Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee will try again to pass his S.386 bill, which grants green cards to India’s college graduates if they take jobs from American graduates.
“I believe it’s ready for prime time,” Mike Lee said in a June 19 statement on the Senate floor, adding:
It is ready to become law … I intend to be back next week making yet another attempt to pass this bill into law. And I hope and expect that we will be able to do so.
Leon Fresco, a Democrat lawyer working with Lee to pass the bill, also declared the bill will pass the Senate:
All objections will be solved, this is an iterative process. Senator Lee his staff are doing a tremendous job working to address the objections of every single member. #GreenCardEquality will not be stopped now. Equality of opportunity is a priority for all 100 senators.
Fresco helped Sen. Chuck Schumer write the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill that nearly passed — and which would have provided investors with a flood of cheap labor for at least 20 years.
Lee’s promise came just after Georgia Sen. David Perdue blocked Lee’s request for the Senate’s “Unanimous consent” approval of his S.386 bill. The bill would allow up to 140,000 Indian workers and family members to get valuable green cards each year in exchange for them working in U.S. college jobs for several years.
Perdue’s block came after Lee negotiated a deal with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who earlier blocked Lee’s bill in late July.
Opponents of Lee’s bill praised Perdue:
Lee’s chance of a Senate win next week is uncertain, despite enormous, behind-the-scenes support from Silicon Valley investors and business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, Amazon, Facebook, and FWD.us.
His radical, pro-outsourcing push has created a series of grassroots groups of technology professionals who are worried their careers will be outsourced to India. The new groups have been organizing to oppose the investors’ efforts to export millions of college graduates’ jobs. These groups include the American Workers Coalition, Protect US Workers, Progressives for Immigration Reform, and U.S. Tech Workers.
Long-standing reform groups, such as Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, also campaigned against the green card bill.
Perdue may decline Lee’s compromise offers, and other senators may step up to defend their voters, donors, and regional economies. For example, Lee’s bill has also triggered concerns among businesses which rely on trade and migration from South America.
“In Florida, we have a lot of aircraft engineers, workers in the hospitality industry as well as workers involved with importing and exporting and luxury goods,” Tammy Fox-Isicoff, a board member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Miami Herald. She continued:
Our workforce applicants predominantly come from Latin America and Europe. Miami is an international hub to Latin America. Because of this, employers tend to seek employees from Latin America … This [Lee bill] is a cheap fix, not the right fix … If it goes through, no one in Florida, except Indian nationals, will get residence through employment for the next decade or more. This will kill Florida, basically end all future Hispanic employment immigration to the U.S.
Also, Lee’s bill is being opposed by specialty groups — including lawyers who work with immigrant athletes, video-game players, or chain-migration family migrants, and also by Chinese immigrants.
But the bill’s damage to the other population groups is a good thing, said Cyrus Mehta, an immigration lawyer in New York who supports Lee’s bill.
By putting Indians first in line, and so forcing other groups to wait many years for green cards, it would increase political pressure on Congress to further expand immigration numbers, he argued in a tweet after Perdue blocked the bill:
Not a perfect bill, but was a rare bipartisan effort to incrementally reforming the EB [employer green card] system, eliminating invidious discrimination [against Indians] and a down payment for further improvement once others besides Indians also experienced some waiting.
Lee’s bill is a huge giveaway to the U.S. investors who are investing in the huge U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. That little-recognized economy is aided by the Indian government and is built on 800,000 Indian visa-worker college-graduates. The Indian graduates in the United States take U.S. jobs and also funnel millions of other jobs to at least two million Indians in India.
The Indian outsourcing economy is valued at almost $80 billion a year, and Lee’s bill would grow that economy by allowing investors to import more Indians graduates. The extra Indian graduates would take more jobs from citizens in computing, design, healthcare, management, and recruitment careers — and then be paid by Sen. Lee’s extra green cards.
U.S. graduates say Indian managers in the United States force them out of jobs, force down their salaries, and impose Indian-style workplace norms, such as favoritism for Indians from higher-status castes or particular regions of India.
But Lee ignored those basic questions when he argued that Americans do not have the right to exclude groups of people because of concerns about their collective identity, for example, as being citizens of India. Lee argued:
Few ideas are more central to who we are as Americans than the notion that people should be judged and treated by their government based on their own merits, as individuals. As individuals with inherent God-given rights, and not on the basis of the color of their skin, or of the country in which they were born. As our founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Lee sought to shame his critics, saying opposition to the immigration of people because of their national affiliations is “gross, unfair, difficult to justify or defend … [and] the fact is, I have yet to meet anyone in this body or in the House of Representatives who can defend this flawed policy on its merits because it makes no sense.”
Yet Lee argued that immigration is intended to benefit the nation’s CEOs, investors, and company owners, but not ordinary citizens,” saying “he employment-based visa system is supposed to enable American businesses to bring the best and the brightest to this country.”
Lee waved away concerns about the impact of cheap imported labor on wages, on the ability of heartland communities to attract investment from coastal investors, on communities’ lost payroll caused by H-1B workers, and about the growing wealth disparity between high-immigration coasts and low-immigration heartland. Lee said:
We need to recognize that we cannot necessarily solve all of our problems at once … We cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the excellent. That’s why I’ve come here to seek unanimous consent to pass this legislation today.
He promised to push his bill through the Senate next week:
I’m hopeful, and I’m optimistic that my colleague who raised an objection today can be persuaded that this bill needs to be passed. We can address these concerns and that we can resolve them. I’ll be working with my distinguished friend and colleague from Georgia throughout this weekend, trying to find a solution. Some explanation. Or, if necessary, language that can win his support. We’re very, very close on what we believe is appropriate and acceptable …
I believe it’s ready for prime time it’s ready to become law. But when seeking unanimity on a measure in order to pass it, one must do everything one can do in order to seek actual unanimity. And that is what I intend to do in the coming days. I intend to be back next week, making yet another attempt to pass this bill into law. And I hope and expect that we will be able to do so.
Lee’s office declined to answer questions from Breitbart News. However, Lee’s press secretary, Conn Carroll, said that Lee’s bill includes some measure to promote disclosure the hiring H-1B workers.
Congress has created a series of visa-worker programs so expanding companies do not have to “poach” Americans away from rival employers companies with promises of higher wages. The welfare programs for CEOs and investors now allow roughly 1.4 million foreign college graduates to work in U.S. jobs — including 800,000 H-1B workers — as well as at least 400,000 blue-collar workers.
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of about 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints more than one million work permits for new foreigners, and rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for investors. The stimulus happens because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes young Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a growing economy. The Census Bureau said September 10 that men who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings increase of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, to bring their median wages to $45,097 for full time, year-round work.
But white-collar wages are growing slower than blue-collar wages, partly because of Indian outsourcing.