WATCH: JD Vance Blocks Visas for Microsoft and Indian Staffing Companies

Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Todd Blanche on Thursday vehemently slammed the corporate exploitation of the H-1B and J-1 visa programs that have sidelined a huge number of American professionals.

Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling also announced he would block the government award of residency visas to foreign workers at Microsoft, Adobe, and five of the biggest Indian-run staffing companies.

“The H-1B visa program is meant to allow companies to bring in really the best of the best from outside the United States of America for positions that are completely impossible to fill with American workers, said Vance, adding:

Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years, probably the last several decades … Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards [for foreign workers]. … If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replace that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.

“Our message to Microsoft is you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” said Vance, who is building a broad coalition for cuts to the visa programs that are strongly backed by many Wall Street investors.  

Universities are also exploiting the J-1 visa program to sideline American professionals, Vance said:

There are nine universities in particular that we believe merit an investigation. Those universities are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT, and what we see is that when you employ an American worker as a graduate student, as a researcher, they’re making about $20,000 more than someone brought in under a J-1 visa, and importantly, these universities are employing J-1 visas for federally funded grants at a rate of about 61 percent. The national average is 38 percent. So something weird is going on at these universities. They’re using these visas way too much.

Breitbart News has posted more than 1,000 articles on the visa programs — especially the H-1B and J-1 programs — since 2011.

Administration officials say the many visa programs keep roughly 2.5 million foreign workers in jobs that would otherwise be held by American graduates.

That huge wealth transfer is driven by Indian executives who sell skilled Americans’ white-collar jobs to mixed-skill Indians for kickbacks, so inflicting massive damage on American innovation, shareholders, and professionals.

“Today, thanks to President Trump, Vice President, and the task force, we are cutting off the head of the snake, the companies that have enabled this abuse for decades,” said Sonderling.

He announced that Microsoft and Adobe, plus multiple Indian-run staffing companies, will be denied visa workers: 

I am hereby suspending from the Permanent Labor Certification Program some of the largest IT outsourcing firms in the world: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCO, and Capgemini. And also, due to multiple active federal investigations, the Department of Labor is suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the program.

He added:

Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They’ve received over 230,000 H-1B visas approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications. That’s hundreds of 1000s of jobs that were taken from American workers. Our historic action is the first critical step to stop the fraud and the abuse, and ensure that these programs never come at the expense of the American worker.

Attorney General Todd Blanche spoke, saying:

This issue has affected Americans across generations, but it’s especially important to young people with a lot of talent who can’t find a job because their potential employer may be engaging in these sort of improper and nefarious practices … The issue of foreign labor favoritism is something that nobody should ignore, and we at the Department of Justice will continue to do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Stephen Miller spoke:

As the vice president said, we always welcome and bring to this country individuals who have exceptional gifts to share with our country. But what we don’t do and can’t do is crush and kill the dreams of millions of young [Americans] in middle school and high school who want that first step in the ladder but are unable to get it, or mid-career workers who’ve dedicated their lives to a company and are given two weeks’ notice just because someone else somewhere in the world is willing to do the job 20, 30, 40, 50 percent cheaper than they are.

“America is the only country in the world that has managed to turn an immigration system from being against its people, to for its people,” Miller said.