Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) may use the Senate’s Unanimous Consent rule this week to pass his redrafted S.386 “country caps” bill, which rewards Indian graduates who take jobs from U.S. graduates, say a variety of lobbyists and advocates.
Lee’s campaign is being quietly pushed by technology companies, from behind the cover of a noisy group of Indian workers who were imported into the United States by U.S. and Indian managers at many mainstream U.S. companies. The group, dubbed Immigration Voice, is loudly blaming Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) for blocking Lee’s bill, partly to obscure GOP senators’ concerns and the growing protests by swing-voting American graduates.
“If Senator Durbin does not negotiate in good faith … we will hold Senator Durbin accountable for killing the bill,” Immigration Voice told its members via a February 27 post on Facebook. “The whole world will witness that Senator Dick Durbin is nothing but a racist who wants the systematic ethnic cleansing of Indian immigrants from the United States,” the group said, adding:
In the near future, we will find out if we were right all along about Senator Durbin … or if Senator Durbin will live up to his own word- if he is honest and has any integrity based on his words on December 18th – when he promised to work in good faith to get #S386 done.
Please be prepared to follow all action items diligently and precisely. Do no more and no less than we request of you.
The extremely aggressive claim that Durbin is “racist” is remarkable,given Durbin’s long-standing support for higher levels of immigration from all parts of the world. But Durbin is a problem for the business groups who are pushing the bill, partly because he has insisted that the S.368 outsourcing bill include a legal measure to curb outsourcing.
The Lee bill would allow roughly 60,000 Indians workers (plus a similar number of family members) at U.S.-based companies to get green cards each year, up from the current annual inflow of about 20,000. In turn, the dramatically expanded offer to green cards to Indians would allow U.S. employers to hold out the huge prize of citizenship to many more Indians in exchange for several years of work.
There are no limits to the number of Indians who can get jobs in the United States each year via the various visa programs, including H-1B, Optional Training Program (OPT), L-1, TN, J-1, and O visas. Currently, U.S. employers use these programs to employ roughly one million Indian contract workers in place of roughly one million U.S. graduates. These Indian workers are hired mostly because they provide employers with a stable, compliant workforce — despite plentiful evidence of reduced innovation and increased risk of employment-discrimination lawsuits.
In December, Durbin and Lee drafted a compromise version of the S.386 bill.
Durbin agreed to remove the country cap that now sets a rough cap of 20,000 on the award of green cards to Indians each year. The cap has been in place for decades, and tech companies have used it to successfully build a huge dependent workforce of roughly 300,000 Indian workers.
These Indian workers are dependent on their employers because the employers have nominated them for green cards — and they cannot change jobs until they receive the green cards. This means the workers describe themselves as “indentured servants” because they cannot change jobs — or risk getting fired by their employers.
In exchange for removing the country cap, Durbin won a new “50-50” rule, which curbs the award of H-1B visas to the Indian-based outsourcing companies. The companies provide many Indian workers to the U.S. companies who want to shed American employees.
Durbin also won an “early filing” rule that would allow Indian visa-workers to escape dependence on their companies while they wait in the green-card backlog. The “early filing” status is very valuable for the Indian visa workers because it would allow them to freely seek new jobs in other U.S. companies while they wait for their green cards, and would effectively minimize the risk of being fired and being sent home by an employer.
But the Lee-Durbin compromise does not provide any significant protections for American graduates. Nor does it set any useful limits on the annual inflow of visa workers or even on the number of guest workers who can be put into the waiting list for green cards each year. It also creates a huge incentive for more Indian graduates to seek “early filing” status by getting U.S. college graduate jobs via the huge, uncapped, and barely supervised OPT program.
But Durbin’s 50-50 section in the bill was immediately denounced by NASSCOM, an India-based business group. The group is usually described as an Indian trade association, but it includes many companies owned by U.S. investors, and it provides cheap, compliant workers to many American and Indian firms. Through a web of contracts and investors, NASSCOM is closely tied to many U.S. companies in the Compete America coalition that is cheerleading for Lee’s bill.
Amid opposition from NASSCOM and from GOP senators, Lee has drafted another version of his bill — any may try to push that through the Senate via the Unanimous Consent rule.
The rule allows a Senator to present a bill in the Senate, and get it passed if no senator objects.
Lee’s latest draft delays the 50/50 rule for three years. That change gives U.S. technology companies three years to lobby for an indefinite delay and a maximum inflow of Indian outsourcing workers. Lee’s draft also offers a cosmetic change to the “early filing” language.
But Lee’s draft still offers no benefits to American graduates who lose their jobs to the many Indians who are willing to work at low wages in exchange for “early filing” and U.S. green cards.
In response to a question from Breitbart News, Lee’s spokesman said he has “no immediate plans for a UC.”
Lee’s hard-fought efforts to pass the outsourcing legislation have been a surprise to many of his conservative supporters. But the S.386 bill is strongly backed by Utah’s political establishment that does have the power to replace Lee via the primary process.
