The Part of the Obama Admin. That’s Supposed to Help U.S. Workers Is Calling for More Foreign Labor

The Obama administration’s Department of Labor, which is supposed to represent the needs of U.S. workers, said Monday that the government needs to find ways to get more skilled foreign workers into the country.

“We also need to fix our broken immigration system to encourage more highly educated foreign-born workers to come to the United States,” Deputy Secretary of Labor Chris Lu said in a blog post. “If we are to compete in a global economy, we must continue to attract and retain the world’s brightest minds.”

“Too many foreign students – many from Asian countries – come to the United States to further their education but must return home when they cannot obtain a green card or immigrant visa. As part of President Obama’s immigration reforms, he has called for “stapling green cards” to diplomas of foreign graduates students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields,” Lu wrote.

The statement appears to be a direct contradiction to the Labor Department’s main mission, which is to help American workers.

The department’s own website says its mission is to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is among the more vocal critics of the Obama administration’s push to create legal status for millions of illegal immigrants. Earlier this month, he blasted an Obama administration proposal to create more than 100,000 job opportunities for the spouses of certain visa holders, at a time when millions of Americans are still out of work.

We bring in 1.1 million LEGAL PERMANENT IMMIGRANTS A YEAR PLUS 650,000 GUEST WORKERS ANNUALLY. Why should we increase even further immigration to the US? Four million Americans graduate high school annually. We already have low labor participation rates. Wages have been declining in real terms since 1969.

We have 800,000 foreign students attending US universities. They came here on student visas, not immigrant visas. Are we going to transform the student visa into an immigrant visa?

Is There a STEM Worker Shortage? A look at employment and wages in science, technology, engineering, and math By Karen Zeigler, Steven A. Camarota May 2014

Using the most common definition of STEM jobs, total STEM employment in 2012 was 5.3 million workers (immigrant and native), but there are 12.1 million STEM degree holders (immigrant and native).

Only one-third of native-born Americans with an undergraduate STEM degree holding a job actually work in a STEM occupation.

There are more than five million native-born Americans with STEM undergraduate degrees working in non-STEM occupations: 1.5 million with engineering degrees, half a million with technology degrees, 400,000 with math degrees, and 2.6 million with science degrees.

An additional 1.2 million natives with STEM degrees are not working — unemployed or out of the labor force in 2012.

Despite the economic downturn, Census Bureau data show that, between 2007 and 2012, about 700,000 new immigrants who have STEM degrees were allowed to settle in the country, yet at the same time, total STEM employment grew by only about 500,000.

Of these new immigrants with STEM degrees, only a little more than a third took a STEM job and about the same share took a non-STEM job. The rest were not working in 2012.

Overall, less than half of immigrants with STEM degrees work in STEM jobs. In particular, just 23 percent of all immigrants with engineering degrees work as engineers.

In total, 1.6 million immigrants with STEM degrees worked outside of a STEM field and 563,000 were not working.

The supply of STEM workers is not just limited to those with STEM degrees. Nearly one-third of the nation's STEM workers do not have an undergraduate STEM degree.

Wage trends are one of the best measures of labor demand. If STEM workers are in short supply, wages should be increasing rapidly. But wage data from multiple sources show little growth over the last 12 years.

Real hourly wages (adjusted for inflation) grew on average just 0.7 percent a year from 2000 to 2012 for STEM workers, and annual wages grew even less — 0.4 percent a year. Wage growth is very modest for most subcategories of engineers and technology workers.

I think this Labor official is talking about DIFFERENT types of immigrants — “foreign graduates students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields,” (from the article)

They all come here on the assumption that they will take their education back to their home country and work to improve the lot of those countries. Instead they take away slots at college for American Citizens and then take away jobs from American Citizens who couldn't get into the college because the foreigners took their slots.

The illegal aliens are taking all the part time jobs that students used to take so that they could defray the costs of tuition and books and instead they have to take out loans that are now 100% controlled by the federal government and which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, thus making them slaves to their government for life. On top of that the education they get at college is not as valuable today as a high school diploma was 20 years ago.

The current and future generations of young Americans are screwed beyond their ability to understand it. Yet they march in lockstep and vote as a block for the people who are working to enslave them.

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