The majority of likely American voters says the United States does not need any more foreign H-1B visa workers to fill white-collar jobs, a new poll finds.
A Rasmussen Reports survey reveals that 6-in-10 Americans say the U.S. “already has enough talented people to train and recruit” for white-collar jobs when asked whether Congress should increase the inflow of foreign workers, primarily those arriving through the H-1B visa program.
Meanwhile, just 26 percent of Americans say Congress should increase the number of foreign visa workers taking white-collar jobs.
Republicans and swing voters, in particular, say the U.S. has enough American talent for such jobs and does not need more foreign visa workers.
The survey shows that 72 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of swing voters, and a plurality of 47 percent of Democrats say the U.S. has talented people who can be trained and recruited for open white-collar jobs.
While corporations lay off Americans in white-collar jobs to import foreign H-1B visa workers, hundreds of thousands of young college-educated Americans enter the workforce every year looking for entry-level jobs with decent salaries.
Annually, about half a million American graduates enter the STEM workforce looking for high-paying jobs with good benefits packages. Their chances of landing such a job are cut significantly with the annual inflow of tens of thousands of foreign H-1B visa workers who will compete directly against them in the white-collar labor market.
In President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, the administration reformed the H-1B visa program to better ensure that companies were not wrongfully firing Americans only to hire foreign visa workers.
By 2022, though, President Joe Biden gutted those reforms and allowed corporations that had been denied foreign H-1B visa workers by the Trump administration to reapply.
