Companies that prefer migrants and H-1B visa workers over Americans will face federal investigations and discrimination lawsuits, says Andrea Lucas, who President Donald Trump picked to serve as acting chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
“The EEOC is putting employers and other covered entities on notice: if you are part of the pipeline contributing to our immigration crisis or abusing our legal immigration system via illegal preferences against American workers, you must stop,” Lucas said in a February 20 notice.
“The law applies to you, and you are not above the law. The EEOC is here to protect all workers from unlawful national origin discrimination, including American workers,” she added.
“Guardedly optimistic,” civil rights lawyer John Miano responded after Breitbart News asked for his assessment.
If the EEOC follows through, it could force companies to curb their hiring of migrants over Americans, said Miano, who is now suing more than 30 Chicago companies for advertising jobs to foreign H-1B workers, but not to Americans.
The move was also welcomed by Amanda Louise, a Missouri-based former tech worker who has begun filing lawsuits against companies that recruit H-1B workers over Americans.
The policy shift is important because many major companies in the United States have foreign-born managers to fill up many jobs with foreign workers, such as mixed-skill H-1B workers, instead of accomplished American graduates.
Nationwide, roughly 1.6 million professional jobs have been filled with foreign workers carrying H-1B, J-1, TN, L-1, TN, OPT, or CPT documents. There are no caps on these programs, nor any requirements that employers try to hire Americans first.
These foreign workers are recruited by hiring managers, many of whom are themselves migrants. This job selection process is critical for Americans’ careers, yet it has been largely exempt from the nation’s anti-discrimination laws.
Those laws bar discrimination against women, racial minorities, and also against American citizens.
However, many Americans and visa workers have told Breitbart News that hiring managers prefer to award jobs to co-ethnic foreign workers, usually in a deal for kickbacks, such as a percentage of a worker’s salary. This concealed process allows each company’s clique of immigrant managers to profitably sell jobs held by accomplished American graduates, regardless of the damage to their company’s long-term profitability.
Breitbart News has covered many examples of established American professionals being fired so they could be replaced by groups of lower-skilled, lower-wage visa workers. Many companies and CEOs have been indicted for criminal fraud for engaging in this practice.
The selling of American professionals’ jobs to ethnic migrants often happens with tacit approval by hands-off American executives who are eager for apparent cost savings.
The result of this hidden market for American jobs is that many technology centers are crowded with Indian visa workers, not American professionals. One tech manager at a critical company in Silicon Valley wrote on X:
Just recently I was at a meeting of all director and above leaders for my product, and I was the only one (of about 25) who was not Indian male. Picking a random senior director of engineering at random from our corporate directory, who is Indian, he has 36 US-based employees. Of them 2 are American, 2 are Chinese, the rest Indian. All of his bosses up to the CEO are Indian. This is not an outlier.
Business leaders claim that the hiring is justified because the H-1B workers are highly skilled — even though the H-1B visas are awarded by lottery to candidates with varied skill levels.
Lobbyists also argue that the visa workers help to raise stock values and that there is a shortage of American experts — even though data shows that STEM wages are flat and many American STEM workers are sidelined.
Moreover, there is little evidence that companies that rely on the H-1B and their visa-worker subcontractors are more productive than companies that rely on skilled American graduates. In fact, many H-1B workers need to be trained by Americans, and the subcontractors have their own incentives that differ from U.S. investors and CEOs.
The EEOC statement said:
Employers have many excuses for why they may prefer non-American workers, but none of these are legally permissible reasons to violate Title VII:
lower cost labor (whether due to payment under the table to illegal aliens, or exploiting rules around certain visa-holder wage requirements, etc.);
a workforce that is perceived as more easily exploited, in terms of the group’s lack of knowledge, access, or use of wage and hour protections, antidiscrimination protections, and other legal protections; customer or client preference;
biased perceptions that foreign workers are more productive or have a better work ethic than American workers.
“The law is clear: the prohibition on national origin discrimination applies to any national origin group, including discrimination against American workers in favor of foreign workers,” Lucas said. “The EEOC is going to rigorously enforce the law to protect American workers from national origin discrimination.”
The statement was released with news that a company paid a $1.4 million fine after being charged with favoring Japanese workers over American workers. The company operates in Guam, which is a legal U.S. territory.
At least 3 million H-1B workers have been imported since 1990, after which Americans’ salaries and workplace clout cratered.
“You’re supposed to answer [executives’ questions] in a very subservient way” when working alongside visa workers, Mary, from central New Jersey, an immigrant software expert, told Breitbart News in 2020:
I would tell [the executive] professionally what the issue was, and she didn’t like that. You can’t oppose her in any way. If she tells you “It is black,” it has to be black even if it is white. [The Indian contractors] will feed her what she wants to hear … They cater specifically to that [attitude].
When the information given to that manager is wrong, and that manager does not care, the professionalism of the field is gone, she said.
The deprofessionalization of the Fortune 500s has weakened the vital tension between professionals, managers, and investors that was key to Silicon Valley’s success. Since roughly 2010, the U.S. economy has been clogged by the H-1B influx, causing numerous failures, corporate risks, technical sclerosis, and reduced productivity.
The dominance of foreign workers in the U.S. tech sector also threatens the privacy of Americans’ personal information, the security and reliability of networks vital for national security, and Americans’ valuable intellectual property.
Moreover, once Indian managers move into senior jobs, they often support the transfer of jobs, careers, technology, revenue, and wealth to India.
This huge economic and class shift has largely been ignored by professional journalists, nearly all of whom are working for pro-migration media outlets.
For example, editors at the Washington Post have posted only four news articles on the contentious H-1B program since December. In contrast, Breitbart News has posted more than 30 articles since December. Similarly, Twitter constricts debate over the H-1B visa, and almost all academics are muted.
But polls show that Americans are increasingly alarmed by the loss of white-collar jobs and careers. As yet, no national politician has jumped into that political opportunity.