The Democratic-run House will decide Tuesday whether to put at least 300,000 Indian contract workers on a fast track to valuable green cards, so incentivizing more low wage Indian graduates to take U.S. jobs from middle class American graduates.
Roughly 108 Republicans have co-sponsored the green card giveaway, called HR.1044 or the “”Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019” — even though the Democrats’ legislation is backed by Silicon Valley investors who oppose the GOP.
Democrats also have kept the legislation secret — the bill has had no hearing or committee votes — and it is being quarterbacked by the immigration lawyer who helped Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer write the disastrous “Gang of Eight” amnesty in 2013.
The GOP legislators backing the giveaway include Colorado GOP Rep. Ken Buck, who is the top Republican on the House’s immigration and citizenship subcommittee, and Tennessee GOP Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, the top Republican on the appropriations’ subcommittee on homeland security.
The bill can only pass if roughly 75 House Republicans support the giveaway. The Democrats need the GOP votes because California Rep. Zoe Lofgren is trying to pass the legislation via a fast-track process without hearings or amendments. But the fast-track process means the bill needs 290 votes, far more than the Democrats’ 235-member bloc in the House.
The names of all GOP legislators who are backing the giveaway are cited at the end of this article.
Buck has repeatedly declined to answer questions from Breitbart News about the giveaway. However, he has tried to support job giveaway legislation before.
In May 2017, for example, he said he supported legislation which would have allowed the states to annually import 495,000 foreign workers to compete for jobs against Americans. The number would have risen as states’ economies grew, according to the legislation, which was titled “The State Sponsored Visa Pilot Program of 2017.” Buck promised to support the CATO-pushed bill, but he showed minimal enthusiasm and the bill died after it was exposed by Breitbart News.
Fleischmann justified his support for the Indian bill by saying technology companies have told him they cannot find enough Americans to do needed jobs. When asked about the impact on Americans’ wages by One America News Network, Fleischmann replied:
We have seen — and corporate leaders have told me — they cannot get the talent. There is dearth of talent out there, we cannot fill these jobs … We have a need for a growing talent pool, I want that talent pool to be the best in the world.
Each year, roughly 800,000 young Americans graduate from college with skilled degrees in healthcare, engineering, software, science, math, architecture, business, or design. The degrees allow them to ask for good wages in the nation’s free market for labor.
But Congress damages Americans’ salaries and careers by allowing companies to import a supposedly temporary workforce of roughly 1.2 million foreign college-graduate contract-workers, many of whom are from India.
These 1.2 million foreign workers are eager to take Americans’ jobs at low wages, in part, because the federal government also allows employers to nominate them for hugely valuable green cards. Companies save a fortune in salaries by offering this taxpayer-funded bonus to their foreign contract-workers.
Companies have also used this green card process to create an extra army of roughly 350,000 contract-workers in the United States. Under federal rules, the short-term contract-workers become long-term indentured workers once their employers file the green card application. This subservient work-and-wait legal status continues for years until the contract-workers get out of the backlog once they get green cards and become legal immigrants.
“Employers love this [because] this is an astonishing subsidy for tech employers … this bill would extend that [backlog and indentured service] model … This will turn the entire employment-based immigration system into the indentured-service model,” a source told Breitbart News.
These two armies of 1.5 million contract workers take prestigious jobs in healthcare, business, engineering, software, teaching, research, journalism, in Silicon Valley, in the fashion industry, in universities and even cutting edge, computer chip manufacturing companies.
This huge imported workforce is great for companies because it helps to prevent a company-vs-company bidding war for American graduates. That bidding war would drive up Americans’ wages, encourage more Americans to get skilled degrees, and would help more Americans graduates get out of debt and then get into good jobs, homes, and marriages.
In 2014, a series of top Silicon Valley firms — including Google and Apple — were found guilty of colluding to suppress salaries for Americans.
The House’s HR.1044 bill is touted as a matter of “fairness” for the Indian workers who choose to crowd into the backlog. It offers to help the 300,000 Indian contract workers — and their roughly 300,000 family members — by removing the pro-diversity “country caps” in immigration law.
These country caps are intended to encourage companies to recruit from a variety of foreign nationals. But the caps are a problem for the many Indian contract workers who have crowded into the backlog by agreeing to take Americans’ jobs. Each year, Indians get roughly 24,000 green cards, or roughly 20 percent of 120,000 EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 green cards which are awarded each year to the employees of American companies.
But the many Indians in the backlog stand in the way of subsequent Indian contract workers.
