During the peak days of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon delivery trucks were a familiar sight in neighborhoods across America.
Amazon’s logo is a smiley face arrow pointing from “A” to “Z” indicating that the company offers customers products that range from those with names that begin with the letter “a” and all through to the letter “z” — in other words, everything.
Shopping at Amazon, the smiling arrow promises, will make consumers happy.
What began in 1994 in Jeff Bezos’ garage as an online bookstore, then called Cadabra and with initial earnings of $20,000, Amazon is now recognized worldwide as the place to shop for products as diverse as AAA batteries or zinc tablets, and have them promptly delivered to your front door quickly.
Today, Amazon’s market cap is $1.7 trillion. As of January, Bezos is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $195 billion.
Amazon is a great American success story. If only Amazon and Bezos could use their billions of dollars-strong financial strength to share their wealth by hiring more Americans and paying them fairly instead of opting for lower-cost overseas workers, their accomplishments might be more broadly hailed.
But when Amazon wants to hire workers, it too often relies on the insidious H-1B, guest worker employment-based visa to fill its needs.
In fiscal years 2020 and 2021, at 6,182, Amazon received more approvals for H-1B visas than any other corporation; Microsoft, Google and IBM received 1,200 or more.
Worse news for U.S. tech workers is that the decline rate for H-1B visas has, under President Joe Biden, dropped to its lowest level in history, which means that more tech jobs will go to Indian and Chinese nationals instead of U.S. citizens.
The National Foundation for American Policy calculated that only 4% of petitions were denied in FY 2021, down from 13% in FY 2020 and down from the high of 24% in FY 2018.
According to the NFAP, the status of many H-1B extensions was reviewed under a more restrictive standard than President Donald Trump’s administration.
Those tighter guidelines gave officers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services more discretion to require additional proof that entry-level computer programming jobs qualify as a “specialty occupation,” a basic requirement for receiving an H-1B visa.
Courts later ruled that the Trump era memo was unlawful.
The NFAP also found that “employers and attorneys have credited USCIS director Ur Jaddou and the Biden administration for rescinding the October 2017 memo.”
Big business, lawyers and the “Americans last” Biden White House — all unlimited immigration advocates — hailed Jaddou’s intervention, and defended the H-1B revision as helpful to corporations struggling to find what they term as “high-skilled” or the “best and brightest” employees, myths that have been perpetuated for decades.
The Census Bureau’s 2019 Community Survey, Single-Year Estimates found that among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37% reported a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a science, technology, engineering or math-related (STEM) occupations.
U.S. tech workers are plentiful, but employers have to seek them out.
Through a series of loopholes, Congress has enabled H-1B visa holders to, instead of the initial six-year time cap on their visas — one three-year period followed by a three-year renewal — remain to work indefinitely, and become U.S. citizens.
Because of the “dual intent” provision, H-1B visas holders can now displace American workers, and are rewarded with citizenship.
Stated differently, admitted under the guise of being temporary, H-1B holders can become the most permanent of residents, a U.S. citizen.
The decline in H-1B denials trend is guaranteed to continue during Biden’s remaining three years in the White House. His critics wonder why he’s so steadfastly determined to harm both high- and low-skilled U.S. workers.
The border influx of mostly limited-skilled and under-educated migrants hurt Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum, while, at the same time, loosening the H-1B visa standards puts college-educated Americans behind the eight ball when it comes to securing a white-collar job.
— Joe Guzzardi is an analyst and researcher with Progressives for Immigration Reform who now lives in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org, or follow him on Twitter: @joeguzzardi19. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.