Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) gave credence to the debate against H-1B visas by confirming that an unhappy result of these work visas is foreign workers “undercutting” U.S. citizens’ wages.
Republican Party members are seemingly split as a result of President-elect Donald Trump changing his opinion on the visas after suspending them in 2020 to now supporting them. Trump has recently nominated a former H-1B visa holder Sriram Krishnan as his Senior White House Policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence, prompting a debate on the topic. Schmitt claimed he understood why Americans are against the visas when they are often left training their “foreign replacements” on Fox News Sunday.
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“The context we need to, I think, keep in mind here is that American workers have been left behind by this economy. Many factory jobs have been sent overseas,” Schmitt explained. “I think the abuses of the H1-B program have been evident, where you have sons and daughters of those factory workers who lost their jobs as accountants and they are training their replacements, the foreign workers, who are undercutting their wages.”
Trump’s attempt to suspend the visas was meant to end the practice of a lottery-based system and switch to one that is merit-based. Some of Trump’s advisers have joined in the debate online to suggest that the country-based caps be removed as there can be more merit-based visas allotted to more countries over others.
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“The abuse that’s happened with this where you see qualified Americans being denied a lot of these jobs because a company can go and hire cheaper labor from a foreign country right? That is really the abuse,” Schmitt said. “IT companies [are] sometimes putting 30,000 applications and hoping to get 10,000 from a random lottery. That is a system I think needs to be reformed.”
Schmitt celebrated the open and free debate regarding the visas on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform. Musk is a proponent of the work visa.