At a recent event that focused on youth unemployment, Vice President Joe Biden stressed the importance of tech jobs being accessible to Black women “from the hood” despite a push for comprehensive amnesty legislation.
The Urban Alliance and the Chamber of Commerce, which promised to invest $50 million into supporting comprehensive amnesty legislation, came together for the event Friday where Biden shared a personal experience about witnessing Black women thriving in the tech space.
During a recent visit to UST Global, a placement operation for IT firms, he explained that women from low-income neighborhoods were able to change their lives for the better through their work in the IT space.
UST Global asked the vice president to come see one of the programs “they have going on at a community college in the inner city of Detroit.”
Biden accepted the invitation and was pleased with what he saw.
“And I walked in and there was, I think it … was a 15-week program, and it was a group of women from the neighborhood, or from the ‘hood,” he said.
Biden explained that the women varied in age from 24 up to 58 and all earned competitive salaries.
“These were people with high school degrees coming out of the most hard-scrabbled neighborhoods, every one of them in Detroit,” he said. “Every one had a job. The lowest starting salary – $58,000. The highest – [$81,000], because in Detroit, there is an immediate need now for 1,000 programmers.”
He also referred to a recent study that estimated that the U.S. will need roughly 1.4 million new workers in the tech space in the next 10 years.
These jobs include everything from software developers to computer network specialists.
According to Ron Hira, a public policy professor at Howard University and an H-1B expert, these jobs can serve as “pathways” to the middle class.
“It’s a way of getting into the middle class and the professional class, and that’s being cut off,” Hira said on a conference call with nonpartisan tech scholars, according to Breitbart News.
Hira was referring to the major push being made by pro-amnesty lobbyists.
Tech giants are moving forward with laying off thousands of American workers and attempting to fill those positions with cheaper foreign labor.
Microsoft recently laid off 18,000 American workers but is still pushing for increases in guest-worker visas.
Hira even slammed Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg during an appearance on The Laura Ingraham Show for “pouring millions of dollars into lobbying efforts for amnesty legislation,” Breitbart News reported.
U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow recently wrote to President Barack Obama about the amnesty programs and explained that they could have a “disastrous effect” on the lives of Black Americans and legal immigrants.