Watch: Chad Wolf’s DHS Confirmation Hearing

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will get a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday morning.

The September 23 hearing is needed before a confirmation vote, and it is likely to include some partisan theatrics as senators from both parties ignore the agency’s important role in importing cheap and compliant workers into Americans’ labor markets.

“What the Democrats will talk about are ‘children in cages,’ what the Republicans will talk about are ‘secure borders,’” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. He continued:

No one is going to talk about employment visa programs like the H-1B, OPT, and J-1 programs. And at the end of the day, the vote will be along highly partisan lines. I don’t see any crossovers.

Both sides of the aisle, Republican and Democrat, are equally culpable of outsourcing and offshoring [white-collar] American jobs, essentially, of waging war on our productive classes. So I don’t expect any questions about employment visas.

Watch here at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Much of the outsourcing is conducted by the very wealthy founders and investors in FWD.us, which is denouncing Wolf for controversies related to DHS’s increasingly successful effort to block illegal blue-collar migration. The group’s statement avoided the hugely profitable white-collar migration to denounce the curb on the less lucrative blue-collar migration:

As Acting Secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf has been at the center of family separation at the border, he fought to end DACA, he was in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, and more. Under his leadership, we have seen recent reports of alleged mass sterilization of women in immigration detention. He ordered armed government agents to threaten and attack individuals protesting police violence.

Wolf is clearly unfit to lead the Department of Homeland Security—whether in his current illegal capacity [or after] confirmation. We urge Senators to reject his nomination. The United States deserves much, much better.

Similarly, Immigration Voice, a pro-migration progressive group, is slamming Wolf for his curb on blue-collar migration while ignoring white-collar migration:

Chad Wolf is an unlawfully appointed Trump henchman more interested in protecting President Trump and implementing the Trump/Miller anti-immigrant agenda than serving the country. He is a willing and enthusiastic participant in one of the darkest chapters of American governance. Based on a long pattern of evidence, he should be offering his resignation, not testifying at his confirmation hearing.

Establishment media coverage before the hearing has played up Democrat talking points.

The hearing will be held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). Johnson is an advocate for corporations’ use of visa workers.

The establishment distraction from white-collar visas is needed, in part, because Wolf is a former lobbyist for NASSCOM, the multinational trade group for the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. In October 2019. Breitbart News reported:

Chad Wolf worked as a lobbyist for NASSCOM in 2016 but may be picked by President Donald Trump to replace departing chief Kevin McAleenan, sources told Breitbart News.

For a reported price of $60,000, Wolf served as a lobbyist for NASSCOM in late 2016 when he was working for Wexler & Walker, a subsidiary of Hill & Knowlton Strategies advocacy group.

NASSCOM is now lobbying Congress to lift the “country caps” that curb their use of the H-1B work visa to put Indian graduates into Americans’ office jobs.

In June 2020, President Trump announced new rules to curb the outsourcing visas. The rules will likely aid U.S. workers, so ensuring a massive political and legal pushback by major U.S. companies and investors.

However, Wolf and his DHS deputies are in charge of developing and implementing the rules, so reformers are concerned that Trump’s reform may get watered down.