The Senate has voted to begin drafting a technology-funding bill with House leaders, amid elite and public concerns over China’s rapid advances.
But a deep political split was exposed during a staged cheerleading event on Monday.
Commerce Secretary Gine Raimondo held the event to urge legislators to finalize the technology bill that will spend at least $52 billion on domestic computer-chip factories, dubbed “fabs.”
However, a prominent investor wants to add easy-migration rules that would deliver more foreign graduates into the new government-funded tech jobs.
“Talent is everything,” interjected Eric Schmidt, who is an investor and a former CEO at Google:
We need this [funding] bill passed and we collectively have got to figure out a way to get all the really, really smart people in this area to work on this. That also, by the way, includes high skills immigration to get people who want to work in the United States to work in these fabs — and the citizenry in those states are going to benefit enormously from this as well.
Raimondo rejected the demand, diplomatically. “As a former governor, I could not agree more with you about that. These are jobs, these are good jobs and these are jobs Americans should have,” Raimondo said, before adding:
My observation is that there is broad agreement on the biggest parts of this [Biartisan] Innovation Act. We’ll disagree around the edges, but there’s broad agreement. The challenge is getting it done quickly.
Raimondo is a leader in President Joe Biden’s old-left East Coast wing, which wants to help raise Americans’ wages. Her wing has clashed repeatedly with the White House’s new-left progressive West Coast wing.
The West Coast wing favors more immigrant labor and consumers for wealthy investors. It is fronted by Vice President Kamala Harris and homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and is backed by Schmidt and other West Coast investors.
Schmidt is a former CEO of Google and is now a leading West Coast investor worth perhaps $30 billion. He is a career advocate of “high-skilled” visa programs that are normally used by the Fortune 500 to import unskilled or mid-skilled foreign contract workers to take the career-starter jobs and the lower-management jobs needed by each generation of skilled U.S. graduates.
The visa programs — such as the H-1B visa and the Optional Practical Training program — have imported an army of more than 1 million foreign workers and managers for the U.S. technology sector, including for chip-maker Intel Corp.
These visa workers are n0-rights contract workers — not naturalized immigrants — so they are totally subordinate to CEOs and Schmidt’s investor class.
Their workplace subordination prevents the visa workers from acting like the U.S. professionals who are educated to argue in favor of quality, long-term research, security, and other vital needs against the short-term, green-eyeshade stock-market priorities embraced by CEOs and other executives.
But many U.S. professionals have been replaced by imported workers and managers who are under intense pressure to focus on their non-professional and self-serving career priorities, discriminatory views, job selling, and exclusionary networks.
The resulting loss of vital workplace tension between U.S. executives and U.S. professionals has helped to stifle innovation. It has also crashed a growing number of U.S. tech industries, including Boeing after the company managers allegedly downplayed critical flaws in its 737 MAX aircraft.
“It used to be when you raised your hand and said ‘We’ve got a problem here,’ the response was ‘Yeah, you’re right, we’re gonna fix it,'” said John Barnett, a quality control expert at Boeing. “After the merger with McDonnell Douglas … Boeing quit listening to their employees, so every time I raised my hands ‘Hey, we got a problem here,’ they would attack the messenger and ignore the message.”
“I’ve been working there in the Seattle area for a long time, and the environment that we ended up merging with [McDonnell Douglas] was so different,” said Cynthia Kitchens, a quality control manager from 2009 to 2016. She continued:
McDonnell Douglas was the ‘Good ole’ boys’ network. They weren’t respectful of our [professional] processes or of employees … Before we got like this, we just didn’t take shortcuts, because it just wasn’t the Boeing culture. No shortcuts: You do it right, and you build in the quality and the safety and the profits will follow. All that changed, and it was just heartbreaking.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” a former Intel employee told Breitbart News. However, the rules are different in an office run by Indian managers, he said:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
Even as he calls for more Fortune 500 visa workers, Schmidt uses his wealth to directly fund promising U.S. and foreign entrepreneurs and researchers.
The Fortune 500 employment of visa workers also aborts the careers of young U.S. graduates who might someday build enough expertise and contacts to launch competing products and companies.
