House GOP legislators defeated the billionaire-backed EAGLE Act outsourcing bill on Wednesday — but only with the help of a breakaway faction of liberal Democrats who rejected the bill’s preference for Indian visa workers.
The remarkable alliance was created by West Coast business groups who used a population of Indian visa workers to disguise a massive outsourcing change — dubbed “Section 7.”
The section threatened to flood the U.S. labor market with a subservient, no-rights workforce that would displace millions of Americans from white-collar and blue-collar jobs.
The giveaway died without a vote when Democratic leaders withdrew the bill once they recognized they would lose on the House floor.
The lack of a vote obscures the political splits and shifts. But nearly all GOP members — including the eight GOP sponsors of the Fortune 500 giveaway — turned against the bill as GOP leaders Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and GOP Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) declared their opposition and began whipping their members to vote against the bill.
The bill’s complex Section 7 was “appalling, and I think that leadership recognized that,” said Ryan Walker, the vice president of Government Relations for Heritage Action. He told Breitbart News:
For a number of years, these types of bills were seen as a gimme from Republicans. But they’re taking a closer look at this stuff now. Especially over the past four, six, ten years, the business community has not always had the American people’s interests at heart. I think the GOP has recognized that and they’re finally taking a fine tooth comb to these pieces of legislation.
GOP legislators spotlighted Section 7.
The bill is “a big fat middle finger to America’s working families,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, (R-CA), one of the leading voices against the bill.
Section 7 of the bill “is an end-run around the annual green card limit,” Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) told the Committee on Rules, which sets the rules for each floor debate in the House.
But the GOP opposition came after conservative activists and immigration reformers lobbied members face-to-face — and after one-in-six GOP voters showed that immigration was their top priority during the 2022 midterm elections.
Breitbart News intensively covered the issue with nine articles since November 22.
Yet the GOP could not have won without support from Democrats, including Rep. Yvette Clark (D-NY) who runs the immigration section of the Congressional Black Caucus. “I cannot support efforts that would perpetuate the current inequities in our immigration system,” she wrote on December 6.
“I think that was probably the most significant development,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, adding:
I think what we’re going to see going forward is an awakening of American descendants. of slaves that they have real political power, and they don’t have to toe the Democratic line. In this case, they pushed off the Chambers of Commerce, the corporate Democrats, and they said, “Hey, what this doesn’t work for anyone but one country so we’re not going along with it.”
The outsourcing bill was pushed by FWD.us, which represents West Coast investors and their outsourcing companies. The investors hid their Section 7 behind a PR strategy that pitched the bill as a decent fix for the pro-diversity “country caps.” The caps limit the annual share of 140,000 corporate-sponsored green cards that can be allocated to the Indian visa workers preferred by the Fortune 500 and their subcontractors.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last year. But copies exist at the other sites.
The 2013 founders included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Matt Cohler at Benchmark, and Reid Hoffman, a partner at the Greylock Partners investment firm who also sits on Microsoft’s board.
The investors’ defeat is a big turnaround from 2019 when business groups used their lobbying to pass a similar bill that got just 65 “nay” votes.
A matching bill by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was blocked by several Senators once GOP staffers learned more about the economic impact of the matching H.R.1044 and S.386 bills.
In 2018, Breitbart News covered a similar push by Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS). He lost his seat in 2018 to Democrat Sharice Davids, who still holds the seat.
In 2018, 2020, and 2020, the opposition was led by a few reform groups, such as NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The media coverage of these jobs-and-wages debates was minimal outside Breitbart News. The vast majority of articles in the corporate media ignored the economics or the interests of Americans, and instead emphasized the concerns of the Indian contract workers who have taken the jobs that otherwise would have gone to Americans.
The EAGLE Act crash follows the apparent failure of a farmworker amnesty, and the expected failure of a Senate-proposed amnesty for the “DACA” illegal migrants.
The failure of a DACA amnesty is not a problem for the tech investors that fund the pro-amnesty protests — because the repeated DACA debates tend to keep the media from investigating the huge pocketbook impact of other migration and outsourcing programs.
But Democrats — and some Republicans — are still trying to insert other immigration giveaways into the end-of-year funding bill.
For example, on December 14, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) announced his support for a bill that offers fast-track green cards to a huge and growing population of 70,000 Afghans.
That population includes some people who fought the Taliban — and some opportunists who slipped into the U.S. airlift to reach what they hope will be a better life in the United States.
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