The Senate’s high-tech funding bill will create high-tech jobs for people in heartland America, not just in immigration-inflated Silicon Valley and other coastal sites, according to Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), the leading Republican behind the bill.
“This bill will establish regional technology hubs across our country, which will become centers for the research, development, entrepreneurship, and manufacturing of new key technologies,” Young said in a Wednesday speech shortly before the bill was approved.
He continued:
This is incredibly important at a time when too many Americans in the heartland feel left out, in too many areas overlooked, when only a handful of cities account for nearly 90 percent of job growth in these advanced sectors.
The bill passed after Young and other GOP senators defeated a Democratic push to let investors import their own workforces instead of hiring Americans.
The Senate’s bill is expected to be approved by the House as early as Friday. The bill passed by a 64 to 33 vote, with most of the GOP opposition publicly focused on the bill’s vast spending.
The bill authorizes government future spending of roughly $280 billion on technologies and on U.S.-based companies that help ordinary Americans compete with China’s government-funded technology sector.
Young’s push to override the government migration programs, and instead let the U.S. labor market govern the nationwide distribution of technology wealth, was backed by non-coastal Democrats. For example, Young allied with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who told the Washington Post on July 27:
Arizona is well poised to be a place for a tech hub. We are already home to, in addition, Arizona State, NAU, and UofA, which are all doing incredible work around technology and science. We’re home to some major corporations that are doing really innovative work around technology. So we’ll be working hard to get one of those tech hubs in Arizona, and I think it’s a good fit based on the work we’re already doing in the state.
In the same interview, Young added on behalf of his Indiana citizens:
I know our state is already hitting the ground running as it relates to applying for such designation. Maybe it will be in hypersonics. Maybe it will be in synthetic biology. We have a lot of resident expertise there between ag and pharma life sciences. Perhaps it will be autonomous systems, utilizing the expertise that we’ve gotten with the constellation of businesses located around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The technology bill’s progress has been delayed by numerous disagreements, including the Democratic proposal that would allow investors and CEOs to import an unlimited supply of foreign graduates for a vast array of technology and non-technology jobs to be created by the spending bill.
The giveaway section was excluded from the Senate’s version of the bill because of clear opposition from Young and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Young did not mention the immigration fight in his floor speech but did include an emphasis on “all Americans”:
Simply put, this bill will make America stronger, safer, and more prosperous. … This bill is about securing our country, giving our people the tools to flourish, and ensuring America continues its global research role. … [We’re] building a prosperous and secure tomorrow for all Americans.
The fight spotlights the growing realization by Americans and GOP legislators that immigration skews the national economy towards the wealthy Democratic-dominated coastal states. For example, the H-1B, L-1, OPT, and J-1 visa-worker programs allow coastal CEOs, investors, and universities to import their own low-productivity, low-cost foreign workforces, regardless of how many millions of young Americans graduate from heartland schools and colleges.
When coastal CEOs can recruit workers at local airports, they face little marketplace pressure to build new offices in heartland states that educate many productive, innovative, skilled, and diligent Americans.
The existence of those visa programs helped minimize high-tech investment in the states that grew the nation’s world-beating industrial economy.
In May, the GOP’s nominee for the Alabama Senate seat, Katie Britt, told Breitbart News:
Alabamians are disproportionately hurt by the immigration system right now. You’ve got two things going [from immigration]. First, continual driving down of wages [in Alabama]. Second, the coastal elites are able to fill their workforce needs [with immigrants] and we lose the opportunity to allow our workers [in Alabama] to compete for those jobs [created by coastal investors].
…
We’re displacing an entire generation. Look at how many immigrants we have coming here! Look at our population growth and you look at what we have to do for the creation of new jobs. It’s actual insanity. We’ve got to [be] … giving our people a pathway to success — not creating an [high-immigration] environment where their skill set is less needed, and therefore, where they have to accept lower wages than what they’re worth.
The rejection of the Democrat’s immigration proposal is a defeat for the establishment’s Extraction Migration economic strategy and the investor class, notably for investor Eric Schmidt and various billionaire founders of the FWD.us lobby group.
Some CEOs and investors recognize the need to invest in Americans, not visa workers. In August 2021, Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, told the Washington Post:
I’m a farm boy from Pennsylvania, sort of stumbled into technology, went to community college, and really just the great American Cinderella story, so it’s something close to my personal heart as well, that, you know, many bright, capable–you know, they don’t have the opportunity to be MIT or Stanford entry … with 18 community colleges … we’re building on a success model that we already had in place to start this AI [Artificial Intelligence] program that enable us to have this workforce development with the basics of AI. We do believe that it becomes basic for everybody, but we also expect that this will [create] some of the Pat Gelsingers of the future, that this will be the starting point, and they go on to university and that they progress with their career and their employers.
“We do hope that sometime soon [that] we’re on a conversation where we’re saying, okay, we’ve launched our next 50, next 100 community colleges,” Gelsinger added.
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