Betrayal of the American Dream

Today the American Dream is becoming less attainable than ever before, while the middle class continues to shrink as America’s economy falters.

American college graduates are finding it increasingly difficult to find jobs within their areas of training. They expected their educations would provide them with solid careers and their share of the American Dream. They are unable to find jobs in their chosen fields even as they attempt to pay back student loans that are, in some cases, as large as mortgage payments.

Immigration lawyers work to undermine American workers by providing guidance to companies on how to NOT find qualified U.S. workers, and corporations seek to hire foreign workers, knowing that these foreign workers will work for lower wages. All the while, foreign students continue to flood into the United States studying for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) degrees.

Several stories have covered the myth of a shortage of U.S. STEM workers, including:

Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry’s ‘Free Pass’

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) issued a news release in May about the enrollment of foreign students in the U.S. with this summary:

As of April 1, almost 1.02 million international students were enrolled in nearly 9,000 U.S. schools using an F (academic) or M (vocational) visa. This marks a two percent increase from January. Seventy-five percent of all international students were from Asia, with 29 percent from China. Saudi Arabia and India had the greatest percentage increase of students studying in the United States at 10 and eight percent, respectively, when compared to January statistics. The top 10 countries of citizenship for international students included: China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil.

ICE has fewer than 7,000 special agents for the entire U.S., and most of them conduct investigations that are focused on customs-related issues. Only a few of these agents are involved in seeking to uncover fraud in the immigration benefits program even though the 9/11 Commission identified immigration fraud as a key entry and embedding tactic of terrorists. The organization lacks the resources to create even a modicum of integrity to the program that involves more than one million foreign students and 9,000 schools.

It is worth noting that according to ICE, Saudi Arabia is among the top ten countries of citizenship for foreign students. While it would of course be wrong-headed to blame all citizens of Saudi Arabia for the terror attacks of 9/11, it is worth noting that most of the hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 were from Saudi Arabia. (Only just recently have families of the victims from those attacks been allowed to sue Saudi Arabia.)

Currently, students from Iran and other countries openly hostile to the U.S. are studying engineering and other STEM curricula here. We need to be concerned with how they may ultimately make use of their training, even as Iran’s leaders make threatening statements about their goals for the U.S.

Senator Ted Cruz provided an amendment to S.744 referred to as “Cruz 5” which, incredibly, provided for a 500 percent increase in the cap for H-1B visas. In theory, H-1Bs are for foreign workers with specialized skills that can’t be found in American workers. The Cruz amendment would have increased the current annual cap of 65,000 such visas to an outrageous 325,000 high-tech workers.

It is crazy to think that the solution to not having enough jobs for Americans is to train more foreign students and import more foreign workers. This defies common sense!

Published reports indicate that since 2007, Silicon Valley executives have pumped more than $1.5 billion into a massive lobbying effort to flood the labor market with huge numbers of foreign high-tech workers and flood our schools with hundreds of thousands of new foreign students.

If the high-tech CEOs and executives are able to succeed in bringing in more foreign workers, the return on their investment will pay off many times over. They will profit significantly by hiring foreign workers whose only claim to being “exceptional” is that they work for exceptionally low wages.