Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin has temporarily delayed Sen. Mike Lee’s green-card giveaway bill to Indian graduates because it does not give away enough green cards to foreign graduates from many countries.
Durbin’s block sends Lee’s business-funded bill back into closed-door negotiations where business lobbyists will keep trying to redesign the nation’s immigration system. The lobbyists are seeking to boost their corporate revenues and profits by steering well-paid jobs away from expert American graduates and their college-graduate children.
So far, no GOP or Democrat senator has spoken up to protect millions of American college-graduate voters from this joint effort by the Indian government and U.S. investors to transfer millions of jobs in American office parks to low-wage India, via the expanding U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. The intended transfer of white-collar jobs mimics the disastrous transfer of many blue-collar jobs to low-wage factories in Chinese cities, following Congress’ approval of a free-trade treaty.
Durbin explained his bigger-is-better block on Thursday morning, to an audience comprised mostly of foreign visa-workers who have taken jobs from American graduates. Durbin said:
So we take this personally with you. And so let us work together. If we can work together to strengthen this, it will make a big difference. We need IT [information technology] engineers, we need medical researchers, we need nurses, we need so many others who are caught up now in this green card limitation. It’s time to bring this to an end, to open the doors for the reasons I mentioned earlier [including] family unification, what’s good for your economy, what is humanitarian [and] speaks to our values as a nation.
For example, Durbin told his audience that he wants to give green-cards to the foreign graduates of U.S. colleges. If implemented, this so-called “staple” plan would flood the labor market for American college-graduates, smash the economic and political power of the U.S. professional class, and supercharge the economic and political power of wealthy investors and real-estate owners.
Durbin’s hold matches the Democrats’ long-standing strategy in immigration politics: Offer more immigrant workers to business in exchange for business delivering more GOP votes for amnesty and immigration expansions.
That cheap-workers-for-amnesty deal strategy was used to get the “Gang of Eight” amnesty through the Senate in 2013 — although it was stymied in the GOP House amid GOP legislators’ worries about voter reactions. But if the business and investor groups get their extra Indian workers from Lee’s bill in 2019, then Democrats lose leverage to get CEOs’ support for a 2021 amnesty that would add millions of Democratic voters over the subsequent decade.
The defeat was announced by the Immigration Voice, which is a group of Indian visa-workers who want a fast-track to green cards for the roughly 300,000 Indian visa workers and their 300,000 foreign-born family members.
The group asked the visa workers to step up the pressure even after Durbin’s public statements.
So far, there has been minimal coverage of the expanding plan to export college-graduate jobs to India.
Industry’s stealthy, years-long, lobbying campaign to pass Lee’s outsourcing bill has successfully minimized coverage in the establishment media to just one Hispanic-focused article in the Miami Herald, and one pro-migrant article in the Wall Street Journal. The establishment coverage is minimal partly because the outsourcing bill has been successfully marketed as a minor correction to supposedly “discriminatory” country caps.
The caps promote diversity by spreading green cards among many countries. In practice, Indians get the largest share of the cards. The 20,000 cards given to Indian visa-workers comprise roughly 16 percent of the 120,000 cards.
The Lee bill gives CEOs 100,00 cards a year which they can recruit more Indian graduates for U.S. jobs.
This huge subsidy is five times larger than the current allocation of approximately 20,000 green cards for Indians, which has helped the companies recruit a volunteer workforce of roughly 800,000 Indian graduates in the United States. The 800,000 number includes roughly 300,000 Indian visa workers who have been allowed to stay long past the expiration of their six-year H-1B visas because their employers nominated them for green cards.
The current Indian workforce of roughly 800,000 visa workers has sidelined at least one million American graduates — including at least 20,000 voters in Durbin’s Illinois.
The sidelined Americans lost salaries and jobs in a wide variety of locations and careers — in software, math, accounting, engineering, design, healthcare, fashion or business. In time, Indians have expanded their role as managers and recruiters in major cities, so prompting widespread complaints and lawsuits about cheating, favoritism, and discrimination. Americans who leave these careers usually find jobs in other sectors, including journalism. Some excluded professionals have killed themselves, but many more have been forced into lonely retirement.
The actual loss to American graduates is likely far higher than one million jobs. The roughly 800,000 Indian visa workers work hand-in-glove with a larger workforce of at least two million Indians based in India. This joint U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy generated roughly $78 billion in revenue for India in 2018 — and it diverts billions of U.S. payroll dollars to investors’ profits and stock values on Wall Street.
The Indian government is lobbying for passage of Lee’s bill because India hopes to grow its economy by exporting Indian graduates into many European and U.S. companies, and then have the work sent to India.
If the CEOs get five times as many green cards to award, they will be able to recruit many more Indian workers for U.S. jobs.
These extra workers can arrive via the uncapped B1, TN, or Optional Practical Training programs, and will compete to be selected by their employers for the uncapped L-1 and part-way capped H-1B programs needed to apply for green cards. This multi-program, multi-year pipeline can hold far more workers than the 800,000 Indians now in the United States.
Overall, roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates from several countries hold visa jobs in the United States, so helping to flatline salaries for tens of millions of American graduates.
The Lee bill does not reform the green card process, for example, by limiting the number of workers who can be nominated for green cards each year.
Most of the Indian workers are being imported to run the U.S. side of the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, which is used by investors to transfer Americans’ salaries into their Wall Street stock values.
For example, Walmart is boosting its stock value by outsourcing 569 finance and accounting jobs in North Carolina to cheaper H-1B workers from India. If the company saves $10,000 per employee, Walmart will save $5.7 million per year. On Wall Street, Walmart’s price to earnings rate is 25 to one, so the $5.7 million in payroll savings will boost its stockholders’ value by $142 million.
Walmart picked an American company, Genpact, to supply the Indian workers. The company is a spin-off of General Electric, and it prospers by providing Indian H-1B workers to many companies in the United States. For example, the company asked for 271 H-1Bs in 2018, 410 H-1Bs in 2017, and 307 H-1Bs in 2016.
Genpact’s H-1Bs work on the U.S. side of the vast and growing U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, now worth roughly $78 billion per year. Part of the H-1Bs’ job is to funnel additional work back into India. For example, Genpact may only need to use 100 H-1Bs in North Carolina to help steer the work of the 569 fired American finance experts back to large teams of low-wage Indian graduates in India.
Genpact’s $3.3 billion in revenue is enough to generate $7.5 billion in stock value for its investors, which include Bain Capital, Blackrock, and Charles Schwab Investment Management.
Employers reward the low-wage Indian workers by giving them green cards, which allow them to become U.S. citizens — and to then import their immediate and extended families from India to the United States.
The investors are mostly based on the coasts, so their wealth is helping to spike income and real estate values in New York and California while the reduced investment and payroll in heartland states reduce their business income, real estate values, skilled workforces, and political power.
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