Silicon Valley Billionaires Bankroll Mike Lee and His Green Card Giveaway

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 18: Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) takes a break from the weekly Senate Repub
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Silicon Valley and California’s wealthiest tech billionaires are bankrolling Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) effort to allow India and China to monopolize the United States’ green card system.

Lee’s S. 386 provides a massive giveaway to Big Tech corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft — all of which are donors to the Utah Senator.

The legislation will ensure outsourcing firms such as Cognizant and Infosys, as well as giant tech conglomerates like Amazon and Facebook, have a green card system wherein employers would have to wait seven to eight years before securing an employment-based green card for a hire.

This process would solidify that employment-based green cards only go to temporary foreign visa workers, like those imported on the H-1B visa, thus rewarding those corporations who replace their American employees with H-1B foreign visa workers who are overwhelmingly Indian male nationals.

While about 25 percent of all employment-based green cards currently are rewarded to Indian nationals today, should Lee’s legislation pass, Indian nationals will obtain more than 90 percent of all the employment-based green cards for at least a decade.

Paying out lobbyists to push Republican and Democrat Senators into supporting Lee’s green card giveaway are tech corporations like Google, Microsoft, the Oracle Corporation, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. For instance, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard have sent out a combined total of 18 lobbyists to Capitol Hill to push Lee’s green card giveaway out to Senators.

At the same time, Microsoft has been Lee’s largest tech donor for the last five election cycles, doling out nearly $130,000 to him since 2015. More than $97,000 of those funds went directly to Lee while another $30,000 went to Lee’s PAC.

Likewise, Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. has donated $55,900 to Lee since 2015, while the Oracle Corporation has donated $44,200.

Others bankrolling Lee’s S. 386 are the Koch brothers’ network of organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, the outsourcing lobby, like Cognizant and the IBM Corporation, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber of Commerce, for example, has almost 30 lobbyists working to push Lee’s green card giveaway, while Cognizant and IBM have a total of seven lobbyists pushing the legislation. IBM and Cognizant are set to gain hugely from S. 386, as they are two of the largest outsourcers of American jobs in the nation.

This year, alone, Cognizant sought to outsource more than 13,000 U.S. jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers. IBM — headed by Ginni Rometty who takes in a salary of $16.45 million a year — attempted to outsource nearly 8,500 U.S. jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.

The Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has deployed eight lobbyists to push Lee’s green card giveaway, has indirectly been a donor to Lee through the years. Since 2015, Lee has raked in nearly $60,000 from Koch Industries.

Lee’s S. 386 is also being lobbied for by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), which aids illegal aliens and foreign workers in their efforts to not be deported, has sent out three lobbyists to push the green card giveaway.

Though S. 386 was blocked by Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), Lee and Perdue are expected to make a deal on the legislation and hope to take fast-track a vote by the end of this week.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

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