A REPUBLICAN presidential aspirant has said he is against increasing H-1B visas – the most sought-after work visas for IT professionals and companies the US.
Terming the increase a "huge mistake", former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said there are already a lot of Americans who are being displaced from the workforce.
"I'd love those Senators [to] tell me why they'd like to be president so we can ship more jobs to Mexico, China or Indonesia. I'd like to see a few more jobs here," Huckabee said in an interview with Breitbart News.
"Honestly, I don't give a rat's rear whether they get wealthy in China. I don't care whether they make it in Mexico – but I doggone sure care that people make it in America," he said.
Huckabee referred to the displaced workers at Disney to demonstrate how increasing H-1B visas negatively impacts the American worker.
"Look at what happened to Disney. There were a bunch of high-tech Disney workers – excellent job performance – and not only were they replaced by foreign H-1B workers, but to add insult to injury, the Disney workers were required to train their foreign replacements. And if they didn't, they would lose all their severance," he said.
Claiming that H-1B visas import cheap labour but are taking jobs away from Americans, he alleged what happened to the Disney workers was because the work they brought in from the H-1B was not up to the quality of the people who are veteran Disney employees, but it was because it was cheap labour.
"I don't know why anyone would want to displace high-tech workers in America to bring somebody from overseas and basically just chop the legs out from under the American worker. I think it's the opposite of what we should be doing," Huckabee said.
H-1B visas appears to have become an issue among the Republican presidential candidates after their last debate.
"One of the real challenges that we face in America is, we have a lot of people coming here from other countries to displace American workers. That makes no sense to me," Huckabee said.
"What I see you guys do out there on that factory floor is incredibly impressive because of the precision of which you have to do those jobs. It's not just that you want to please the customers. Some of the things you're doing out there, people's lives depend on the quality of work you do on this factory floor," he added.
