The GOP’s newest legislator, Rep. Mayra Flores (R-TX), is defending her Thursday vote to help get green cards to the adult children of the Fortune 500’s foreign contract workers and managers, who take jobs and career opportunities from Americans.
“Amnesty was not passed last week!” Flores said in a July 17 tweet. “An amendment in the NDAA bill gave legally documented children of LEGAL VISA workers the ability to remain in the United States with their parents. Stop the misinformation and stay focused on taking back the house this November!!”
The amendment to the Pentagon bill counts as an amnesty because it exempts the adult children of Indian visa workers from laws that protect Americans from excessive migration, countered Rosemary Jenks, policy director of NumbersUSA. Those laws only allow visa workers to get green cards for their minor children but not for their adult children aged 21 and above.
“That’s the whole point of [the amendment] — they’re going to age out and so we’re giving them [a legal] status that they don’t deserve before they become illegal,” she said.
The amendment was part of an “en bloc” amendment, which was backed by 62 GOP legislators, led by Rep. Marienette Millers-Meeks (R-IA) and by Rep. Deborah Ross (D-ND).
The little-known amendment was quietly pitched as humanitarian support for “documented dreamers.”
These “documented dreamers” are the adult children of Indian tech workers who took Fortune 500 jobs — that otherwise would have gone to American graduates — in exchange for the hugely valuable green cards promised by U.S. executives.
“Instead of hiring 10 American [professionals], they’re bringing in 5o Indians to do the same work,” Armando from Texas told Breitbart News. “This is happening throughout the entire country, not just in Texas,” said the Latino software engineer said. U.S. executives allow Indians to “hire their friends and families, to help each other out,” he said.
“It is basically [Indian-first] favoritism … and they gang up on the Americans,” said Armando, who has been pushed out of several jobs by Indian managers. “Their goal is to take every [Information Technology] job for Indians — they’ve told me that to my face,” he added.
This resulting huge “green card workforce,” plus their roughly 400,000 Indian-born family members, must wait in turn for many years to get one of the roughly 25,000 green cards available for Indians each year.
The Indians’ rush has overwhelmed the green card process, so many of the Indian-born children of the outsourcing workers age out of the process when they turn 21. Many of those Indian adult children do stay in the United States under a variety of other employment visas, including the H-1B and OPT work permit programs. When they go home, they are easily able to get good jobs in India, partly because of the free education and cultural experiences they gained when their parents pushed Americans out of Fortune 500 jobs.
The amendment gives the favored Indians — a claimed initial 200,000 beneficiaries — an amnesty-like exemption from Congress’ immigration limits. This loophole will also speed the progress of Indian visa workers through the green card line by perhaps eight years. In turn, this back-entrance to the green card line also helps the Fortune 500 recruit the next wave of Indian visa workers for Americans’ jobs.
Many young Americans — including Latinas in Texas — also lose nursing careers because Congress allows the hospital chains to import their own nurses.
The inflow of cheap and compliant Indian workers is great for Wall Street’s investors. But the inflow also cripples U.S. technology innovation, sidelines millions of American graduates, and makes it more difficult for young Americans to get good jobs, buy homes and raise families.
The Miller-Meeks bill also breaks new ground by offering green cards to the adult children of Indians who get E-2 visas.
The E-2 visas allow foreigners in the United States to run franchised convenience stores, hotels, restaurants, and much else. But the E-2 visas do not have a path to green cards, so the visa holders — and their families — must go home when they cannot extend the visa. This makes them a cheaper — but less valuable visa — than the so-called EB-5 visas that allow foreigners to buy a family pack of green cards for the price of lending $800,000 to wealthy U.S. investors for several years.
But the amendment would also help the E-2 franchise operators to get green cards through their adult children. It allows the adult children to stay in the waiting line for green cards after they breach the age-21 limit. Once the adult child gets a green card, she or he can gain citizenship five years later and then sponsor their E-2 foreign parents for green cards.
The most public advocacy group pushing for the bill, ImproveTheDream.org, is headed by Dip Patel. In 2021, the New York Times reported:
Mr. Patel, 25, a Canadian citizen, has lived in the United States for more than 16 years. His parents came to the United States on E-2 visas, a program that allows small business investors to reside in the United States, and opened a grocery store in Southern Illinois.
It was not until he was in high school that Mr. Patel realized that his dependent visa would expire when he turned 21, complicating his future. An E-2 visa is one that can be renewed endlessly, but it does not offer a pathway to citizenship.
Patel declined to answer questions from Breitbart News about his funding or backers.
But his cause has been pushed by FWD.us, which is a lobbying group for West Coast investors. The group was founded in 2013 by pro-migration billionaires to expand the federal policy of extracting workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries.
