The Vanguard Group’s outsourcing of 1,300 Pennsylvania white-collar jobs to Indian H-1B workers has given a huge opportunity to President Donald Trump in the key swing state, says a series of activists and consultants.

“Most voters vote their pocketbook, and if one candidate is going to protect their jobs and the other is going to give them away, that strategy seems pretty obvious to me,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA. “It would make sense for him to go there and talk about that.”

Trump already blocked the outsourcing of at least 200 Americans’ jobs at the Tennessee Valley Authority in a dramatic August meeting at the White House, said Kevin Lynn, the director of U.S. Tech Workers. So the American professionals threatened by Vanguard’ outsourcing can and must “come together and work collectively,” he said, adding:

No-one is looking out for them right now. Not the executives — they’ve got their golden parachutes. No-one is going to look out for them. They have to learn how to work together so they can bring attention to their job losses.

“There are people in the White House who are watching what is going on at Vanguard, and looking for an opportunity to get involved,” Lynn said.

“The President does understand that this is a battleground state and that his base includes white-collar workers,” said Jay Palmer, a consultant who closely tracks H-1B outsourcing. “I will be traveling to Pennsylvania to meet with some of the workers.”

White-collar voters in the state can decide a close election, said a D.C. political operative. “The next time Trump is in Pennsylvania, he’ll need to have Vanguard employees with him — and the next time Biden goes to Pennsylvania, he needs to have Vanguard employees on the stage with him,” he said.

“Whenever you can add [voters] without the risk of subtraction, you should take the play,” said Charlie Gerow, a GOP political consultant in Pennsylvania. Even if Trump gains only 10,000 votes by protecting white-collar jobs in Pennsylvania, he said. “10,000 is a quarter of his margin from four years ago … 10,000 is a huge number, a potentially determinative number,” he said.

Even small shifts among college voters can make considerable differences in the election, according to the “Swingometer” offered by the Cook Political Report. On September 28, the site suggested Joe Biden will win with 307 electoral votes. But if the 31 percent of white voters who are college graduates shifted by just two points toward Trump, then Trump’s 48 percent share of that demographic would boost his topline number from 231 electoral votes up to a game-winning 281 points.

“People have missed all of that” potential white-collar support for Trump, said Ronil Hira, an Howard University expert on the visa programs.

Nationwide, at least 1.3 million visa workers hold jobs needed by U.S. graduates. In June and in August, Trump announced new curbs and reforms that would transfer many jobs to young American graduates.

In Pennsylvania, the 1,300 professionals are losing their white-collar jobs because Vanguard Group is “rebadging” their jobs to Infosys. This Indian-run firm creates profit for itself and for U.S. investors by importing lower-wage Indians to take a wide variety of white-collar jobs in the United States.

The Indians are imported via Congress’ H-1B and L-1 program and via the White House’s OPT and CPT programs.

If past experience with outsourcing companies holds true, the American graduates will be kept at their jobs for one year and change, so satisfying federal labor law. But then they will be presented with unacceptable assignments, for example, a pay cut plus a transfer to contract work in a distant city. Once they refuse the assignment, they can be legally replaced, typically, by an Indian working on temporary assignments in the United States.

Vanguard’s deal with Infosys covers 1,300 jobs. Most of those jobs are in the swing state of Pennsylvania. But some of the fired people are reportedly based in the swing state of Arizona and the swing state of North Carolina.

The outsourcing process is expected to save Vanguard some payroll funding — but also suck much payroll from the city, so hurting retail, housing, and other sectors. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on July 20:

Infosys, like its large rivals, typically moves work offshore after its U.S.-based and Indian-national partners have learned how to do it, says the India-born head of a Pennsylvania software company, who agreed to speak on the condition he was not named because he competes with Infosys for corporate and government contracts.

The savings start, he added, when the work moves offshore. He said Infosys and other outsourcers had offered to do engineering work for $20 to $30 an hour, relying on newly credentialed engineers in India, in competition with his own firm and U.S. rivals charging $80 or $90 an hour for seasoned engineers, including Indian immigrants with long experience.

These outsourcing contracts are also favored by CEOs because they trade in their American workers to get a more compliant and mobile workforce. For example, the outsourcing contracts typically allow U.S. executives to hire and fire extra blocs Indian workers, usually from a huge pool of low-wage migrant gig workers employed by other Indian-run subcontractors throughout the United States. With the Infosys contract in place, Vanguard executives can “ramp up” future employment through Infosys subcontractors, not by hiring Americans, said Hira.

