Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us and other high profile tech companies say they want presidential candidates to talk about immigration reform, particularly about increasing caps for H-1B visas. Donald Trump has made immigration a top issue for the 2016 presidential campaign, yet the conversation has centered on what to do with illegal aliens and border control.
FWD.us President, Todd Schulte, is calling for more high-skilled foreign workers to be able to work in the United States. Schulte cited that tech companies frequently say that the current immigration system is holding them back.
Schulte claims that more H-1B visas are needed to fill the rising gap for graduates in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, however, there are more than five million native-born Americans with STEM undergraduate degrees working in non-STEM occupations. In 2012 an additional 1.2 million natives with STEM degrees were not working, either unemployed or out of the workforce.
Last month, Trump called out Mark Zuckerberg and other companies for using the H-1B program to lower American wages by hiring cheaper foreign workers. This week Hewlett Packard announced that it would lay off 30,000 American workers while expanding their H-1B visa program. Last year, Disney was caught firing hundreds of thousands of American workers and replacing them with foreign workers. The American workers were forced to train their replacements in order to receive their severance pay.
Other founders of FWD.us include Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates, Yahoo Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Read More at The Wall Street Journal.
