Democrats’ China Bill to ‘Lobotomize’ U.S. College Graduates

The House’s pending anti-China bill offers Chinese, Indian, and other foreign graduates easy access to mainstream white collar jobs needed by striving U.S. college graduates.

“This is a lobotomy for the American middle class, for the professional classes in America, because they’re going to be muscled out in the workplace by [foreign] people who are the preferred hires of corporations and university research universities,” Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, told Breitbart News.

The draft “America COMPETES Act of 2022” would allow foreigners to win an uncapped number of green cards by studying to become ordinary chemists, doctors, engineers, and statisticians — or accountants, tax experts, computer security experts, statisticians, ecologists, and many other types of professionals.

“It’s insanity — the idea that you would create a bill that supposedly improves America’s competitiveness [against China] by outsourcing all of the [skilled] labor is just nuts,” said Rosemary Jenks, government relations director for NumbersUSA. “It’s dystopian.”

The bill emerged from the House shortly after the Senate blocked the Build Back Better bill, which tried to create new pipelines for foreign graduates to get U.S white-collar jobs.

The bill’s immigration sections are touted by advocates as a way to deliver skilled workers into supposedly empty “science, technology, engineering and math” (STEM) jobs throughout the U.S. tech sector. So Section 80303 of the bill is titled “Doctoral STEM Graduates,” and it offers extra green cards to foreigners who get PhDs at U.S. and foreign universities.

But the fine print allows a far greater variety of mid-skilled foreign migrants into the white-collar jobs needed by Americans.

The section says on page 1,708 that the green cards will be offered to people who “have earned a doctoral degree in a program of study involving [emphasis added] science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.”

Page 1,710 offer more details:

The term ‘program of study involving science, technology, engineering, or mathematics’ means a field included in the Department of Education’s Classification of Instructional Programs taxonomy within the summary groups of agricultural sciences, natural resources and conservation, computer and information sciences and support services, engineering, biological and biomedical sciences, mathematics and statistics, military technologies, physical sciences, or medical residency and fellowship programs, or the summary group subsets of accounting and related services and taxation.

But the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) is a long list of skills and credentials — and it was expanded January 21 by President Joe Biden’s zealously pro-migration deputy, Alejandro Mayorkas.

The bill allows green cards to be given to graduates who get Ph.D. degrees — in exchange for full tuition — in categories 1,3, 11, 15, 29, 14, 26, 27, and 40.

The degrees can be awarded from a wide variety of universities, including Chinese and Indian universities, as well as lower-tiered domestic universities, dubbed R2 universities.

These 60-plus R2 universities include Azusa Pacific University, East Carolina University, Hampton University, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Oakland University, Southern Methodist University, and Teachers College at Columbia University.

So the Lofgren bill is opening a university-manage pipeline of mid-skill — but highly credentialled — foreign workers to the Fortune 500 firms in her Silicon Valley district and throughout the nation, said Lynn. He continued:

It’s about creating incentives [for foreign graduates] to go to an American university because they are dangling the promise of citizenship … If you’re in a country like China or India, you’re going to invest a lot in that [hope that] universities will be acting as a de-facto immigration service.

The legislation would provide federally-funded U.S. universities with a vast, captured workforce of foreign Ph.D. graduates to replace American professionals. Many foreign graduates would work long hours to help develop technology — and then go home to create their own companies that would produce and sell the technology developed with federal funds.

In reality, there are few or no limits on the inflow of very clever people, either via U.S. colleges, O-1 “genius visas,” L-1 work permits, and other visa routes known by hired legal guides. For example, Twitter’s CEO arrived as a college graduate.

Moreover, the focus on universities is counter-productive, said Lynn:

When you ship all your manufacturing overseas [to China], you ship the brains and you ship the engineering jobs overseas. The idea that “They can make it overseas but we will design it here” is rubbish because eventually the research and development follow the manufacturing. We now have the research and development following manufacturing [to China], and America is being hollowed out and eventually, we will be making napkins.