The outsourcing also creates new security concerns for the private 401K accounts held by many millions of Americans. “The Vanguard staff — or ‘crew,’ as Vanguard calls its 18,000 workers — track five million Americans’ retirement money in 401(k) plans and other defined-contribution accounts,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on July 20. “That work accounts for about $1.7 trillion of Vanguard’s $6.5 trillion in total customer assets.”

“Through the partnership, Infosys [and its eventual Indian workforce] will assume day-to-day operations supporting Vanguard’s D.C. recordkeeping business, including software platforms, administration, and associated processes,” Infosys reported on July 14

The growing role of foreign workers in America’s financial sector is a threat to the privacy and security of Americans’ financial and healthcare data, said Sara Blackwell, a Florida-based lawyer who counsels Americans who have been replaced by H-1B workers. “There are a lot of examples where [data breaches] can be tied to someone outside the country,” she told Breitbart News, adding:

In my experience with this business model, I don’t think it is a good idea for anyone expect the company owners … I’ve always been an advocate for a virtual wall [to protect Americans’ private data]. We need to focus on that, not only for the jobs saved [by ending outsourcing] but to ensure  our private data is protected.

The outsourcing is risky for Vanguard’s trillions of dollars — and its myriad American participants — because it outsources management control, said Hira. “You’re going to lose managerial control by outsourcing … If you’re going to outsource, you actually have to put more money into managerial oversight, and that’s a side that usually gets dropped or isn’t done very well,” Hira told Breitbart News.

Also, “there’s going to be huge hidden costs” in things that are not written down in contracts, said Hira. “If you talk to anybody who’s dealt with H-1Bs and offshoring, they’ll tell you the quality goes down.”

Forbes posted one expert’s review of the deal, headlined, “Vanguard And Infosys Are Now Billion Dollar Outsourcing Partners. Good, Bad And Always Risky.” Villanova University professor Steve Andriole wrote, “It will take years for the decision to be declared a success or failure, and the management team that blessed the move will probably be gone by then.”

The task of controlling risks is made more difficult when company executives profit from the outsourcing deals, Hira added. “That’s management 101 … someone’s got some kind of conflict of interest,” he said.

The deal is a grab by executives, said Lynn. “Vanguard is making gobs of money and [internal] costs are not an issue — it just greed,” he said, adding, “American executives view their employees as disposable and the only hope for the employees is to work with each other and fight.”

Under the deal, one of Vanguard’s top executives, Martha King, is joining Infosys.

Vanguard is likely to outsource more Americans’ jobs. The firm has already displaced hundreds of Americans by hiring visa workers from a different Indian company, the Inquirer reported:

According to Vanguard workers, the company also outsources information technology services. As many as 600 contractors for India-based Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) work on Vanguard projects at buildings along Morehall Road and other sites near Vanguard buildings; other TCS staff in India also work on Vanguard IT.

Vanguard is also cutting future pension payments for its workers. In a second July 29 article, the Inquirer noted:

Crew members with fewer than 15 years of Vanguard service or who are younger than 50 on Oct. 11, when the transition takes effect, face the loss of a coveted perk for “15-and-50” achievers: a retirement bonus that can sweeten their combined cash and medical savings accounts by as much as $100,000 when they leave Vanguard.

Throughout Pennsylvania, many professionals have lost jobs to H-1B, often via corrupt backroom practice. SAITJ.org, for example, reports that employers sought almost 19,000 H-1B in 2017, not counting L-1, J-1, or CPT workers. Few of these workers are high-skilled, despite claims by employer groups. For example, almost 77 percent of the foreign H-1Bs were rated at “entry-level” or just “qualified,” ensuring they were being placed into the starter jobs needed by American graduates.

Vanguard’s political donations from Vanguard are skewed to the Democrats, partly because Democrats — including Joe Biden and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf — support cheap-labor outsourcing.

Pennsylvania media do not understand the scale of white-collar outsourcing or the resulting impact on many American graduates. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer glibly touted the use of foreign H-1B and J-1 laboratory workers in a July article critical of Trump’s popular reforms of the visa worker programs:

Cesar de la Fuente is at risk of losing more than half of his research lab to deportation.

Tighter visa restrictions have the University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor fearing that the eight international researchers in his 10-member lab might be forced to leave if they can’t find an exception to the new [H-1B] regulations. “We only have two Americans in the lab right now. So everyone else, I’m worried for them.”

[…]

His own path shows the power of that mechanism. De la Fuente emigrated from Spain to attend the University of British Columbia in Vancouver with a Canadian visa before using a J-1 visa to become a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular restrictions on immigration and visa workers. But Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegal aliens, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.

