India’s Workers Target Rick Scott for Blocking S.386 ‘Green Card Lite’ Bill

The main lobby group for India’s visa workers in the United States is urging its members to repeatedly call the staff members of Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who blocked the fast-track passage of Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 bill through the Senate on August 5.

The online instructions by Immigration Voice urge its members to repeatedly call the office of Scott (R-FL) and to also email the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, the legislative director and the immigration staffer:

Call the Office of Senator Rick Scott at (202) 224-5274 using the following script …

….

1. Write SEPARATE emails to all the staff

2. Write different emails DAILY with different words to explain the issue and why Rick Scott should remove his hold

3. DO NOT send your emails in quick succession. Instead, span them out so that some automated filters will not flag it.

4. Instead of using the same email address to send out the messages, please use different email accounts on different days. Mix and match, the goal is not to let them be able to block your email, and land in their Inbox.

5. They cannot not respond to you and ignore the issues.

6. Think and reinvent ways to reach out to them and land in their Inbox every time.

The instructions reflect the Indian group’s sharp-elbowed campaign to win fast-track green cards for themselves and for future Indian visa workers throughout the U.S. economy.

Roughly 300,000 of India’s visa workers have been sponsored for green cards by their employers, alongside roughly 300,000 family members. Each year, companies add roughly 60,000 extra Indian contract workers to the line — so allowing them to stay and work — even though federal laws limit the number of green cards for Indians to about 23,000 per year. Overall, perhaps one million Indian visa workers hold white-collar jobs in the U.S. economy.

Some of the Indian visa workers say their style of aggressive lobbying is working. For example, the group held many demonstrations in Chicago, where they made many claims of racism against Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) to get him to drop his opposition to the bill.

On August 5, Durbin suddenly announced his support for Lee’s S.386, which offers a novel “Green-Card Lite” legal status to an uncapped number of migrants once they are nominated for green cards by their employers.

The Green Card Lite allows an unlimited number of migrant workers — and their families — to stay in the U.S. job market as they wait many years in a backlog for the proper green cards, which can be converted into citizenship after five years.

If made law, the Green Card Lite rule will dramatically reward employers and will increase the annual inflow of India’s workers. The resulting expansion of Green Card Lite migrants will dramatically increase the political pressure from migrants, migrant groups, and Democrats to raise the legal immigration by awarding more proper green cards.

Scott’s surprise action to block Unanimous Consent for the bill on August 5 caused India’s group to turn its rhetorical fire on Scott:

These hardnosed tactics are played out alongside closed-door lobbying by business groups, as well as cheerleading by U.S. companies, including Microsoft, which employs thousands of Indian workers to maintain and upgrade software code. For example, Microsoft’s associate general counsel, Jack Chen tweeted his support for Lee and Durbin shortly after Scott blocked the bill:

The S.386 bill is also strongly backed by India’s government, which hopes to grow its economy by exporting many more millions of young men and women into other countries’ economies.

The leaders of Immigration Voice did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.

However, the group’s instructions include a note by Aman Kapoor, the group’s chief, who said:

This is a difficult process. So what is your alternative?

Perhaps you are started following the debate since 2 years, but this bill has been underway since 2011. It takes long time to pass bills in US Congress, and if you don’t like it then maybe you have an alternative?

There is no surety in life for anything. The only way to pass a bill is for people to work on it, rather than looking for assurances. And when people will feel that the bill must pass, then they will speak-up to provide the threshold energy, thereby making themselves deserving of the change they seek, and then the bill will pass. That’s how the system is designed.

The good news is that we are very very close. So the choice is to push this across the finish line, or, do nothing? What is it going to be?

In response, groups of threatened American professionals — including many immigrants — have organized to stop Lee’s S.368 bill.

They argue Lee’s bill will dramatically expand the citizenship incentive for many more Indians to take many more of the white-collar jobs deeded by professionals and their U.S. graduate children. These Indians can take U.S. jobs via a variety of pipelines into the United States, including the uncapped “Practical Training” work permits offered via universities.

The Indians’ aggressive tactics “work because I know that there were GOP Senators unwilling to stand up, because it’s like, ‘Who needs the hassle?'” said Kevin Lynn, director of  Progressives for Immigration Reform.

In response, “I submitted to the FBI a note with all of this rhetoric, the ‘Head on a Pike [tweet],’ the Scott and KKK image, … This is intimidation, and it is coercion,” he said.

Lynn continued:

I  understand that these people are desperate, but I also understand that [employers] selected the most hyper-aggressive people to get to the jobs in the United States. The Indians knew there was a huge waiting list [because so many Indians take jobs to get green cards] Now that they have failed to garner the pity and goodwill they were looking for, and their attempts to pass legislation to clear the backlog have failed, they’ve shifted to intimidation and coercion.

Intimidation of politicians in order to drive certain polices. Intimidation of others who oppose their world view and oppose less-restrictive immigration …  [GOP politicians] cannot give in to intimidation and coercion — you’ll get more initiation and coercion, and once the people using it see the impact it is having, they’ll amp things up. It is only a short jump from there to the threat of physical violence.

If Congress eventually establishes reforms that protect Americans from the Fortune 500’s outsourcing policies, the Indians may get settled, he said. “Once we have a solid reform, and we pretty much end the pipeline of cheap, ordinary workers coming in to displace Americans, then we can look at the backlog, and ask ourselves, ‘What would be the humane thing to do?'”