Dr. Ron Hira, professor of public policy at Howard University, argued that the tech industry supports executive action by President Obama on illegal immigration in order to depress wages, which he stated amounts to a war on the middle class on Thursday’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on the Fox Business Network.
Hira said that the claimed shortage of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workers is refuted by the lack of increase in STEM wages. And that increasing the number of foreign STEM workers crowds out American STEM workers, in addition to “discouraging US students from going into these fields, and these fields are really important stepping stones to the middle class.” He added “most of the rhetoric is about the best and brightest, in reality, most of the foreign workers they’re bringing in, have no more than ordinary skills and are paid cheaper wages, and so this is really about bringing in cheaper labor.”
Hira concluded by agreeing with Dobbs that “class warfare is being practiced in this country, just not by the president and Democrats, the first front in that war is Corporate America, technology companies, Silicon Valley, against middle class American workers,” further declaring that Silicon Valley was warring “against the middle class and it’s against those who are aspiring upward mobility into the middle class from the working class.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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