Judges Block Business Plan to Import More White-Collar Workers
Three judges have rejected a sneak claim by business groups to double the inflow of foreign visa-worker graduates into the jobs needed by American college graduates.
“This is a terrible decision for the [visa worker] community,” lamented a June 9 tweet by Cyrus Mehta, a New York-based immigration lawyer.
“The DC Circuit just killed the hopes of not counting dependents against the green card cap,” mourned David Bier, a migration advocate at the business-funded Cato Institute.
“What that does is it lowers the supply of [foreign] workers coming in,” Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, told Breitbart News July 12. “That’s a benefit to have the American workers who are grappling with job insecurity, offshoring, and outsourcing of their jobs,” he said.
The lawsuit had asked the judges to force the government to supply free green cards to the dependent families of workers who get “Employment-Based” (EB) green cards from their employers. The lawsuit was intended to help restart the clogged sale of EB-5 green cards to wealthy Chinese investors. But if the court claim had been approved, the judges would have effectively doubled the number of EB green cards that employers could offer foreign recruits, up from roughly 140,000 each year to roughly 280,000.
In turn, the expanded number of green cards would double the inflow of foreign graduates eager to take U.S. jobs for low wages in the hope of also getting the huge prize of green cards. The cards allow the foreign workers to migrate from their poor and chaotic home countries.
The court’s decision is good news for U.S. graduates because it crimps the ability of U.S. companies to discriminate against them in favor of foreign workers for many career-starting white-collar jobs.
Many universities, plus Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors, import and hire many mid-skill foreign graduates via the interlocking networks of government work permit programs, including the H-1B, L-1, J-1, Optional Practical Training (OPT), and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs. The O-1 visa is awarded to higher-skilled migrants.
Late in his term, deputies for President Donald Trump issue several regulations to protect U.S. graduates from the visa worker programs. However, President Joe Biden’s deputies have discarded those protective rules.
This indentured “green card workforce” of at least one million visa workers allows U.S. investors to shrink Americans’ salaries. But it also allows them to corral and control innovation by replacing outspoken American professionals with mid-skill foreign graduates who can rarely switch jobs in the ten to 30 years before they get their deferred bonus of a green card.
That outsourced workforce also makes it easier for Fortune 500 companies to benefit from illegal immigrants who have white-collar credentials. Those illegal workers can be hired by Fortune 500 subcontractors without creating any legal risk for the Fortune 500 companies.
The one million estimate includes roughly 480,000 foreign graduates who are still working for their employers long after they were put in a line for green cards.
The waiting line for green cards is long for Chinese investors seeking green cards via the EB-5 route and for Indian graduates seeking green cards via the EB-2 and EB-pathways. The line is also backing up for Central Americans and Mexicans who are being paid with promises of EB-4 green card approvals by low-wage employers, including farm companies and slaughterhouse operators.
The lines have built up for two reasons. Firstly, a 1965 law sets loose limits on the annual award of green cards to each country, partly to ensure a wide diversity of nationalities get green cards. Secondly, far more people have volunteered to take U.S. jobs than their employers can annually reward with government-issued green cards.
Business groups — such as Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of West Coast investors — are lobbying for laws that would allow them to hire an unlimited number of foreign graduates in place of Americans.
The legal pipeline they want would allow foreigners to get work permits in U.S universities and then get green cards after working in Americans’ jobs for a decade.
So far, immigration reporters at establishment news sites have ignored the growing population of visa workers, the corporate push to expand the population, and President Joe Biden’s rollback of protections for U.S. graduates, which were set by President Donald Trump.
Are the Good Times Over for Biden?
By Patrick J. Buchanan | July 13, 2021 | 4:55am EDT
Are the Democrats headed for their Little Bighorn, with President Joe Biden as Col. Custer? The wish, you suggest, is father to the thought. Yet, consider.
On taking office, Biden held a winning hand.
Three vaccines, with excellent efficacy rates, had been created and were being administered at a rate of a million shots a day. The pandemic was at its peak but looking certain to turn down, and it did.
This welcome news lifted national spirits, and the economy with it.
And the new president was taking office in a brief era of good feelings produced by the departure of the party and president who had given us the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Thus did Biden begin his administration with his approval at a level his predecessor never reached in any year of his presidency.
Happy days were here again.