For example, Atul Nanda is an Indian-born former visa worker who now works as a vice president at Google’s database company. He recently fired a team of U.S. database experts in the company’s “Looker” team — but only after they trained Indian visa workers, according to a March 21 report in MorningBrew.com:
Since its 2012 debut, Looker had been steadily expanding in staff and scope and had landed clients like Kickstarter, Asana, TaskRabbit, and Moderna. One of Looker’s goals is to help provide “scalable machine learning,” like allowing users to pair ML models with organized data sets. In theory, its software platform makes Google Cloud even more attractive to clients looking to parse their reams of data.
[…]
One of Looker’s major selling points is its highly trained customer-support team. That’s something Atul Nanda, VP of Google Cloud Support, stressed in an internal town hall one week after the layoffs.
“Looker has a Department of Customer Love, which is more than just a department name and sets the culture—it’s the secret sauce, it’s the DNA,” Nanda said. “With every acquisition, there’s an evolution process we go through, and sometimes these innovation processes can be difficult. In this case, for Looker, we needed to bring Looker into alignment for the rest of GCP [Google Cloud Platform]. And I am hoping that we can do our very best to preserve that culture of DCL, which is just admirable, to say the least.”
The workplace dominance of the investor-minded CEOs has ensured the has U.S. fallen behind China’s 5G technology, even as China focuses its effort on developing artificial intelligence, new weaponry, and commercial aircraft.
The post-1990 damage from the visa-worker programs has also been worsened by investors’ repeated claims that U.S. manufacturing could be exported to China without damaging U.S. research capabilities.
But the transfer of the U.S. manufacturing sector provided a foundation for Chinese engineers and scientists to gradually build a vast range of products — and to develop new technologies that threaten much-touted American dominance.
Meanwhile, the loss of the U.S. manufacturing sector also destroyed the economic and engineering foundation for private-sector U.S. researchers, even as U.S. universities imported more Chinese and European scientists to take U.S. science careers.
Schmidt twice acknowledged the disastrous mistake that has been pushed by investors for 15 or more years. “We made a mistake collectively,” he told Raimondo. “This bill addresses that,” he said, adding:
… the key thing that this money does is … it provides funding for expansion of these [fabs] but it also provides funding for basic research, basic strategy, and basically get us to where we should have been because of the mistake we made maybe a decade ago. Why is that important? When you study fabs they are a process of continuous improvement, every single day, over and over and over again.
Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) is the leading GOP Senator in the debate. He dodged Schmidt’s migration demand as he told the group that “American leadership in science and technology, especially the emerging technologies that will dominate the 21st century is vital to both the future of the American economy and to our competitiveness with China.”
But he echoed Raimondo, saying “it’s essential that [the bill] be bipartisan.”
The call for bipartisanship is a coded disagreement with the Democratic-drafted House version of the bill, which would allow Fortune 500 CEOs to import many more foreign workers for a vast range of white-collar jobs. Breitbart News reported on February 1:
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.
On February 7, Young told Punchbowl News that if Congress wants to import workers, “we need to do it smartly, in order to once again ensure that those new workers aren’t competing with our existing workers for jobs, competing for wages and salaries.”
Other Democrats are concerned about the economic damage caused by the huge and growing population of no-rights visa workers. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), for example, has co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that would modestly curb the loss of jobs to H-1B contract workers.
There is no politically feasible way for legislators to develop a visa program for “high skilled workers” without it being used to push skilled Americans out of many white-collar jobs, said Rob Law, a policy expert at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
If you look at the H-1B program, they use glossy language like “Best and Brightest” … But there’s nothing top-tiered about it. There are no protections [for skilled Americans]. There are no recruiting requirements … There’s nothing that puts pay at a premium, and so the system is used to import a large foreign worker population that is rather indistinguishable [from Americans].
The foreign workers must be compliant because they depend on their CEOs to get the big, deferred-compensation bonus of green cards for themselves and their children, Law told Breitbart News:
The way the employment-based immigration system is, with the employer in charge of the visa … the foreign worker is going to be obedient. They will not push back, they won’t offer alternative suggestions from what their bosses are offering up, they’re not going to seek out a new job … They are going to stay put and their compliance and their immobility is the price for them getting to work in the United States and the potential prospect of a path to citizenship.
The imported, dependent, and compliant workforce is bad for innovation, Law said: “It kills innovation and it destroys or erodes the environment that led to the groundbreaking developments generated by Americans in America, whether it is technological advances or advances in the sciences.”
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
The self-serving economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point. It is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and shoves tens of millions of Americans out of the labor force.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, reduces their political clout, undermines U.S. workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic strategy also kills many migrants, splits foreign families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.
Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.