What Silicon Valley and the Fortune 500 really want out of the China bill is more mid-skilled workers to fill many more professional jobs, said Lynn.

Fortune 500 and technology investors have long been lobbying for more foreign workers under the claim that they need “top tier” immigrants. “The ability to attract and retain top-tier talent from around the world is the backbone of a trifecta where the best talent comes to the U.S., to work at the best institutions on the most cutting-edge intellectual property,” ex-Google chief Eric Schmidt wrote in a June 2020 op-ed for Barron’s magazine.

Currently, these workers mostly arrive from India or China via the H-1B visa program, the Optional Practical Training program, the B-1/B-2 six-month visa, or as visa overstays.

Some of the visa workers are very clever and productive. But the vast majority are mid-skilled, recent graduates who are wanted by U.S. executives because they are willing to work long hours for many years to get the massive prize of green cards from the U.S. government, said Lynn.

Roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates are now working in jobs to get green cards.

Before the visa workers were imported by Congress, those jobs were the starter jobs for young American graduates, and were used to grow a domestic workforce of experienced and innovative American professionals, he said.

But today’s foreign contract workers cannot change companies without approval from their employers. They cannot quit to create their own companies. They cannot complain about frequent posting to different cities, about having to work on weekends for abusive managers, because they face the permanent risk of being sent home by angry home-country managers who are empowered by hands-off U.S. executives.

The visa workers cannot testify in court or object to reckless, unethical, or illegal decisions by their company executives unless they are willing to give up their hope of getting green cards for themselves and their children.

So the workers rationally prioritize their ruthless pursuit of green cards above product quality, corporate health, and professional obligations, according to Breitbart’s interviews with many U.S.  and Indian visa workers.

The process of sponsoring foreign workers for green cards is “highly susceptible to fraud,” says a 2020 report by the Department of Labor’s Inspector General. The process “relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria,” the report said, echoing decades of systemic fraud described by cops, federal agencies, embassy officials, and advocates for Americans.

The post-1990 massive replacement of American professionals by subordinate foreign workers has harmed U.S. productivity — mostly garishly when Boeing executives reportedly spiked their stock market bonuses by relying on powerless Indian contract workers to complete faulty parts of the 737 MAX airliner.

Similarly, U.S. companies have lost the lead in 5G communications gear to China, in part because the U.S. executives use their compliant visa workers to goose short-term profit at the cost of long-term research.

But lobbyists for U.S. investors are eager to import many more foreign graduates for U.S. white-collar jobs.

“I think our North Star that we want is a fundamental overhaul of the immigration system,” said Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an advocacy group for West Coast investors, including Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. On January 24, he told the business-funded Bipartisan Policy Center that:

We need  … an approach that actually builds legal immigration avenues to the United States so that everything is not so reliant on [workers] showing up to the border and seeking asylum … We should be building and working on boring and mundane [bureaucratic] systems so that moms and dads can come to the United States on a bus or on a plane, people can come to work, they can come for seasonal work, they can come to get a green card, they can come to reunite with family here.

This push for more migration is being led by Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors. They stand to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters. The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats not to talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.

“We have to be successful in this legislative moment … [legislators] should be leaning in as hard as they possibly can take advantage of this moment,” Schulte added.

The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website in 2021. But copies exist at other sites.

The China outsourcing bill “basically ensures that if America is competing, it’s relying on foreign workers,” said Jenks, adding:

It is a huge opportunity [for Republicans] to show Americans what the Democrats intend for them. They’re giving away the [nation’s] white-collar jobs. They’ve already tried to give amnesty to all the agricultural workers, so they want to give away the farm jobs. They’ve increased H-2B [visa workers], so they want to give away lower-skilled jobs. What’s left?

“You can be an elite millionaire, a billionaire, be a college professor, or in the media or in politics, and that’s it,” she added.

“The average member of Congress does not know what’s in this bill,” she told Breitbart News. “I guarantee you, none of them have read it. But the leadership, including Lofgren, they know exactly what’s in this, and they know the impact that it will have, and they’re fine with that …  They are 100% responsible for it.”