Universities Exploit Illegal Immigrants

Academia loves to proclaim its concern for the dispossessed but seldom wants to discuss its role in their exploitation.

“High-tech companies, university lobbyists, and powerful leaders in both parties have ramped up their plans to import unlimited numbers of legal foreign workers into our country through an alphabet soup of cheap labor visa programs,” Michelle Malkin and John Miano allege in their book, Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best and Brightest Workers. Malkin and Miano name names too, of people, places and things that make America’s immigration system look like something Upton Sinclair would warn against.

For example, they show that “the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama sneakily expanded the foreign worker supply by administrative fiat, including expansion of the Optional Practical Training (OPT) Program, through which 560,000 foreign ‘students’ have been authorized to work in the U.S.” Sometimes this optional training is in convenience stores.

Yet and still, the academic connection goes back much further than the last two presidents, at least as far back as the Immigration Act of 1990.  “Buried in the law is a special sweetheart deal for universities, nonprofits, and government research agencies for which ‘the prevailing wage level shall only take into account employees at such institutions and organizations in the area of employment,’” Malkin and Miano write. “Cheap labor-hungry universities only have to pay the prevailing wage in academia, not in a given industry at large.”

“In a university town, its wage effectively becomes the prevailing wage.” Malkin, a nationally syndicated columnist, is the author of a half a dozen books, including this one. Miano is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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