But now the storm clouds are gathering and rumbling.
By last week, Biden's disapproval rating had risen into the 40s, and half the country believed America was "on the wrong track."
Yet it is not what has happened but what impends that appears ominous for Biden's and his party's prospects.
With not quite 70% of U.S. adults having received a vaccination, a new and more contagious delta variant of the disease is spreading worldwide, and an uptick in new U.S. infections has been reported.
In the economy, with markets at an all-time high, an old demon has reappeared. Writes today's Wall Street Journal:
"Americans should brace themselves for several years of higher inflation than they've seen in decades, according to economists who expect the robust post-pandemic economic recovery to fuel brisk price increases ...
"If the economists prove correct, Federal Reserve officials might have to raise (interest) rates sooner or more than they expect to keep inflation under control."
Inflation and rising interest rates to combat it is usually a near-fatal cocktail for a party in control of the White House and Congress in the year they face the electorate.
In addition to warning lights flashing in the economy, Biden has presided over a sudden crisis along the southern border, where 170,000 illegal migrants are being apprehended every month.
"Getaways" — border-crossers who sneak in and evade contact with the Border Patrol — now number 30,000 a month.
Who these people are and whence they came, we know not.
Former President Donald Trump's policies secured the border, and this new invasion is traceable to Biden's trashing of Trump's policy.
Indeed, Biden's designation of Vice President Kamala Harris as point person on the border crisis, and her reflexive recoil from the duties of that assignment, testify that this latest invasion could be a killer issue for Democrats in 2022.
Also, the progressives' adamant stand that rogue cops hostile to people of color are the true police crisis in America has been rendered politically obsolete by a nationwide surge in shootings, murders and mass killings.
How potent is the issue? Eric Adams, a Black former police captain running on the issue of public safety, won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York and is headed for Gracie Mansion.
Almost without exception, the cities where the shootings and killings are occurring have been run by Democrats for decades.
The "defund the police!" chant of Black Lives Matter and its camp followers is now being drowned out by a clamor for more cops to protect the people of color who are the collateral damage and victims of the shootings.
Other stories gracing front pages and evening news reports in coming months will be the horrors coming out of Afghanistan, as the Taliban capture towns and provincial capitals and exact retribution on those Afghans who made the fatal mistake of casting their lot with the Americans.
Biden did not take us into Afghanistan, but he ordered the rapid withdrawal, and his presidency will bear the political consequences of his presiding over yet another lost American war. As JFK said, life is unfair.
If the Democratic Party goes into the election of 2022 defending Biden's border failures, decrying rogue cops rather than addressing the shootings and killings, and explaining away inflation and rising interest rates as "not our fault," the result would seem to be foreordained.
Then there is the matter of race.
Is it a winner for the Democrats in 2022 to be seen as the party of tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Lewis and Clark, of requiring that schoolchildren be indoctrinated in the tenets of "systemic racism" and "white privilege," and learn about how their ancestors were slave-owners and their grandparents cousins or friends of Jim Crow?
As for the progressives' agenda, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act could all wind up dead on the Senate floor alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders $6 trillion plan for remaking America in the image of Norman Thomas.
All killed by filibusters bravely defended by Sen. Joe Manchin.
(Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.")
A humble patriot praying for the USA
Dear God,
I humbly pray for our country, the United States of America, a country which I love and treasure, a country which shines as a beacon of hope, freedom, and the American Dream.
The power and attraction of this country have always been the melting pot of diverse races, ethnic cultures, languages, music, art, cuisines, fashions, a symphony of unique talents, human values, ideas, and strengths from all walks of life contributing to unstoppable success and prosperity for future generations.
In this dark, dangerous, and destructive period of American history, I pray that God will bless all of us, the citizens of this great country, with wisdom and courage to replace wicked and power-hungry leaders who promote hate, divisiveness, corruption, censorship, intimidation, violence, crime, irresponsibility, illegal voting, illegal immigration, socialism, and Communism, with people with honesty, integrity, character, and courage, brilliant patriots who celebrate life, freedom, respect, individual dignity and differences, continuous and meaningful improvement, collaboration for the greater good, law and order, love of country and family, and who will lead by example to inspire and elevate all, and restore and protect this country as Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.
Thank you, dear God, for listening and for Your help, Amen.
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