In 2013 and 2014, for example, FWD.us led the push for the “Gang of Eight” amnesty. Under President Donald Trump, it opposed any migration reductions that would help ordinary Americans gain wages and wealth. Under President Joe Biden, the group has repeatedly pushed for massive amnesties that would make it hard for ordinary Americans — including the Latino voters in Flores’ district — to climb into the prosperous middle class.
The group has a policy of hiding its lobbying behind allied groups, such as the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration and Make the Road New York.
The Flores-backed amendment is also backed by the pro-migration Business Roundtable, the Koch network, and the Cato Institute:
Investors are likely to gain from the E-2 giveaway because it will boost the green-card benefits for Indians who are considering whether to sign a franchise deal with one of the Fortune 500 companies. Without Indian migrants, the Fortune 500 would accept more franchise deals with ambitious young Americans, including the young Latinos in Flores’ Hispanic-majority district.
There are roughly 78,000 franchise outlets in Texas, according to the International Franchise Association.
Fortune 500 firms may prefer to sign franchise deals with Indian E-2s, just as they also work with many Indian-run subcontractors.
The U.S. has not signed an E-2 treaty with India, so Indians cannot get E-2 visas directly — unless than can also claim citizenship in countries that have an E-2 treaty, such as Canada.
Indian owners can disregard American laws and customs, and impose Indian-style cheap-labor, maximum-profit work rules in the United States.
For example, in December 2021, Breitbart News described the testimony of Hasit Patel, an Indian legal immigrant who operated a two-star La Quinta franchise budget hotel in Liberty County, Ga. But Patel’s business plan was upended in 2020 when President Donald Trump forced up blue-collar wages by shutting down the supply of cheap migrant labor, according to what Patel told the Washington Post:
[His] struggle to find [replacement] labor felt like a blow to his whole notion of what made America great. An immigrant from India, he believed that the health of the U.S. economy was protected by a constant refreshing of the workforce, an injection of striving immigrants willing to take on some of the unpleasant jobs that many Americans are loath to do — like cleaning [his] hotel rooms.
The Post described Patel’s reaction after one employee quit Patel’s $8.50-per-hour hotel job to take a $15-per-hour job at a nearby Target store:
“I can’t compete with the warehouses for wages,” Patel said. “The government should let us get people from India, even just for six months. The government has to realize there are certain job categories that American people don’t want to do anymore.”
In Patel’s caste-divided India, half the workers earn less than $100 per week.
Patel’s reference to “six months” suggested he would like to use workers imported with B-1/B-2 visas. That visa is widely used by Indian workers to legally visit for six months — but also to illegally work for employers while they are in the United States.
Corporate franchising to Indian E-2s is “legal cover for corporate sweatshops,” said Jay Palmer, an Alabama-based immigration and human trafficking expert, who was an immigration advisor to President Donald Trump. The process outsources corporations’ street-level businesses to foreigners who can use their foreign networks to dodge federal enforcement of civil rights, workplace regulations, and tax rules, he said.
The predatory process hides behind complex laws while it pushes American businesses to the sidelines, drains communities of payroll wealth, and defrauds local governments of taxes, said Palmer, who works with migrants seeking legal status and with lawyers who sue companies on behalf of victimized Americans.
This outsourced-manager business likely includes 1o0,000 E-2 visa holders, many of whom operate several businesses, he said. “Less taxes are paid, so it means there’s less money for education, less money for roads, less money for anything,” Palmer said.
The E-2 outsourcing managers likely employ about 1 million people, many of whom are Indians who are illegally working while holding temporary F-1 visas for students, or B-1/B-2 visas for visitors, he said. Some cases involve Chinese E-2s.
Many of the E-2 workers are cousins or neighbors of the Indian E-2 visa holders, said Palmer. They minimize their U.S. rents and local spending because they prefer to send as much money home as possible, he said:
They’re not spending money back into the local economy. They’re sending it to India, and they’re living here frugally. They’re living four, five, six, seven or eight to a house or to a room, and they’re just sending that saved money back to India in the hope of going back to India and to live like kings.
Some of the Fortune 500 companies that lease to franchisees prefer to deal with Indians, said Palmer. They prefer the Indians because the Indians can use their Indian networks to import cheap workers, which allows them to buy the franchises at higher prices than law-abiding Americans can pay, he said. The outsourced use of foreign labor is “cutting out any possibility of American mom and pop stores anymore,” he said.
Federal officials have repeatedly found illegal Indian migrants who are being smuggled from India to work as indentured servants for Indian-born business owners. In 2018, the department announced a jail sentence, a fine, and deportation for two Indian hotel operators:
According to documents filed in court, the defendants admitted to conspiring to harbor the victim, who was an undocumented Indian national, at a Super 8 Motel in Kimball between October 2011 and February 2013. During that time, the defendants required the victim to work long hours, seven days a week at the motel, performing manual labor, including cleaning rooms, shoveling snow, and doing laundry. Although the defendants promised to pay the victim, they never did, but rather claimed to apply that amount to a debt the victim owed.