Lynn said the Pennsylvania workers can save their jobs from outsourcing executives, just as the TVA workers kept their jobs.

“What are we offering? To help them fight back against this, to let them know they are not alone, to tell their stories, to cooperate as a group, and fight back against this,” he said. “These are middle-class people who are about to become lower-middle-class people,” he said, adding, “this is the first time Amerian labor has someone on their side.”

The Expanding Green Card Economy:

A growing number of visa workers have been imported since 1990 to take the jobs needed by U.S. graduates, via the various H-1B, L-1, J-1, and other worker pipelines.

Most foreign workers were imported for short-term training or for lower-tier and routine software jobs. But an increasing number are being imported for coastal jobs in science, health care, management, accounting, recruiting, marketing, and other white-collar jobs.

The foreign graduates accepted the lower-wage job offers from many Fortune 500 companies in the expectation that the employers would deliver green cards to their favored workers.

Most of the imported workers are Indians because India’s government works with U.S. investors to exploit the huge wage difference between the United States and India.

But the corporate executives promised far more green cards to Indian recruits than the roughly 23,000 cards allowed per year by the federal government. So the gap between the executives’ promises and the annual supply of green cards for Indians has accumulated to create a massive backlog of roughly 350,000 indentured, compliant Indian workers (plus 350,000 spouses and older children) who are choosing to wait many years for their promised cards.

This multi-year Indian green card backlog is also a huge problem for the Fortune 500 companies and India’s economic strategy because it greatly hinders their ability to recruit another wave of Indian workers.

There is no limit to the number of foreigners who can temporarily get white-collar jobs in the United States.

The door is held open by administrators at U.S. colleges. They have the power to sign the enrollment documents needed by foreigners to get work permits via the government’s Curricular Practical Training (CPT) and the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programs. The two work permit programs were largely created and expanded by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with no approval from Congress.

Some of those CPT and OPT graduates are hired directly by Fortune 500 companies, but many get jobs in large or small staffing companies that provide gig workers for jobs outsourced by the C-suites of Fortune 500 companies. Indian migrants tell Breitbart News that many subcontractors hire OPTs and CPTs — as well as overstay illegal aliens — to fill the outsourced Fortune 500 jobs.

These migrant gig workers often work for sub-minimum wages because they hope to eventually win the green cards dangled by Congress and employers.

This Green Card Economy includes at least 1.3 million foreign graduates who arrived via the H-1B, J-1, L-1, Optional Practical Training (OPT), Curricular Practical Training (CPT), or H4EAD workforce pipelines. For example, the H-1B program includes at least 600,000 workers; the H4EAD program includes at least 100,000 workers, while the OPT and CPT programs keep at least 400,000 foreign workers in U.S. white-collar and technology jobs.

In contrast, roughly 800,000 Americans graduate each year from four-year colleges with skilled degrees in health care, engineering, business, math, science, software, or architecture. Many skilled American graduates are forced into other careers — despite college debts — because U.S. executives prefer to hire less-proficient visa workers for starter jobs.

The presence of these many legal and illegal foreign workers ensures a loose labor market in which Fortune 500 employers never have to compete against each other for U.S. graduates, for example, by offering full-time employment, benefits, and decent wages.

Many CEOs also prefer visa workers because they are disposable and subservient. For example, the workers are employed and swapped by a dizzying variety of subcontractors who can move blocs of labor from one city to the next, to fill short term contracts, with little notice or compensation to the disposable workers.

In contrast, American professionals speak their minds, push for high-quality products, ask for higher wages, change employers, collaborate to develop innovative products, complain about workplace discrimination, sue their employers, and testify in court. This professional pressure on executives spurs innovation and quality gains, U.S. experts and managers tell Breitbart News. But corporate executives are rewarded for raising near-term stock values, not for developing new and better technology.

Once executives get comfortable with compliant visa workers, innovation declines because American professionals are “supposed to answer in a very subservient way,” Mary from central New Jersey, a foreign-born software expert, told Breitbart News. She added:

I would tell [the female executive] professionally what the issue was, and she didn’t like that. You can’t oppose her in any way. If she tells you, “It is black,” it has to be black even if it is white. [The Indian contractors] will feed her what she wants to hear … They cater specifically to that [attitude].

When the information given to that manager is wrong, and that manager does not care, the professionalism of the field is gone.

Most of these green card workers are also part of the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. The outsourcing economy allows U.S. investors to boost stock values by hiring blocs of cheap Indian graduates for U.S. jobs. It also allows investors to transfer jobs to India by first importing Indians to get trained by the Americans who are getting replaced. It also funds India’s economic growth and appetite for American imports.