US Elections: Immigrants welcome?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Trump's crackdown on immigrants is popular with his core voters, but less so with corporate America.
Manuela Saragosa asks whether this nation of immigrants is about to vote to close the door to the American Dream for millions of foreigners. Among them are Indian IT workers who have been left in limbo by the sudden suspension of H-1B visas, as relayed by immigration lawyer Poorvi Chotani of LawQuest.
Theresa Cardinal Brown of the Bipartisan Policy Center says there is widespread agreement among voters that the immigration system is "broken", less so on what needs doing. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies think tank says President Trump hasn't gone far enough. In contrast, Britta Glennon of the Wharton business school says that even the lighter restrictions under the Obama administration drove high value jobs out of the US.
(Picture: A new US citizen is sworn-in at a naturalisation ceremony in Santa Ana, California Credit: Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Saaragossa. |
| 0:06.4 | Coming up, welcome to America, or maybe not, the US presidential elections will decide. |
| 0:12.9 | The idea that continent-spanning nation with a third of a billion people that invented the modern world needs a, you know, constant trickle of |
| 0:23.3 | computer programmers from South India is absurd. It's harder than ever for some of the world's |
| 0:29.0 | highest skilled people to gain permission to work in the United States. What does it all mean for |
| 0:34.4 | the American economy? The real concern is that the United States just isn't a place people want to come anymore. |
| 0:39.8 | And that has significant long-term effects on our ability to grow and prosper. |
| 0:44.6 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:51.2 | About half a million people in the US have come into the country on what's known as an H-1B visa, a work permit designed for high-skilled workers. |
| 1:00.5 | More than 70% of them are Indians, many of them, technology workers. |
| 1:05.2 | But it seems like President Trump doesn't really want them. |
| 1:08.4 | In June, he issued a proclamation temporarily blocking foreign |
| 1:11.7 | workers entering the country on these visas. Any jobs lost as a result of the COVID pandemic, |
| 1:17.2 | he said, should go to Americans first, not foreigners. It's worrying some American businesses. |
| 1:23.4 | Here's the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. |
| 1:25.9 | This high-skills immigration is crucial to American competitiveness, |
| 1:30.7 | building new companies, and so forth. |
| 1:32.3 | America does not have enough people with those skills, |
| 1:35.6 | those very specialized skills, to fill it, we need these people. |
| 1:38.9 | I don't agree with the current view on this matter in the government |
| 1:42.6 | because I know from a fact that we need |
| 1:45.3 | them in Silicon Valley. Another interesting statistic is that half of the founders of the Silicon Valley |
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