In October 2020, for example, the Department of Justice announced a 16-year sentence for an Indian employer:
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, between February 2014 and October 2016, Kartan and Barai hired workers from [India] to perform domestic labor in their home in Stockton. In advertisements seeking workers on the internet and India-based newspapers, the defendants made false claims about the wages and conditions of employment. Once the workers arrived at the defendants’ Stockton residence, Kartan and Barai compelled them to work up to 18 hours a day with limited rest and nourishment. Few of them were paid any wage.
In January 2018, federal law enforcement officials visited almost 100 convenience stores looking for violations.
Roughly half of all hotels are run by Indians, according to a 2018 report by National Geographic. Hotels are under increasing pressure to curb trafficking. For example, Houston established an anti-trafficking law in March 2021.
The “documented dreamer” amendment also creates massive opportunities for fraudulent claims of parental relationships, Palmer said.
Green cards are worth around $250,000, so E-2 holders could earn massive profits by selling green cards — or just work permits — to unrelated strangers, he said. “The United States has zero ways to trace back the legitimacy of who’s related to whom from India,” partly because Indians can bribe Indian officials to create official-but-fake birth certificates, he said.
Law enforcement officials are loath to investigate the E-2 scandals because it is hidden within immigration laws and within the complexities of the U.S. and the Indian court systems, Palmer said. “This is what they say when I asked: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is convoluted. This is so convoluted. We need black and white,'” he said.
Congress’s failure to investigate the details of the so-called “documented dreamer” pitch is not surprising, said Palmer.
Many legislators, especially new legislators, are swept up by stealth lobbying campaigns, especially if they rely on staffers quietly selected by donors during the rush of an election race. “I would say 99 percent of the legislators don’t see the downside” of E-2 visas, Palmer said.
Flores, for example, was wooed by the Improve the Dream campaign shortly after she was elected to Congress on June 14:
Unsurprisingly, Flores has been forced to defend herself from criticism after the vote — and she is being backed by ImproveTheDream:
The lobbying group is also pushing back against the opposition, in part, because the immigration-boosting bill has yet to be approved by the Senate:
Also, Flores has used Twitter to show support for Texas farm companies and their Latino workforces. But many farm companies prefer to hire and fire migrant workers instead of investing in machinery that helps farmworkers earn more each day by doing more work each day:
The Indian giveaway was not supported by top GOP leaders, such as Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Repp Jim Jordan (R-OH), or leading conservatives, such as Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).
But the yes voters included Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), a former lobbyist who now runs the GOP’s 2022 campaign committee; Tom Cole, the pro-outsourcing top Republican member of the rules committee, and Rep. John Katko (R-NY), the top Republican on the homeland security committee.
The giveaway was also backed by anti-Trump Republicans, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), and Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI).
Many other Midwest Republicans also voted for the bill that diverts wealth and investment from their districts. They included Jim Baird (R-IN), Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH), Rep. Jack Bergman (R-MI), Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN), Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (D-OH), Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH), Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH), Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), Rep. Billy Long (R-MO), and Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO).
Pro-migration Republicans backed the giveaway, even though the bill benefits visa workers, not immigrants. They included orchard owner Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA), Rep. Jaime Herrea-Beutler (R-WA), and Rep. David Valadao (RCA). Other supporters of the corporate giveaway include Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL).
Many of the GOP yes voters are expected to be gone after the 2022 election. They included Cheney, Kinzinger, Upton, Katko, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-OH), and Rodney Davis (R-IL), In addition, Newhouse, Meijer, and Herrera Beutler face tough primary races.
The GOP’s rising number of pro-migration Latino representatives mostly voted for the corporate giveaway to the Indian white-collar workers that take jobs from American Latino graduates. They included Flores of Texas, Rep. Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Tony Gonzalez (R-TX), Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA), and Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL),
Business-first Republicans also backed the giveaway. They included Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Mark Amodei (R-NV), Rep. Patrick Fitzgerald (R-PA), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Rep. Young Kim (R-CA), and Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA).
All but three Democrats voted for the “documented dreamer” bill.
The amendment has yet to be approved by the Senate’s armed services committee. The committee includes several pro-migration Republicans, such as Sen. Thom Tillis, (RNC) and Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND).
But the committee also includes several cautious Senators, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rick Scott (R-FL), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants — and temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers.
The inflationary policy makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.
Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.
Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
The progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits poor foreigners and splits foreign families as it extracts human-resource wealth from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors. This migration policy also minimizes shareholder pressure on U.S. companies to build up beneficial and complementary trade with people in poor countries.
Business-backed migration advocates hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration is good for migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
The polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration — but they also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.
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