H-1B

More college student groups are signing onto a letter urging President Trump to suspend the H-1B visa and OPT programs while 30 million Americans are jobless due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

The Texas, Iowa, and Maine Federations of College Republicans, representing thousands of college students, have signed a letter with another 30 college student groups requesting that the OPT program be ended and the H-1B visa program be suspended to reduce foreign competition in the labor market.

“We are writing to you today on behalf of concerned graduating college seniors and young professionals nationwide,” the college student organizations write:

Specifically, we ask you to immediately take action to rescind the work authorization of hundreds of thousands of foreign, nonimmigrant skilled guest workers in order to ease the economic suffering of American college students and recent graduates looking for meaningful employment in these trying times. [Emphasis added]

…

Made worse by the coronavirus economic crisis are the hundreds of thousands of nonimmigrant guest workers in the United States. These guest workers – and especially those in the OPT and H1B programs – take jobs temporarily at wages far below the average for their positions. This is because employers can easily pay these guest workers less than they pay Americans. This is not right. [Emphasis added]

This year, alone, millions of college graduates will enter the labor market looking for high-paying white-collar jobs. Collin Pruett, head of the Texas Federation of College Republicans, told Breitbart News that many of his members are STEM students graduating in computer science.

“A lot of our members are STEM majors,” Pruett said. “Especially in computer science with Austin emerging as a tech hub. These visas hurt Texas college graduates’ employment opportunities when they need them the most.”

The Texas student group has at least 5,000 members and represents 25 chapters, making them the second-largest College Republican Federation in the United States.

I’ve often cited data from NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a widely-respected organization that tracks the salaries of new graduates.  I believe most universities are members.  It has always shown in the past few years that Computer Science graduate salaries have basically been flat — up 2% one year, down 3% the next.  But the current figures show the biggest one-year change I can ever recall seeing — and it is downward.

The 2014 mean starting salary for new CS bachelor’s degree grads was $67,300, according to NACE.  But the organization’s projection for 2015 is only $61,287.  If that projection holds, it will be a drop of 9%.

Yet the tech industry continues to say, “We’re desperate to hire.”  And Congress continues to believe them; so does President Obama.

As I’ve said, the new grads still have it pretty good.  No, they are NOT all immediately being snapped up by employers, but their situation is still far better than those who are 10 or 15 years out of school.  I’ve written about this many times, but I direct your attention to an article in Venturebeat, sarcastically titled “Disposable Employees May Be the Tech Industry’s Greatest Achievement.”  Lots of interesting layoff data in there.

The industry would counter, of course, that those being laid off don’t have the background to work on the latest technology.  I’ve explained before why that’s a red herring — the short answer is that if only young new grads have that background, how is it that they acquired that knowledge from old guys like me? — but again, Congress believes it (or claims to).