Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn today called for an immigration deal to increase the supply of foreign graduates for the white-collar jobs sought by debt-burdened, college-graduate Americans.
Cornyn is under pressure from the many business groups who recognize that cheap white-collar immigrants cut payroll costs and raise profits. The greater supply of skilled labor forces down salaries for American professionals in many jobs, including technology, business, medicine, education and even journalism.
Cornyn is the second-ranking GOP Senator, and he argued that reductions to the visa-lottery and chain-migration programs can allow increases in skilled immigration programs, such as green cards for the foreign graduates of Americans colleges. He said:
We might to maybe reassign some of those visas to merit-based immigration, people who have graduated with skills that we need here in the United States, including the STEM field — science, technology, engineering, math.
I think that would — I think that makes a lot of sense. but obviously, I am not going to decide this by myself. we’re going to have to build a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, and I think we can.
Under current laws, companies employ a roughly 2 million foreign graduates under various types of visa programs, including the H-1B, OPT, L-1 and J-1 visas. In 2017, Texas universities and companies got 25,000 H-1B new visas, suggesting a resident population of at least 100,000 H-1B workers in the state.
Many of the foreign graduates work at very low wages in universities, healthcare, technology, teaching, accounting, business, and fashion, partly because they will get a deferred bonus of citizenship from the federal government. The cheap-labor policy is backed by many business groups, including Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us.
If implemented, Cornyn’s proposal could add more than 300,000 foreign graduates to the labor marketplace each year, alongside the 800,000 indebted Americans who graduate as doctors, business managers, architects, accountants, teachers, designers, statisticians, and therapists.
But Cornyn’s proposal to transfer — not eliminate — the 50,000 visa lottery visas and the roughly 250,000 chain-migration visas would also force many Americans graduates downwards to compete for jobs against blue-collar Americans. That movement would pressure wages in the United States, and conflict with Trump’s “Buy Americans, Hire American” policy, which has helped raise Americans’ salaries in 2017 by curbing overall immigration inflows.
Cornyn’s call for raising the number of white-collar immigrants may become part of the second round of negotiations after Congress and the President come to a deal on the first four issues, said one source. In the first round, Cornyn “has been solid” in support the president’s four objectives, the source said.
In his Senate speech, Cornyn also said:
Any solution we come up with … must also protect the 320 million Americans who already live in the country … We need to correspondingly assure the American people that we are serious about border security and enforcing our laws.
Cornyn and House GOP Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy are the two GOP members of the four-man panel now trying to develop some legislative package that meets Trump’s popular immigration priorities. Those priorities are labeled under four categories — ending chain-migration, ending the visa lottery, building a border wall with needed enforcement legal changes, and providing some form of amnesty to the 690,000 registered DACA enrollees.
In contrast, Democrats and some liberal Republicans have been pushing to provide an amnesty for perhaps 8 million people, without offering anything significant on chain migration, the visa lottery or the wall. That package was decisively rejected January 11 by Trump, prompting the Democrats to filibuster the federal 2018 budget.
On January 22, after Senate Democrats ended their filibuster, the White House slammed the “Gang of Six” plan:
Their proposal provides a path to citizenship or legalization to at least 8 million unlawful immigrants: “dreamers”, their siblings and their parents. Flake-Graham-Durbin want to leave extended-family chain migration in place which means millions more relatives in foreign countries would be able to come to America, bringing the total covered population past 10 million …
The Flake-Graham-Durbin proposal embodies every reason Americans do not trust Washington. It puts people who are in this country unlawfully ahead of our own American citizens. The Trump Administration remains committed to bipartisan responsible immigration reform that truly secures the border and puts the interests of the American people first.
After the vote, Trump also invited several GOP Senators to the White House to discuss the next stage of the debate. They included Cornyn, Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. James Lankford, Sen. David Perdue, and Sen. Thom Tillis.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
That inflow is applauded by many GOP and Democratic Senators who face constant pressure from business groups for more cheap workers.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
The cheap labor policy has hit college graduates, not just blue-collar workers.
The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.
Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a large percentage of the nation’s annual income has shifted to investors and away from employees.
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