Indian-American lawyer and the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US. Department of Justice Harmeet K Dhillon said she is an immigrant and came to the US on a visa but the idea that the government is funding institutions that disproportionately hire H-1B visa and other legal immigrant visa categories when there are Americans who could fill those jobs is problematic. Dhillon said this on Christopher Rufo’s podcast amid a growing resistance towards the H-1B visa program that allows companies to hire Indians and Chinese and other skilled professionals from foreign countries.
Dhillon is quite active on social media and every time an H-1B abuse is flagged, she responds — promising action or seeking more details.
“I am an immigrant. I am grateful that my family was able to come to this country. My dad was a doctor. He provided medical services in a rural community for most of his career. And I think that’s an important role because frankly, American medical schools aren’t pumping out enough doctors to serve all of our institutions.”
“But why aren’t they? We should be solving that problem so that the foreign medical graduate, the foreign engineer, the foreign CEO is an exception and not a fairly significant swath of the populace.
I think that needs to be solved by our society and the demand needs to change,” Dhillon said.
The India-born Trump administration official said this is a conservative and liberal problem. “I can tell you from living in Silicon Valley and being a lawyer there for decades, the economics of it are such that it makes good sense for American corporations to exploit foreign labor. It’s cheaper and you have a fiduciary duty to your bottom line to make your widget for the least amount of monet and that’s what they’re doing,” Dhillon said, adding that DoJ can only go to a certain extent and can inflict pain on institutions that are blatantly violating federal law but the puzzle has more pieces to be solved and the rest are not in the hands of the DoJ.
