types of visas available the number gets larger, and that’s taking jobs away from American workers and affecting the paychecks of everyone. “More workers mean lower wages, and that’s just the natural order of things,” he says. “The employer just replaces Americans with cheap foreign workers. They’re able to get these workers because they can dangle immigration benefits in exchange for low wages.”
Miano says the policy of issuing visas to foreign workers is ripe for an overhaul, and something that the Trump administration, but mostly Congress, must address immediately. He has some proposals. “One of them that I hope they’ll do is reduce the term of an H1B from the current six years to three years,” he offers.
Goldman Sachs reports that it is common in the U.S. for media outlets to report there are only 85,000 H1B visas per year. They allow college graduates from other countries to come work in the U.S. The tech industry is often a major employer of these workers. Though they are here on temporary visas, often they don’t leave.