South Bend, Indiana — Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s former town — is set to be yet another American city to subsidize the importation of foreign H-1B visa recipients to take high-skill labor jobs such as data scientists and development engineers. This is a shock to residents given the city’s already growing unemployment rate and lower-than-national average hourly wages. Locals and politicians alike, including Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), have been outspoken in their opposition to companies undercutting American labor and wages by replacing them with foreign workers. Many have gone further and are asking for the abolition of the H-1B visa program altogether.
BREITBART: South Bend, Indiana to Subsidize Importing Foreign H-1B Visa Workers for White-Collar Jobs
By John Binder; January 22, 2023
City officials in South Bend, Indiana, will help companies outsource employment by subsidizing the cost of importing foreign H-1B visa workers for white-collar jobs.
This month, South Bend officials announced a plan that earmarks $300,000 to go towards a “high-skill immigration fund” that will split processing fee costs with companies to import foreign H-1B visa workers for white-collar jobs.
Already, companies in South Bend have hired a handful of foreign H-1B visa workers for jobs such as development engineers and data scientists. The plan comes as joblessness in South Bend has grown since 2021, with the latest figures showing a 3.4 percent unemployment rate.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), running for the United States Senate, has previously endorsed major reforms to the H-1B visa program to prevent companies from undercutting U.S. wages and laying off Americans to cut labor costs.
Likewise, average hourly wages in South Bend are lower than the national average.
Others have suggested abolishing the H-1B visa program altogether.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
The outsourcing-offshoring business model has proven extremely lucrative for Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, JP Morgan Chase, and others as they often contract with “body shop” firms like Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys, Accenture, IBM, and Capgemini to lay off their American employees and replace them with tens of thousands of foreign H-1B visa workers primarily from India.
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) research has shown that most corporations importing foreign H-1B visa workers are making significant savings in wages paid by doing so.
Nearly all H-1B visa reforms imposed by former President Trump have been reversed by President Joe Biden. In 2021, for example, Biden allowed corporations that had been denied foreign H-1B visa workers by the Trump administration to reapply.
Americans, by a majority, agree that the U.S. has enough talent for white-collar jobs without having to import foreign visa workers. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 55 percent of likely voters prefer companies hire qualified professional Americans and college graduates over giving jobs to foreign visa workers.