The Indian workers’ advocacy group, dubbed “Immigration Voice,” hired Schumer’s former top immigration aide, Leon Fresco, to quarterback their campaign for fast-track access to green cards.
The campaign is backed by pro-migration Democrats, and by a variety of business group, including FWD.us, which an advocacy group for wealthy West Coast investors, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
The Immigration Voice group effectively mobilizes Indian contract-workers to lobby and charm GOP legislators with emotional appeals for equality, even though their own Indian culture is built on an ancient caste system which enforces deep and permanent inequalities.
The Indians’ pitch includes charges of racism against Americans who want Americans to get the first crack at jobs. On June 30, for example, Fresco told his Indian clients:
All of our opponents can be lumped into one of two categories, very simple. Either you are an ethno-racist … Or you are what I would call a for-profit racist, meaning, ‘I have figured out a way to make money from the racist system, and if this racist system goes away, I’m not going to make money anymore.’ Both of those are disgusting, OK?
In the Senate, Fresco is backing a matching giveaway bill that is being pushed by Utah Sen. Mike Lee and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate’s judiciary committee. In late June, Lee and Graham tried to rush the giveaway bill through the Senate via a “Unanimous Consent” maneuver, but they were blocked by Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul.
Presidential aspirant Sen. Kamala Harris is the leading Democrat on the Senate’s giveaway legislation. “Sometimes people from the other side of the aisle have good ideas,” Fleischmann told OANN.
“108 House GOP members could be about to hand a great victory to Pelosi and Big Tech by helping her pass a bill (without hearings or rules) to allow contract workers from India who displaced US workers to jump in front of nurses, researchers and other applicants in green card line,” said a July 7 tweet from Jessica Vaughan policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
The GOP’s support for the fast-track legislation is unusual because Buck, Fleishman and the other GOP legislators — see below — are giving the Senate Democrats a big political advantage in the GOP Senate, said a source. “This is Democratic bill in the House, and if it passes and goes to the Senate, it has the inside track” in the Senate’s ongoing debate, said the source. “To the extent that [House] Republicans want any say in this [debate], they should want the action [to take place] in the [GOP-run] Senate,” the source said.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’s leader in the House, has kept a low profile during the debate.
Besides, the source said, “it is an interesting question why Republican members would give [pro-Democratic] Silicon Valley … such a victory.”
The 2020 election is coming fast, and immigration is a key issue for the GOP’s base, said the source. “This issue is not impossible to become the vehicle to generate 16,000 votes in any district you can name,” the source said.
At least three house GOP members have been defeated when they underestimated the emotional impact of legislation which gives away U.S. jobs. The most prominent victim was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who lost his seat in a 2014 primary over immigration.
Other GOP Legislators have lost their seats to the rising inflow of green card workers into their districts. In November for example, pro-migration Rep. Pete Sessions lost his seat in Texas’ 32nd district.
Moreover, GOP legislators are trying to reverse the slide in political support for the GOP among college graduates. This Indian giveaway bill strikes directly at the ability of their constituents’ to earn the salaries they need to pay their college debts, buy homes, get married, and stimulate the economies of many GOP districts.
Many Americans say their incomes have been slashed by companies’ use of the green card system to attract and pay cheap labor from India. During the last year, these professionals have organized into several groups, include the American Workers Coalition, doctorswithoutjobs.com, ProUSworkers, No on H.R. 1044, and The Multinational Coalition Against H.R. 1044/S. 386.
In 2018, these American opponents of the green card giveaway bill helped defeat Kansas GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder, who supported a prior version of the legislation.
In turn, these professional groups are backed up by websites which are tracking the scale and location of the outsourcing industry in each legislator’s district. For example, h1bhuntinglicenses.com allows users to quickly check federal data to see which employers are trying to hire H-1B contract-workers in every zip code or career. The federal data, for example, shows that employers tried to hire 2,500 foreign architects instead of Americans during the last decade.
SAITJ.org allows voters, staffers, and political researchers to quickly see how many H-1B workers were sought in each legislators’ district. In Rep. Buck’s 4th district in Colorado, for example, employers sought to hire 2,999 foreign college graduates in 2017. In Fleischmann’s district, employers tried to hire 877 foreign graduates instead of American graduates in 2017.
The legislation will also cause problems for many American companies.
If the Indians’ country caps are removed by HR.1044, then many many employees from diverse countries will have to wait in line behind the huge flow of Indian contract workers.
Also, companies who wish to import specialized foreign workers from other countries — such as non-college nurses from the Philippines — will have to wait for years while their non-Indian hires wait behind the huge inflow of cheap Indian contract workers.
