Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is expected to seek Senate passage of his S.386 job-outsourcing bill Wednesday evening.
If no Republican or Democrat objects to Lee’s actions, his bill will pass the Senate by so-called “Unanimous Consent,” (UC), setting the stage for a joint House-Senate conference to draft a final bill.
Lee’s aggressive effort to pass the bill by UC is a threat to the GOP Senators and their slim majority, an immigration activist told Breitbart News. “They have to give Georgia Republicans a reason to vote [in January] — and UC for this bill ain’t that,” the activist said.
Lee is trying to pass the bill after Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) dropped his opposition to the legislation.
Activists hope that Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue will announce opposition to the bill — although Lee’s surprise move caught them while they are campaigning in Georgia. In August, Loeffler praised President Donald Trump for adopting reforms of the H-1B program.
Lee’s bill would remove the so-called country caps on employers’ award of green cards to their foreign workers. The change would allow hundreds of thousands of Indian visa workers to jump to the front of the line, bypassing would-be immigrants from various other countries, including the Philippines and Costa Rica.
The bill would also encourage huge numbers of new Indian graduates to take future low-wage jobs in the United States. Those jobs would allow them to compete for one of the 85,000 H-1B visas awarded to companies each year — and then convert the H-1Bs into green cards and then into renewable “green card lite” work permits. There is no limit to the number of foreign graduates who can get jobs via the universities’ Optional Practical Training and Curricular Practical Training work-permit programs.
The huge inflow of foreign workers allows U.S. investors and CEOs to corral competition in the tech sector by minimizing the recruitment, training, and promotion of the U.S. graduates who may later quit to develop rival products. That labor policy has already damaged the nation’s technology leadership, insiders tell Breitbart News.
“There’s collusion within these big tech companies to preserve their monopoly status,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, who campaign against the flood of foreign graduates. “The best way to do that is to block the sneakernet, you know, one person going from one company to another taking what’s between their ears with them. So that’s why this is important — it allows them to maintain their group of compliant indentured [foreign] workers, and also prevents the movement of workers from one company to another, or workers deciding to form their own companies.”
The huge inflow of foreign workers is driving down wages for many American graduates, in part, because the inflow forces American tech grads to seek work in other sectors of the economy. From 2016 to 2019, the median or midpoint income of college graduates fell by two percent, according to a September report by the federal reserve.
The vast majority of voters oppose laws that allow companies to import low-wage foreigners for jobs needed by Americans.