Coming down hard on the “misuse” of H-1B visas, used largely to bring software professionals from India, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has mooted a pause in the use of these visas for one or two years to fix the “mess” surrounding this visa programme which he called “very, very bad” for American workers.
In a curious comment during a Republican debate in Miami on Thursday night, Trump said he himself has been using H-1B visas for his company, remarking: “It’s something that I frankly use and I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have it. Very, very bad for workers.”
“I think for a period of a year to two years we have to look back and we have to see, just to answer the second part of your question, where we are, where we stand, what’s going on,” he said, adding: “We have to sort of take a strong, good, hard look and come up with plans that work.”
Other Republican candidates also came down hard on H-1B visas the way the programme was being run. That included Senator Marco Rubio, who once was a big supporter of H-1B visas and wanted the programme to be expanded. He attacked Disney for replacing American workers with Indians, brought by Tata under this visa.
“What they’re basically doing is they are insourcing and outsourcing. They are bringing in workers from abroad that are not direct employees of a Disney or someone else, they’re employees of this consulting business,” he said.
“What I argue is that no consulting business such as that should be allowed to hoard up all of these visas, that the visas should only be available for companies to use to directly hire workers and that we should be stricter in how he enforce it,” Rubio said.
During the debate, Trump refused to reverse his earlier comments in a CNN interview that “Islam hates US”, adding a “lot of” Muslims, if not all, did hate America.
While voicing his commitment to crush ISIS, Trump, for the first time, said the effort might require a massive ground deployment of forces to crush ISIS. The numbers could be in the range of 20,000-30,000 workers, he said.
“We really have no choice, we have to knock out ISIS,” Trump said. “I would listen to the generals, but I’m hearing numbers of 20,000 to 30,000.”