If passed, Lee’s bill also will have a huge impact on the immigration system.
By pushing the backlogged army of roughly 600,000 Indian workers and families to the head of the green card line, other companies will have to wait many years to get their imported workers.
For example, hospitals will lose their easy access to Filipino nurses, Florida companies will lose their ability to import people from South America, and farmers will lose their ability to provide green cards to Mexican dairy workers. The subsequent corporate pressure will likely push GOP legislators to further expand the inflow of pro-Democrat immigrants — and further alienate the swing-voting bloc of American college graduates.
In fact, some pro-migration groups and lawyers have said they support Lee’s bill precisely because it will quickly force Congress to raise immigration levels.
The S.386 bill and Lee’s draft are opposed by a loose alliance of the U.S and foreign graduates, immigration lawyers, immigration reformers, and various interest-groups who will lose access to foreign workers when once the bill offer fast-track green-cards to roughly 700,000 Indin workers and families.
For example, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is facing a tough reelection fight in Kentucky, and he will not be helped by the passage of a bill that allows U.S. companies to import Indian tech workers ahead of foreign medical experts, such as Filipino nurses hired by many urban and rural hospitals. “If this is perceived as it is — as a NASSCOM outsourcing protection bill that hurts opioid treatment in Kentucky — that’s enough to hurt McConnell in November,” one source told Breitbart News.
Many Americans have lost since jobs, professional status, much money, homes, and even marriages as the Indian workers spread out through the U.S. technology market. The earlier waves of Indian workers are now managers and recruiters and are using their jobs to block Americans from even getting interviewed for new jobs. This massive loss by a generation of American technology graduates has largely been ignored by the established media, even though it has been accompanied by mass underemployment of tech-experts and by a massive decline in U.S. technological ambition and innovation.
The U.S. graduates are politically important because they vote — and there may be enough of them to swing state total in the 2020 election, just as they helped to swing the 2018 election in against the GOP. The graduates’ anger was described by one Silicon Valley executive to Breibart News:
There is no corporate desire to reverse the Indians’ growing dominance of major companies, the Silicon Valley manager said. “They don’t want to. Nobody wants to do that … The Chamber of Commerce? They love this thing. Big tech? They love this thing. There are a few people at the top that are getting rich on this [Indian] thing.”
Federal legislators will not try to reverse the Indian expansion, he said:
“I’m sure they know. You talk to congressman and they’re like, “Oh my God, replacing Americans? Absolutely never gonna allow that! I would never allow that!” But they get in a room to vote and they go, ‘Yeah, no problem.’”
…
American college graduates are going to revolt against their replacement by Indians’ workers and managers, he said:
“People are looking at [Sen.] Bernie Sanders they’re so pissed off about the system. They’re looking at a socialist government, and I’m going ‘You know what? Neither party has served me. So why the fuck not go with Bernie Sanders and get rid of all these [CEOs and Indians]?’ Yeah, that’s kind of where we’re going [because] I think people are so pissed off.”
These American professionals have created several advocacy groups, including SAITJ.org, U.S. Tech Workers, and the American Workers Coalition. These groups allow the Americans to fight back without exposing their own identities to Indian managers and recruiters.
“This is the most radical change to America’s immigration laws in decades, and it threatens U.S. sovereignty by giving away control of our green card distribution process to foreign meddlers who have persistently harassed a sitting US senator,” said Marie Larson, a founder of the American Workers Coalition. Senators should instead act to bar companies from expanding their backlog of indentured workers by curbing the number of foreign workers who are approved for green cards each year, she added.
“We have had several meetings with different Senate offices, and the general consensus is that they all know this is a really bad bill, as it won’t solve the problem it’s seeking to solve,” said a statement from Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, He continued:
A lot of the supporters of bill S.386 make the argument that Indian IT outsourcing companies, like TCS, do not want the bill to pass simply because they want to keep these backlogged workers on indentured status. That is false based on how hard TCS, Nasscom, and Cognizant have been lobbying to pass the version of the bill without the Durbin [50-50] amendments.”
The pro-American groups are backed by the Chinese American Civic Action Alliance, which is an advocacy group of Chinese immigrants who oppose the Indian outsourcing programs, but who also support large-scale immigration.
Non-Indian foreigners are also lobbying against S.386 because it would push the technology sector’s Indian workforce to the head of the green-card waiting line. That push would also delay the award of green cards to many scientists and technology experts from Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia. These groups include the Anti-S386 Coalition and Support All of Us.
Paul Donnelly, a lobbyist for Support All of Us, says Lee’s country caps bill is a disguised giveaway to the India-based outsourcing companies.
At least one group of immigration lawyers also oppose the S.386 bill because it would more cause long delays for migrants for every other country. The long delays would happen because S.386 moves more than 300,000 Indian tech-workers — plus at least 300,000 spouses and children — to the head of the line for green-cards.
Other advocates say the measures will hurt the U.S. dairy industry, the Florida economy, sports teams, and even the E-sports industry.
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