Trump Plans ‘Potential Pathway to Citizenship’ for Foreign H-1B Workers

President Trump says he plans to offer foreign workers imported to the United States by Silicon Valley tech conglomerates and multinational corporations every year a “potential path to citizenship” to encourage so-called “highly skilled” migration.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans a year potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.

In a tweet Friday morning, Trump reversed course on his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, saying he wants to offer a pathway to U.S. citizenship to the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers living in the country on the H-1B visa.

“H1-B holders in the United States can rest assured that changes are soon coming which will bring both simplicity and certainty to your stay, including a potential path to citizenship,” Trump said. “We want to encourage talented and highly skilled people to pursue career options in the U.S.”

H1-B holders in the United States can rest assured that changes are soon coming which will bring both simplicity and certainty to your stay, including a potential path to citizenship. We want to encourage talented and highly skilled people to pursue career options in the U.S.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2019

Trump most recently told the media he wanted technology corporations to import and hire more H-1B foreign workers for coveted, high-paying white-collar jobs instead of those companies seeking American graduates in the tech fields.

“It is contradictory that Trump wants to raise wages for Americans and also bring in more workers who will cut salaries,” an American technology professional told Breitbart News’ Neil Munro. “It is political suicide … because the tech workers believed [in 2016] he was the only one who stood up for them.”

While Trump is now looking to streamline the H-1B visa to make it easier for employers to import foreign workers to take American jobs, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had been considering a regulatory change to tighten the program in order to ensure that American workers are not being readily replaced by mostly Indian male nationals.

Trump’s tweet comes as business attempted to outsource nearly 420,000 American jobs in Fiscal Year 2018 to H-1B foreign workers rather than hiring U.S. workers.

Business Aims to Outsource 420K U.S. Jobs to Foreign Workers in 2018, Outpacing the Population of Tampa https://t.co/lX0NVYf6DM

— John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) December 13, 2018

On the campaign trail and in his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, Trump promised to reform the H-1B visa program to stem the tide of American workers being laid off by multinational corporations and forced to train their foreign replacements.

The most famous case was that of the laid-off American Disney workers who rallied with Trump on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, trusting that he would stop companies from importing foreign workers instead of hiring qualified Americans.

Last year, the laid-off Americans who sued Disney for replacing them with foreign H-1B workers announced they would be dropping their lawsuit after years of attempting to hold the corporation accountable.