Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, is the first 2016 GOP presidential candidate to come out against tech companies’ abuse of the H1B guest worker program to replace American workers with cheap foreign labor.
Huckabee spoke up for American workers and against special interests and foreign workers on Breitbart News Sunday in an interview with guest host Breitbart News investigative journalist Matthew Boyle. It’s a significant move that could force the whole Republican field to address an issue it’s been silent on thus far.
“I’m not against immigration. Our country has been made strong by the people who came here. But we focus too much on how many people are coming—I think the focus needs to be on why people are coming,” Huckabee said when asked about the connections between immigration policy and wages for American workers. He specifically noted that some in the rest of the GOP 2016 field openly support massively increasing the numbers of foreign workers brought into the country. “Do they come here because they believe in what America stands for and opportunities? Do they want to be part of this great country and accept the responsibility for helping to make it great? Then goodness, let’s get as many people here as want to come.”
Huckabee then hammered away at the recent examples from Disney and Southern California Edison, among others, where American workers were forced to train their replacements—replacements who were brought into America on H1B visas and paid significantly less than the Americans they were replacing to do the exact same jobs. Huckabee adds:
When people come because they believe there’s going to be free education and free healthcare, and there’s not going to be that level of free responsibility, and when people come and take a job that an American has trained for—I mean, recently, we had numerous testimonials of people who in the high-tech sector were actually having and forced to train their replacements who were imported workers who were coming in and making less than half of what they were being paid. Now, in a world of supply and demand that’s one thing. But when companies are undercutting an American worker just so they can increase their profits without regard to the people who made them profitable in the first place, that’s not a money issue. That’s a moral issue.
The Southern California Edison case has received bipartisan attention, with Sens. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) working together to try to expose what happened and hold the company accountable.
“Southern California Edison ought to be the tipping point that finally compels Washington to take needed actions to protect American workers. As Professor Ron Hira testified, the H-1B visa has become ‘a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans,” Sessions said in a statement after he and Durbin pressed several elements of the Obama administration for an investigation into the case—something the administration has not yet done.
Most of the H-1B program is now being used to import cheaper foreign guestworkers, replacing American workers, and undercutting their wages.’ The U.S. is graduating twice as many STEM students each year as find jobs in those fields, yet the H-1B program continues to provide IT companies with a large annual supply of lower-wage guest workers to hire in place of more qualified Americans. There is no ‘shortage’ of talented Americans, only a shortage of officials willing to protect them.
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Huckabee’s decision to focus on an issue where no other candidate has yet been willing to go—the H1B fraud—could pay massive dividends for him on the campaign trail. Most Americans—in astonishingly high levels, across party lines—believe in what he’s talking about here: Protect American workers first.
Polling data, especially that from the National Republican Senatorial Committee commissioned Paragon Insights poll from before the 2014 midterm elections and from KellyAnne Conway’s the Polling Company polls from last summer, show widespread support across party lines — higher than 70 percent among Democrats, Republicans and independents — wanting to help American workers first.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...ech-companies/
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