Republican President George H.W. Bush joined Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy to pass the Immigration Act of 1990 that expanded U.S. foreign worker visas, implemented family-chain-migration, and launched the H-1B “specialty occupations" visa program.
The so-called “Einstein Visas” program was designed to allow employers having difficulty hiring enough skilled U.S. college graduates, to temporarily sponsor “green card” work visas for up to 85,000 foreign college graduates. But Silicon Valley tech giants used low-cost H-1B foreigners to dump higher-paid American employees. When H-1B temporary workers’ visas expire, many fail to return home and just keep working.
Senator Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 in opposition to offshoring U.S. jobs and displacing U.S. tech workers with temporary H-1B visas. Obama trumpeted that if elected president, “I will stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.”
But in his first six years as president, the H-1B program swelled to 460,000 non-immigrant foreign graduates taking U.S. jobs, plus another 107,000 foreign workers taking American tech jobs under an H-1B unlimited hiring exemption for US universities.