Ten years ago, Disney fired its American IT staff in Orlando, Fla., and replaced them with “high-skilled” foreign workers on H-1B visas.

The foreign workers were so “highly skilled” that the Americans they were replacing had to train them on how to do their jobs — and if they didn’t, they’d lose their severance pay.

The politicians fumed, with one senator saying, “This program was created to help fill jobs when there were labor shortages, not to take jobs away from anyone.”

Except for the H-1B visa program — like most immigration programs for “skilled” workers — is intended to replace American workers and hold down their salaries. H-1B workers, mainly from India, have been used by dozens of corporations to replace their American staff with cheaper foreign labor.

One aspect of the visa, which is especially attractive to employers, is that it ties the worker to a specific job, like the indentured servitude of earlier centuries. An American or permanent-resident worker is free labor — he can ask for higher pay, seek promotion into a new position, or change employers altogether.

A foreigner can do these things only with great difficulty or not at all. Employers praise this as “loyalty,” but what they really mean is, “We own them.”

Is this a problem with this particular visa that can be fixed with a few tweaks? No, because the problem isn’t limited to one visa program.

At least as bad as H-1B is something called Optional Practical Training. This was supposed to be for foreign students to have a brief internship upon graduation before returning home. It has become a three-year work visa for certain foreign “students” who are no longer students, which they use until they can “graduate” to an H-1B visa.

Worse yet, because we pretend that the OPT workers are still students, their employers don’t have to pay Social Security, Medicare and unemployment taxes. That means the federal government effectively gives an 8 percent subsidy to companies that hire young foreign graduates instead of young American graduates.

None of this is an accident. The National Science Foundation, one of the big government funders of university research, wrote a memo in 1989 calling for importing more foreign graduate students to hold down wages in tech.

The following year, Congress created the H-1B program.

In fact, there is no shortage of workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) — because if there were, wages in those fields would be going up, which they haven’t. And tech companies wouldn’t be laying off thousands of workers, either.

What’s more, millions of Americans with degrees in STEM aren’t working in STEM. That’s a large pool of workers available for recruitment (maybe at higher pay), but only if employers had an incentive to recruit them rather than short-circuiting the forces of supply and demand by bringing in workers from outside.

Does America benefit from the immigration of truly exceptional talents, the vaunted “best and brightest”? Yes, absolutely. But, really, how many Einsteins are there?

Elon Musk said he doesn’t want the H-1B program to be used as cheap labor because he only wants the top 0.1% of engineering talent. If this is true, reform is possible.

Our current system for bringing in “skilled” immigrants is akin — at best — to giving a participation trophy to every child in Little League.

Instead, we need a World Series for immigration, giving only the best of the best the greatest gift we can bestow — the right to live and work in the United States and eventually to become a member of the American people.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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