The federal government is helping giant multinational corporations such as Amazon and Google to reap a 15 percent discount every time foreign workers are hired over American college graduates, says Hilarie Gamm, author of Billions Lost: The American Tech Crisis and The Road Map to Change and co-founder of the American Workers Coalition.
During an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Gamm explained how the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program provides a tax incentive, and thus a subsidy paid for by U.S. taxpayers, for corporations to hire foreign workers over American graduates.
LISTEN:
“The OPT started … in the Bush administration and then what Obama did … was he went from creating something that allowed foreign children studying in the United States to work for like six months or a year to instead be able to work three years and then get a renewal for up to five to six years,” Gamm said.
“So what’s happening today is you’ll have children that are American citizens where their parents have basically bankrupted themselves to send their kids to these American universities and they’ll be sitting alongside their foreign friends who are … earning the same degree,” Gamm continued. “And those foreign children will have a job offer in hand when they graduate and the American child will not have even gotten an interview for that same company.”
As Gamm explained, corporations like Amazon, Google, Deloitte, and Intel employ thousands of OPT foreign workers over American STEM graduates every year. In 2017, alone, Amazon had placed nearly 2,400 OPT foreign workers into white-collar STEM jobs that could have otherwise gone to American graduates.
The incentive for Amazon and others to hire OPT foreign workers comes in the form of a 15 percent discount that has allowed multinational corporations to evade at least $20 billion to $30 billion in FICA taxes over the years.
“OPT is not a visa and so it is not administered by USCIS. It is actually administered by ICE … so the worker — the foreign student that is graduating — as well as their employer are exempt from paying FICA taxes. So they are not contributing to Social Security or Medicare,” Gamm said.
“So where a Jane Doe is hired and they have to contribute and pay into Medicare and Social Security when they have a job because they are an American citizen and then their employer, let’s say Deloitte, has to contribute as well,” Gamm said. “In the case of an OPT candidate and hire, neither the … worker or Deloitte has to pay … anything if they are an OPT hire. They don’t pay Medicare contributions and they don’t pay Social Security contributions.”
“That represents a 15.3 percent tax incentive for the employer to hire an OPT worker rather than an American citizen,” Gamm continued. “It is estimated to translate into over $2 billion a year.”
Gamm said the OPT program is merely a federal program that allows the federal government “and our American citizens to subsidize our most successful corporations.”
“I don’t think that Amazon needs our subsidy,” Gamm said.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has introduced legislation, the Fairness for High-Skilled Americans Act, to end the OPT program and decrease foreign job competition for America’s working and middle class STEM graduates.
Despite corporations’ claims that there is a shortage of American workers to take coveted high-paying, white-collar jobs in the STEM fields, about four million young Americans enter the workforce each year. Many American workers have spoken out about how they were fired, replaced, and forced to train their foreign replacements.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/01/exclusive-hilarie-gamm-15-percent-discount/
Another ugly face of invasion. How much more will we take?
🙁
.
Related:
This 1983 film is currently playing in theaters around the nation in celebration of its release anniversary. I wonder how much of a role it played in advancing our current immigration crisis, uh, I mean invasion crisis? Here’s the original trailer:
El Norte:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPoqBCvyG9k
I looked up Ebert’s review. Here are a few extractions:
“El Norte told the story of a Guatemalan brother and sister who fled persecution at home and journeyed north the length of Mexico with a dream of finding a new home in the United States. They were illegal aliens, but then as now, the California economy could not function without their invisible presence as cheap labor.”
“Their progress through Mexico is hard enough, but crossing of the border is a nightmare. They hire a ‘coyote,’ a man expert at helping immigrants enter America, and have the good luck to find an honest one. He suggests they crawl into America through an empty drainage pipe, and he will meet them at the other end. … As they were crawling through the pipe, it occurred to me that we are fortunate to live in a country people want to enter, instead of escape. And fortunate because so many of our immigrants are the best and the brightest. It takes imagination, ambition and courage to leave your homeland and start over again in a strange land.”
“In the years since the film was released, the underlying reality of illegal immigration has remained essentially the same: America forbids it, yet requires it as a source of cheap labor.”
Roger, if you were still around we’d have to talk.
.
“So what’s happening today is you’ll have children that are American citizens where their parents have basically bankrupted themselves to send their kids to these American universities and they’ll be sitting alongside their foreign friends who are … earning the same degree,” Gamm continued. “And those foreign children will have a job offer in hand when they graduate and the American child will not have even gotten an interview for that same company.”
Paid big mammon to have their brats brainwashed by these communist institutions.
All for naught.