A group of white-collar Americans is protesting GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder’s plan to quickly deliver green cards to roughly 250,000 Indian visa workers who are now holding U.S. college grad jobs.
The group of technology workers rented two billboards in Yoder’s district, where he is facing an increasingly difficult race against a far-left radical who backed the Abolish ICE! during his primary battle.
Yoder’s reelection race has been hampered by his promotion of several cheap labor programs, including the offer of fast-track citizenship to at least 250,000 Indian visa workers who have taken many jobs once held by middle class technology workers.
Polls show the race is a toss-up, despite Yoder’s war chest of business-donated funds.
“Yoder was having a job fair, and on the way to the job fair, people saw the billboards in his district, which more or less says Americans do not want [Yoder’s] HR 392” bill, said Dawn Casey, one of the white-collar workers who formed the Protect US Workers group. Yoder’s bill, she said:
is the most radical change in our nation’s recent history and it being done with no public debate, no hearings. It will supply India only with green cards for the next six to seven years … He’s placing foreigners over Americans.
The group’s message “has been set out to many media people [but] we have not got a response,” said Casey, a New York-based computer expert who has been repeatedly displaced by American companies’ decisions to hire Indian outsourcing workers.
Yoder is lagging in the polls, she said, but “if he puts Americans first, he’ll improve his polls.”
Yoder’s suburban district in Kansas already includes many college graduates — but also roughly 1,400 foreign visa-workers in the white-collar technology jobs needed by middle-class Americans, she said.
Employers asked for 1,427 H-1B outsourcing visas in 2017 for jobs in Yoder’s district, according to H1BFacts.com, which organizes federal data. Of those requests, 29 percent were for entry-level graduate jobs which are needed by U.S. graduates to launch their careers.
Roughly one-third of the corporate H-1B requests are approved. But each approval lasts for three years, so the request for 1,427 visas indicates that roughly 1,400 visa-workers hold jobs in the district.
The outsourced jobs, according to the H1BFacts site, were slated for foreign laboratory assistants and interior designers who would be paid just merely $30,000 per year, accountants who would be paid $42,000, programmers who would get $56,000 and hospital doctors who would get just $65,000.
The visa-worker issue is complicating a difficult race for Yoder.
The billboards were posted in Yoder’s after a small-scale, experimental poll by the New York Times of 494 people in Yoder’s district showed him losing 43 percent to 51 percent to his opponent, Sharice Davids.
The wide gap is noteworthy because Davids has joined the far-left Abolish ICE! campaign, which would allow a large number of migrants to flood into blue-collar and white-collar job-markets nationwide.
Since the primary, Davids is trying to downplay the migration issue and is instead talking up a healthcare proposal:
Election-tracking sites Fivethirtyeight.com, the Cook Political Report, and RealClearPolitics rate the Yoder vs. Davids race as a “Toss Up.”
Yoder’s lagging performance has prompted Democrats to shift funds into the race. According to KMUW.org:
ProPublica reported that Davids’ campaign collected $700,000 from ActBlue, an online service that raises small donations for Democrats. But the most recent campaign finance reports showed Yoder with $1.8 million cash on hand compared to Davids’ $128,000. The reports go through July 18, and since that time, hundreds of thousandx of dollars from outside groups have poured into race.
In response, the business-funded Congressional Leadership Fund is helping Yoder with a $2 million ad campaign that focuses on illegal immigration while ignoring the wage-and-salary impact of the legal immigration and outsourcing programs.
The CLF group was a major backer of several cheap-labor migration bills in the House during 2018. For example, the group backed the pro-amnesty candidates who pushed for the no-strings award of green cards and work permits to roughly 700,000 ‘DACA’ illegals.
Yoder is getting support from groups of Indian visa-workers who are lobbying to remove the “country caps” on U.S. immigration laws.
The country caps say that not more than 7 percent of annual employer-sponsored visas can be given to people from one country. The caps were added to keep the inflow diverse and to prevent a lopsided inflow of people from large countries, such as China and India.
But the caps are now a political problem because the U.S. companies have used Indian companies to import huge numbers of outsourcing workers, often by offering the chance of citizenship instead of American-level wages.
Indian and Chinese college-grad outsourcing-workers are playing a growing role in the U.S. technology business, partly because they tend to drive down salaries and to push young Americans away from the careers. Foreign-born workers comprise 43 percent of medical and biological scientists, 38 percent of physical scientists, 38 percent of software developers, 36 percent of computer engineers, 31 percent of economists, 28 percent of physicists and doctors, 27 percent of electronics engineers and 25 percent of software programmers, according to federal data presented by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The roughly 1.5 million visa-workers in the United States means that roughly 300,000 Indian visa-workers (and a similar number of their family members) are also waiting for green-cards in three lines, dubbed EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3.
Each year, about 12,000 Indian workers and 10,000 family members get to the head of the lines, enduring that roughly 100,000 will get green cards over the next four years, even if Yoder’s bill fails. But many of the other 250,000 Indian visa-workers in the line are lobbying Congress for fast-track access to the head of the line. In September, for example, one group of Indians suggested that they be allowed to buy their way around the country-caps limit.
If Congress accepts Yoder’s HR 392 bill this fall, the allocation process will shift from diversity to first come, first served, and the 300,000 Indians visa-workers and the 300,000 family members in the United States will get almost all of the annual supply of 140,000 EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 green cards for several years.
That annual increase will also allow U.S. and Indian companies to hire many more H-1B and L-1 outsourcing workers in India with offers of low wages and fast-track citizenship.
The Yoder bill will push more Americans away from the technology careers, said Casey. Ten years ago, she said, American companies used American recruiters to hire Americans computer experts. “These days, it is all Indians,” she said. “Even when you are not looking for a job, the [Indian recruiters] will call,” but only to offer short-term outsourcing contracts, she said.
“You will never hear from an American [recruiter],” she said. “It is so unbelievable.”