Economist Magazine: 23 Million Foreign Graduates Want Americans’ Jobs

In this photo taken on January 10, 2019, employees of education technology start-up Byju's
MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Twenty-three million foreign graduates want the white-collar salaries needed by U.S. graduates, and President Joe Biden’s border deputies have already opened many airport loopholes for them to take U.S. jobs.

The 23 million estimate was posted by the Economist magazine as it urged governments to open up their nation’s white-collar jobs to foreign graduates:

When brainy immigrants arrive in a country, they do not just bring their brains. They bring fresh ways of looking at things. They know things that locals don’t, and can tap foreign-language sources that locals can’t. So in a variety of fields, from business to science, their skills are likely to be unusually beneficial.

The article lowballs the influx, saying, “If there were no barriers to entry, 23m graduates would move to America, 17m to Canada and 9m to Australia, we estimate.”

The airport inflow of white-collar migrants is already accelerating behind the media-publicized border inflow of blue-collar migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border.

“When you turn on the news, you see migrants flooding across the border, you may think … they’re not coming for your job,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. TechWorkers, adding:

But when you run into a migrant in the airport coming with their family, or you run into them in the halls of the corporation where you’re working, or when you run into them on campus — you’ve just run into your replacement. [Wall Street is] going to replace the middle class of America with workers that have low expectations about wages and benefits.

Democrats are opening the borders to millions of salary-shrinking foreign graduates, yet recent polls by the New York Times show that Vice President Kamala Harris has a huge 21-point lead with white graduates in three midwest battleground states. Those voters are 39 percent of the states’ electorates.

The politicians in the 2024 elections are ignoring the specific issue of airport migration and visa workers, even as they loudly argue over blue-collar border migration.

But Lynn and his allies can claim some success: In 2020, white-collar activists persuaded Trump to block a plan to outsource a few hundred jobs in Tennessee to visa workers. Also, Trump’s 2024 manifesto promises: “STOP OUTSOURCING, AND TURN THE UNITED STATES INTO A MANUFACTURING SUPERPOWER ….  Republicans will strengthen Buy American and Hire American Policies, banning companies that outsource jobs from doing business with the Federal Government.”

 

White Collar Migration

Nationwide, at least 1.5 million foreign white-collar temporary workers are getting salaries and homes that would otherwise be earned by U.S. graduates.

The federal government annually awards work visas to at least 550,000 foreign graduates who are deemed “high skilled.”  In reality, the vast majority of those migrants are mid-skill and get first-rung jobs needed by young U.S. graduates.

The migrants are welcomed by Biden’s homeland security czar, Alejandro Mayorkas — despite rising white-collar layoffs within the nation’s workforce of 65 million college graduates.

Most of the white-collar migrants get U.S. jobs by enrolling in U.S. universities and then applying for an “Optional Practical Training” (OPT) work permit.  Forty-one percent of foreign college graduates — including many with very low scores — use the visa system to grab U.S. careers, according to survey data cited by the Economist. However, a “hefty 73% of foreign graduates of American universities say they would stay in the country if a [green card] visa were readily available,” it added.

Mayorkas is quietly expanding the various H-1B, H4EAD, O-1, J-1, TN, OPT, and CPT visa-worker programs, despite massive evidence of cheating, job selling, and fraud.

He even announced plans to give green cards to illegal migrants who get U.S. college degrees, starting with a group of 100,000 migrants, despite growing white-collar layoffs and underemployment.

These visas are supposed to be short-term work permits for highly skilled graduates. But in practice, many foreign graduates — including low-skilled migrants who cannot speak English — stay for many years by jumping from one visa to another. Only a small share are skilled enough to help raise Americans’ productivity and wages.

Many are kept in a sweatshop economy of discriminatory hiring, fraud, low-quality workers, and job buying among coethnics, usually within the pyramids of subcontractors underneath the Fortune 500 companies. Many of the pyramid contractors are owned by immigrants who maintain workplace practices that are routine in their home countries but illegal in the United States. The pyramid companies also shelter the growing population of white-collar illegal migrants.

Most migrants are very eager to stay in the United States and will work long hours at low wages to avoid being sent home. Many rationally and skillfully game the visa rules to maximize their stay in the United States.

The Economist favorably cited a prominent Indian migrant and X user named Deedy Das. After jumping from temporary visa to temporary visa for 18 years, Das recently got a permanent green card from Mayorkas’ deputies in the Department of Homeland Security:

Deedy Das, a young AI whizz … applied for what is colloquially known as the “genius visa.” He had to send 926 pages detailing his technical and commercial accomplishments to bureaucrats who struggled to understand either. He was rejected on what he calls “nonsensical” grounds: for failing to provide evidence he had, in fact, provided. He appealed and was eventually granted a visa. The process “stifles innovation,” he says.

Unfortunately for pro-migration advocates, Das explained how he brought “fresh ways of looking at things.”

He gamed the visa process to get his green card via the EB-1A visa program, which is sometimes dubbed an “Einstein visa”:

Recently, after 18 years of living in the US, I was approved for my EB-1A for “Aliens of Extraordinary Ability”. I wrote about my journey in paralyzingly boring detail in my last blog post. This was one of the few ways, as someone born in India, I could have a path to US citizenship in a reasonable time.

Das later justified his use of the pay-to-publish maneuver:

The way this works is that they interview you to learn the key things you’ve done and record it, draft an article from your interview, ask you to do a final review and edits, and then work with various publications to get your article published.

They’re fairly expensive and charge $3500 for 1 article, $6700 for 2 and $9600 for 3. They’re also quite slow — I decided to use them in mid-December and the articles came out in May and June, 6-7 months later.