Even if the bill is passed, the time needed for Indians to get green cards may not decrease, according to the Congressional Research Service, because the extra green cards will likely encourage more Indians to become contract-workers in the United States. “Shorter wait times for [green cards] might actually incentivize greater numbers of nationals from India, China, and the Philippines to seek employment-based [green card] status,” a CRS report warned legislators. “If that were to occur, the reduction in the number of approved petitions pending might be short lived,” said the December 2018 report.
Lobbyists who are pushing the HR.1044 legislation correctly say the legislation does not increase the number of green cards.
But the lobbyists say nothing about the unlimited inflow of foreign workers into Americans’ workplaces via non-green card routes.
For example, there is no cap on the number of Indian workers who can use the universities’ “Optional Practical Training” work permit program.
Also, the H-1B program is supposedly capped at 85,000 contract workers per year. But a loophole in the H-1B program says there is no limit on the number of H-1B contract workers who can be hired by non-profit universities, hospitals, or research centers.
Moreover, companies are now nominating roughly 250,000 employees and family members for the green cards each year, even though the government only provides 120,000 cards. This policy means the backlog of foreign wait-and-work employees is getting larger as companies use it to extend the stay of supposedly temporary contract-workers, regardless of country caps.
Congress.gov shows the GOP sponsors of the Lofgren’s Green card Giveaway Act, and the date when they co-sponsored the giveaway bill:
Rep. Amodei, Mark E. [R-NV-2] 05/09/2019,
Rep. Armstrong, Kelly [R-ND-At Large] 02/25/2019,
Rep. Bacon, Don [R-NE-2] *02/07/2019
Rep. Baird, James R. [R-IN-4] 04/10/2019
Rep. Balderson, Troy [R-OH-12] 03/08/2019
Rep. Banks, Jim [R-IN-3] 03/26/2019
Rep. Barr, Andy [R-KY-6] *02/07/2019
Rep. Bilirakis, Gus M. [R-FL-12] *02/07/2019
Rep. Bishop, Rob [R-UT-1] 02/11/2019
Rep. Bost, Mike [R-IL-12] 03/12/2019
Rep. Brooks, Susan W. [R-IN-5] 02/07/2019
Rep. Buck, Ken [R-CO-4] 02/07/2019
Rep. Bucshon, Larry [R-IN-8] 02/13/2019
Rep. Budd, Ted [R-NC-13] 06/21/2019
Rep. Byrne, Bradley [R-AL-1] 06/10/2019
Rep. Calvert, Ken [R-CA-42] 02/07/2019
Rep. Cline, Ben [R-VA-6] 04/09/2019
Rep. Cole, Tom [R-OK-4] 02/26/2019
Rep. Comer, James [R-KY-1] 02/07/2019
Rep. Cook, Paul [R-CA-8] 03/08/2019
Rep. Crenshaw, Dan [R-TX-2] 03/26/2019
Rep. Curtis, John R. [R-UT-3] 02/07/2019
Rep. Davis, Rodney [R-IL-13] 02/07/2019
Rep. DesJarlais, Scott [R-TN-4] 06/14/2019
Rep. Emmer, Tom [R-MN-6] 02/07/2019
Rep. Estes, Ron [R-KS-4] 02/07/2019
Rep. Fitzpatrick, Brian K. [R-PA-1] 02/07/2019
Rep. Fleischmann, Charles J. “Chuck” [R-TN-3] 02/28/2019
Rep. Flores, Bill [R-TX-17] 06/18/2019
Rep. Fulcher, Russ [R-ID-1] 03/12/2019
Rep. Gianforte, Greg [R-MT-At Large] 06/19/2019
Rep. Gibbs, Bob [R-OH-7] 02/07/2019
Rep. Gonzalez, Anthony [R-OH-16] 02/28/2019
