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A West Virginia congressman is fed up with popular work visas, and revealed to Fox News Digital a behind-the-scenes surge of Republican lawmakers who also support abolition of the foreign worker program.
“I think the H-1B visa program is a scam, and it’s one that has been perpetrated on the American worker for far too long,” Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., said in an interview.
“Essentially, we shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas and people were told to ‘learn how to code,'” he continued. “Well, now they’re being replaced with the H-1B visa workers on the coding jobs as well. So when is the American worker actually going to get a win here?”
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H-1B visas are billed as temporary work authorizations for “high-skilled” foreign workers who are qualified to do jobs that American workers do not have the skills to do. But the companies that use them are not required to prove that they couldn’t find a qualified American to do the same job, raising criticism among those who want to stop outsourcing jobs to foreign workers.
Companies who use the most H-1B visas include Amazon, IT consulting firm Cognizant, Infosys, IBM and Microsoft.
Microsoft set off a firestorm last week when its XBOX gaming division laid off 1,600 workers, despite the parent company being approved for 2,273 H-1B visas this year alone.
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“We’re sending all of our kids to college, trade school or what have you, to get advanced knowledge or career preparation for the workplace, and we’re coming in with H-1B visas and displacing them with lower skilled, lower paid workers, and many of young people are ending up either unemployed, or baristas at Starbucks, or you name it with $200,000 in debt,” Moore lamented to Fox News Digital.
The typical H-1B visa is limited to three years, but employers can file extensions that last up to six years. And while the foreign workers are in the United States, there is nothing stopping them from pursuing permanent residency.
According to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 80% of H-1B visa holders who become permanent residents do so through employment-based green cards. Permanent residents can later become naturalized citizens.
Moore insists the idea that H-1B workers are more skilled than American workers is a “complete fallacy,” and said that the only reason they’re being brought to the United States is because they will work for less pay than the ordinary American.
“This is a rigged market against American workers,” said Moore. “It’s not free market capitalism at all, because the government is handing these out and also setting the levels of how many H-1B visas are going to be issued.”
“This is all controlled by the government, and it’s obviously big corporate lobbyists that are pushing for more H-1B visas. This is not an exercise in the free market.”
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As of 2021, National Foundation for American Policy analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data estimated that there were 619,000 H-1B workers in the U.S. — a number that is likely higher today.
Optional Practical Training (OPT) work authorizations, Moore says, are perhaps more pernicious than H-1B visas, and further disprove the idea that H-1B visas are for “high skilled” foreign laborers.
Foreign students who come to the U.S. on F-1 student visas often use OPT as a bridge between studying in the United States and receiving an H1-B visa.
“Look at the OPT program, right, where they’re doing the training,” Moore said. “They’re going through our university system. Obviously they’re coming through our university system because it’s the greatest on the planet.”
Moore wants to abolish both programs completely, and says there’s a quiet groundswell of support for his efforts behind the scenes.
“I’m certainly not the lone voice in this,” he told Fox News Digital. “I might be the loudest. Some people are quietly talking about it, but I have had many, many of my colleagues here in Congress come up and talk with me since I’ve started talking about this and thank me for speaking up.”
“So I have a lot of support behind me on this issue, and there’s others who are starting to speak up as well.”
Recently, President Donald Trump tried to limit employers’ use of the H-1B program by imposing a $100,000 fee for companies seeking H-1B applications.
A federal judge struck down that order, reasoning that it amounted to a tax that only Congress has the ability to impose.
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For Moore, it all comes back to protecting American labor.
“The American worker is the only worker on the planet that has to compete with labor from all over the world inside their own borders. We’re the only ones. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all, and we’re putting all of our young people in a disadvantaged position.”
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