Joe Biden is promising investors that he will flood the white-collar labor market with a huge inflow of cheap foreign graduates, but he is offering only paperwork protections to the millions of U.S. graduates who will lose jobs, salaries, and careers.
“Biden will work with Congress to first reform temporary visas to establish a wage-based allocation process and establish enforcement mechanisms to ensure they are aligned with the labor market and not used to undermine wages,” said Biden’s plan for legal immigration. “Then, Biden will support expanding the number of high-skilled visas and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country, which create unacceptably long backlogs,” the plan says.
Biden’s zig-zag immigration manifesto suggests that he is trying to win support from the wealthy investors who gain from more college graduate immigrants yet also trying to win back the swing-voting college graduates who sided with Donald Trump in 2016.
Many college graduates sided with Trump in 2016 when he promised to curb the low-wage H-1B visa worker program. That H-1B program keeps roughly 750,000 foreign graduates in Americans’ jobs, alongside at least another 500,000 foreign graduates working under several other types of white-collar visa workers.
Trump has done little to follow through on his 2016 promise, partly because of intense pressure from the investors whose corporate stocks spike whenever white-collar salaries are nudged downwards. For example, Trump’s deputies are currently trying to preserve the 2015 rule that aids investors by granting work permits to 100,000 spouses of H-1B workers.