Still Waiting for Trump to Stop H-1Bs from Replacing U.S. Workers

By John Miano on March 5, 2020

The H-1B visa program is designed to replace Americans with cheap, foreign workers. For decades, employers have replaced hundreds of Americans at a time using H-1B visas. Whether the result of corporate control (e.g., Amazon over the Washington Post or Disney over ABC) or political correctness, the nation's elite media largely ignore this issue and refuse to report on cases when Americans are replaced.

A break in the media blackout came in 2015 when Julia Preston of the New York Times reported that Disney had replaced 250 Americans with cheap, foreign workers imported on H-1B visas.

Preston followed up with a few more articles on the H-1B disgrace, but she retired and the New York Times has resumed its blackout on the issue.

However, the process of replacing Americans with H-1B workers has continued unabated. Tucker Carlson at Fox News disrupted the blackout by reporting on how AT&T is in the process of replacing thousands of Americans.

Carlson's report includes documentation on how organized the process of replacing Americans has become. Fox News has made some of the materials describing how the "knowledge transfer" will work available:

"Tucker Carlson Tonight" producers obtained shocking documents from the training courses. Powerpoint slides with the AT&T and Accenture logos inform workers about Indian cultural customs and mention that Indian men will not shake hands with American women. AT&T also gives its soon-to-be-former employees a list of "approved topics" for discussion and urges them not to discuss India's religious conflicts or human rights record with their future replacements.

Keep in mind that when companies replace Americans using H-1B visas that this is not abuse; this is the system working as it is intended. Congress explicitly made it legal to replace Americans with H-1B workers. Congress made it legal to pay H-1B workers at the bottom one-sixth of wages. No company has ever been legally punished for replacing Americans with H-1B workers.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump campaigned with former Disney workers and promised he would do something about the use of H-1B visas to replace Americans.

Trump has had the ability to put an end to Disney-style replacements of Americans with the stroke of his pen — but we are still waiting.