Tax Dollars Used to Replace You The American Citizen
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.
“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.
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