In Immigration Debate, Trump Says We Don’t Have Enough American Workers to Fill Skilled Labor Jobs

President Donald Trump told Fox News TV host Laura Ingraham on Friday his 2021 plans to welcome more foreign graduates will not flood the labor market for U.S. college graduates.

“I have so many companies coming into this country, you’re not going to have to worry about it,” Trump said in the interview, adding, “It is always going to be a shortage … We have so many companies coming in, from Japan … [and] China now is going to start building a lot of things.”

Trump and Ingraham did not find common ground, likely because they were talking about different parts of the immigration problem. Also, neither mentioned Ivanka Trump’s campaign to prod companies to train their own American employees for high-tech jobs.

Ingraham began the exchange by noting American graduates’ salaries have been suppressed by the flood of foreign graduates:

We don’t have a tight labor market. If we had a tight labor market, we would be seeing real increases in wages. I hear that your team is planning on advocating more foreign workers coming in for some of these high-tech companies.

Ingraham rejected business claims of shortages: “We’re seeing a plateauing of wages … There’s a never-ending appetite on the part of corporate America to bring in as much cheap labor as possible to drive down wages.”

“I’m not talking about cheap — I’m talking about brainpower,” Trump responded. “They want to hire smart people. And those people are thrown out of the country — we can’t do that,” he said, referring to foreign graduates of U.S. colleges.

Trump seems to want to help companies import a relatively small number of very clever people, such as Ivy League valedictorians. In contrast, Ingraham is trying to block companies’ effort to cut payrolls by replacing well-paid American professionals with cheap foreign graduates who have just enough skills to get the job done, regardless of quality.

“We have to allow smart people to stay in our country — if you graduate number one in your class at Harvard, [if] you graduate from the Wharton School of Finance,” Trump said. “If we tell smart people to get the hell out, that’s not America first.”

“Yes, that’s a small percentage of what [ccompanies] want,” said Ingraham.

” No, it’s not. It’s a lot,” said Trump.

But business has hired very few valedictorians among the pool of roughly 1.5 million visa workers who now hold jobs sought by American graduates.

In fact, the government does not require U.S companies to hire Americans first, and it does not screen out unskilled foreign workers. The government does not cap foreign hires and does not enforce the loopholed rules which supposedly require foreign workers to be skilled and to be paid market-level wages. Nor does the government even try to curb the large scale nepotism that allows foreign born managers in the United States to import huge numbers of foreign workers who will kick back some of their salaries to their bosses.

For example, the “Optional Practical Training” program was expanded by President G. Bush and President Barack Obama to provide employers with an extra stream of foreign graduates. Foreigners get these OPT work permits by simply enrolling in U.S. colleges, ranging from the elite Stanford University down to the so-called “visa-mill” colleges where many students can speak little English and may do very little study.

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When I hear employers [who] would come to me and they’d say, ‘We need more skilled workers, we need more skilled workers,’ and then I’d read about them laying off segments of their workforce because they were investing in productivity, and not having spent the time — when they had known three years prior they’d be making that investment and upgrading those systems — not taking the time to take those workers and reskill and then retrain them into their job vacancies, well, I have very little sympathy for that.

Her push seems to be working.

Many U.S. companies are upgrading their training programs, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently showcased a company that uses software to identify and hire ordinary Americans — including truckers — who may have the intellectual skills to succeed in the software business.

Ivanka tells CEOs to train Americans before asking for more immigrants.
She stood up for unemployed, ex-cons, old ppl, blacks, disabled, & non-grads.
But she was diplomatic & pleasant, so many journos simply missed her decent & strong populist message. https://t.co/BDOk1BUhzB

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) January 8, 2020

Before serving as President, Trump was an employer, and he has repeatedly shown his sympathy for fellow employers who complain about supposed labor shortages that would force them to compete for employees by offering higher wages. But he was elected on a pro-American promise — and he has raised Americans’ wages by repeatedly rejecting business demands for more, and yet more, imported workers.

Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers helps them force down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs, wages are going to go up.”

Story cited here.

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