Rep. Gonzalez-Colon, Jenniffer [R-PR-At Large] 02/07/2019
Rep. Gooden, Lance [R-TX-5] 02/13/2019
Rep. Granger, Kay [R-TX-12] 05/28/2019
Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6] 05/14/2019
Rep. Green, Mark E. [R-TN-7] 06/10/2019
Rep. Grothman, Glenn [R-WI-6] 05/02/2019
Rep. Guest, Michael [R-MS-3] 02/07/2019
Rep. Guthrie, Brett [R-KY-2] 02/07/2019
Rep. Hagedorn, Jim [R-MN-1] 06/12/2019
Rep. Hartzler, Vicky [R-MO-4] 05/09/2019
Rep. Hern, Kevin [R-OK-1] 05/17/2019
Rep. Herrera Beutler, Jaime [R-WA-3] 02/07/2019
Rep. Hice, Jody B. [R-GA-10] 02/07/2019
Rep. Hill, J. French [R-AR-2] 02/07/2019
Rep. Hunter, Duncan D. [R-CA-50] 04/29/2019
Rep. Hurd, Will [R-TX-23] 02/07/2019
Rep. Johnson, Bill [R-OH-6] 02/07/2019
Rep. Katko, John [R-NY-24] 02/07/2019
Rep. Kelly, Mike [R-PA-16] 02/19/2019
Rep. Kelly, Trent [R-MS-1] 02/25/2019
Rep. King, Peter T. [R-NY-2] 02/07/2019
Rep. Kinzinger, Adam [R-IL-16] 02/07/2019
Rep. LaMalfa, Doug [R-CA-1] 03/08/2019
Rep. Lamborn, Doug [R-CO-5] 02/26/2019
Rep. Lesko, Debbie [R-AZ-8] 03/25/2019
Rep. Long, Billy [R-MO-7] 02/07/2019
Rep. Luetkemeyer, Blaine [R-MO-3] 03/08/2019
Rep. Marshall, Roger W. [R-KS-1] 02/07/2019
Rep. Massie, Thomas [R-KY-4] 02/07/2019
Rep. McCaul, Michael T. [R-TX-10] 03/05/2019
Rep. Rodgers, Cathy McMorris [R-WA-5] 02/07/2019
Rep. Mitchell, Paul [R-MI-10] 05/09/2019
Rep. Moolenaar, John R. [R-MI-4] 05/28/2019
Rep. Mullin, Markwayne [R-OK-2] 05/14/2019
Rep. Newhouse, Dan [R-WA-4] 02/07/2019
Rep. Norman, Ralph [R-SC-5] 02/07/2019
Rep. Pence, Greg [R-IN-6] 04/02/2019
Rep. Perry, Scott [R-PA-10] 02/07/2019
Rep. Reed, Tom [R-NY-23] 03/08/2019
Rep. Reschenthaler, Guy [R-PA-14] 06/04/2019
Rep. Riggleman, Denver [R-VA-5] 02/07/2019
Rep. Roe, David P. [R-TN-1] 02/07/2019
Rep. Rogers, Harold [R-KY-5] 05/02/2019
Rep. Rouzer, David [R-NC-7] 02/13/2019
Rep. Rutherford, John H. [R-FL-4] 02/07/2019
Rep. Schweikert, David [R-AZ-6] 02/11/2019
Rep. Simpson, Michael K. [R-ID-2] 03/05/2019
Rep. Smith, Christopher H. [R-NJ-4] 06/14/2019
Rep. Smith, Jason [R-MO-8] 04/02/2019
Rep. Smucker, Lloyd [R-PA-11] 05/21/2019
Rep. Spano, Ross [R-FL-15] 05/21/2019
Rep. Stauber, Pete [R-MN-8] 02/11/2019
Rep. Stefanik, Elise M. [R-NY-21] 02/07/2019
Rep. Steil, Bryan [R-WI-1] 03/25/2019
Rep. Stewart, Chris [R-UT-2] 02/07/2019
Rep. Stivers, Steve [R-OH-15] 02/07/2019
Rep. Taylor, Van [R-TX-3] 05/09/2019
Rep. Thompson, Glenn [R-PA-15] 02/19/2019
Rep. Thornberry, Mac [R-TX-13] 02/13/2019
Rep. Timmons, William R. IV [R-SC-4] 06/24/2019
Rep. Tipton, Scott R. [R-CO-3] 02/28/2019
Rep. Upton, Fred [R-MI-6] 02/07/2019
Rep. Wagner, Ann [R-MO-2] 02/07/2019
Rep. Walden, Greg [R-OR-2] 03/25/2019
Rep. Walorski, Jackie [R-IN-2] 05/17/2019
Rep. Watkins, Steven C., Jr. [R-KS-2] 02/11/2019
Rep. Wenstrup, Brad R. [R-OH-2] 04/29/2019
Rep. Westerman, Bruce [R-AR-4] 02/07/2019
Rep. Williams, Roger [R-TX-25] 03/08/2019
Rep. Wittman, Robert J. [R-VA-1] 04/29/2019
Rep. Womack, Steve [R-AR-3] 03/25/2019
Rep. Woodall, Rob [R-GA-7] 02/07/2019
Rep. Wright, Ron [R-TX-6] 02/26/2019
Rep. Yoho, Ted S. [R-FL-3] 06/14/2019
Rep. Young, Don [R-AK-At Large] 02/07/2019