Das also suggested a list of lawyers who can guide would-be airport migrants through the jungle of regulations:

I used Alcorn Law and Sophie Alcorn as my lawyer. She charges $11,750 for a 12-week EB-1 I-140, $700 for I-140 filing and $2500 for Premium Processing. She charges extra for RFE hourly at $350/hr for an attorney. This is a total of $14,950.

“The whole system is gamed,” countered Lynn. Would-be migrants “will pay money and someone will write a report for them that they will look at, sign off on, and then that will be their published paper” for submission to win a green card for a “high skilled” worker. He added:

Does that sound like scientific rigor to you? Does that sound like someone you would like to have working with you? It’s worse than you know whose mail-order doctorate degrees we used to see in the 1980s.

Each year, more than 100,000 white-collar temporary workers — like Das — turn their temporary visas into green cards, allowing them to permanently stay in the United States and to get citizenship after five years.

“Deedy Das is a fake and The Economist article is a fake,” Lynn continued. “He spends all his working hours reading about how to get more Indians into America rather than doing things that actually merit what is ostensibly an Einstein visa. All he’s done is teach others how to game the system. This is why you can’t trust these visa programs anymore … they’re all being gamed.”

Das responded to questions from Breitbart News. “US Tech Workers comes from an ideologically biased stance against me so his comment is unsurprising … They had an issue with me paying trade press services, which are intermediaries that help corporations and individuals publish in trade journals for decades.”

“My Google Scholar [record], patents, Ivy League degree and LinkedIn are public — this is the evidence The Economist looked at,” responded Das, who is a mid-level “principal” under 14 partners at Menlo Ventures.

 

Biden’s Deputies Are Expanding White-Collar Migration

The Economist‘s push for more migrants — regardless of civic costs — helps Mayorkas, who has repeatedly said extra migrants are needed to help employers — not Americans’ income. In March 2023, he told a Senate hearing:

We have employers who are striving to hire, to find people who could fill jobs to contribute to our country’s economic prosperity. Regrettably, regrettably, our legal immigration system is not designed to meet that need of employers here in the United States, despite the fact that individuals from other countries want to come here to work — even seasonally, even temporarily — earn the money that they can bring back to their home countries and support their families there.

Mayorkas and his allies are using their legal skills to quietly expand the corporate hiring of foreign graduates.

For example, Mayorkas has stated a regulatory process to help more employers hire more foreign graduates via the little-discussed J-1 “Exchange Visitor” visa process.

The J-1 process has allowed the immigration of roughly 600,000 foreign graduates into U.S. white-collar jobs since 2014. But agency officials can now revise it to welcome an additional 400,000 migrants over 10 years, according to an August 2024 paper by the Institute for Progress.

“This revision is not only a matter of justice for individual migrants but also a strategic imperative for fostering international cooperation and shared prosperity,” said the group which is funded by pro-migration foundations and investors, including two Irish immigrants, Patrick Collison and John Collison.

“They’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” responded Lynn, who added:

We do not have a STEM [graduate] shortage problem. We do not have a white-collar professional shortage problem. We do not have a medical professional shortage problem. All of our medical schools … are all way over-subscribed, as well as our nursing programs and medical tech programs.  If there’s a shortage anywhere, it’s a lack of investment in our infrastructure to educate the [American] people willing and able to work in those professions.

The migration programs, he added, are also unfair to people living in poor countries. “This is a brain drain from these countries … They need this talent, and they need it there — we don’t need it here.”

The Economist recognized the white-collar brain-drain issue, saying, “China and India would lose the largest number of graduates in absolute terms (14m and 12m respectively). In relative terms, however, places like Iran, Ecuador, and the Democratic Republic of Congo would see the biggest net outflows.”

The migration and brain drain also reduces the incentive for corporate executives to train Americans for the long-run task of building businesses in the many developing countries in Africa and Asia, Lynn said. “If the goal is to enrich America, then send trained Americans abroad,” he said. Because of the visa programs, he added, “there is very little advantage for an American [graduate] to learn a foreign language, but there is a huge advantage for a foreigner to learn English.”

The rising use of foreign graduates in U.S. workplaces also wrecks U.S. professionalism and subordinates American professionals to C-suite executives, he said. That corporate power shift is wrecking U.S. innovation and product quality, he said. In mid-July, operations at U.S. airports and banks were severely disrupted when employees failed to test a contractor-supplied software modification, he noted:

The quality of the services has declined beacuse the IT [information technology] sector is dominated by foreign workers. Twenty years ago that probably wouldn’t have happened because no company and no university with a professional IT department would have allowed software to be downloaded and then put on their network until it had been tested in-house, until they were satisfied with it.

The professional decline is a career threat to diligent U.S. graduates, said Lynn. “American [graduates] are disadvantaged because their fields are full of all these credentialed people with bogus credentials,” whom executives prefer to hire, he said.

That fraud is bad for U.S. innovation and productivity, Lynn added. “It means we can no longer trust the [hiring and promotion] system …  [which is] supposed to reward merit, but which is being gamed by people who are very ordinary [and] dishonest.”

The Economist article is itself an example of professional failure because it includes factual errors, Lynn said. “It stated that there was a legal requirement that the [hiring] company [first] search out for an American before they look for an H-1B visa holder. Well, that’s not true — there is no requirement [to seek Americans].”

“We can’t even rely on The Economist to provide us with reliable information … this article itself is an example of the decline of professionalism,” Lynn said.

Amid the hidden airport inflow, salaries for American white-collar professionals have stagnated and declined, even as housing costs have risen because executives and immigrant middle-managers prefer to hire foreign graduates, Lynn said.

In 2016, “the “college-wage premium” [over blue-collar wages] was 170% …  In recent years wage growth among poorer Americans has easily outpaced that enjoyed by richer folk,” leaving the college premium at about 140 percent, according to an August 8 article in the Economist.

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