The disappearing American worker – American Thinker

Almost 60% of Gen Z college graduates in the last year have not found full time work, according to Fortune magazine.

It’s no accident, but rather a pro-corporate policy that has dispossessed American people in favor of foreign replacements, even as AI energy vacuums suck up entry level work.

The erasure of American employees is not new, just an acceleration of ongoing trends.

During the pandemic, many foreigners were brought in under the cloak of diversity. S&P 100 companies were congratulated in the business press for filling 94% of job roles with diversity hires.

But post-COVID hires were mainly from overseas, not from underrepresented American minority groups DEI was sold as, but rather a completely new group of people desired for their minimal employment rights, or their biased tax benefits. Bloomberg News had a full report on it, as did ZeroHedge.

That is, the foreign non-resident worker, a class of employee that is hired under several different visa programs, each offering their corporate sponsors a privilege over hiring American workers.

One such privileged program is the F-1 OPT visa worker. F-1 visas are those granted to foreigners studying in the U.S. After graduating from university, these visas can be used for employment in the U.S. via OPT, optional practical training. They give a standard one year of eligibility, but they can be extended to three years for STEM graduates.

These foreign grads are preferred over U.S. grads due to a shocking tax bias, they are not subject to FICA taxes! Neither they, nor their employer, are charged Social Security or Medicare taxes during their F-1 OPT employment. This makes them hireable at a 15.3% discount over Americans.

So the corporation is given a tax benefit for reducing the American citizen employment base, the very base that keeps Social Security and Medicare solvent.

The results have been devastating for young Americans, while simultaneously underfunding the retirement fund for American seniors. The IRS details the bias on its website here.

Another class of foreign worker is the H1B hire. H1B visa employees are dependent on their employer for existence in the U.S. These workers have limited ability to change jobs, as it requires the filing and approval of new visa paperwork. And if fired, they must leave the U.S. within a 60-day grade period, barring the approval of a new visa status.

This tenuous position prods employees to toil for their corporate overlord. These employers feel emboldened to press them with an overload of demands, overworking them with little fear of the employee quitting. Our U.S. visa law acts as an accomplice to this new indentured servitude, particularly the 1990 immigration act that created this category.

So why do these workers agree to it? The corporations dangle U.S. citizenship as a perk, at no expense to themselves. Although H1B is labeled as a non-immigrant temporary visa, many have used it as a foothold to secure green cards and eventual citizenship.

Businessmen, such as Elon Musk, have defended H1B aggressively, arguing that it allows the US to recruit the “top ~0.1% of engineering talent” from around the world. Here is a screen shot of a recent tweet of his:

The practice on the ground has been quite different. Employers have filed for jobs as common as restaurant chef. There is an example of such at a wage of $22 per hour in Rockland, Maine.