Almost every House Democrat voted on Thursday to reward Indian H-1B visa workers by offering the huge prize of citizenship to their adult children in exchange for their parents taking Fortune 500 jobs from American graduates.
If approved by the Senate, the giveaway legislation will make it easier for Fortune 500 companies — and their many subcontractors — to fill corporate jobs with more Indian visa workers instead of American professionals.
Many corporations use the H-1B visa program to dangle the prize of citizenship before cheap and compliant Indian graduates when recruiting for jobs that would otherwise go to skilled, underused, innovative, and outspoken American professionals. This replacement process spikes the stock bonuses of C-suite executives but undermines the companies’ ability to innovate amid growing foreign competition.
The existing visa worker system has brought at least 1.5 million foreign contract workers into coastal-based jobs at many Fortune 500 companies.
This huge inflow of foreign workers drains investment from GOP-majority Midwest and Southern towns and it demotes millions of the ambitious sons and daughters of American parents. The giveaway legislation benefits the visa workers and their foreign-born children but provides no compensation to Americans or their communities.
The chain migration giveaway also threatens the jobs of GOP members. Naturalized Indian immigrants are one of the most pro-Democratic voting blocs, partly because they feel little pressure to give up their ancient caste culture to better integrate into U.S. society.
All but three of the 218 Democrats voted for the chain migration giveaway.
This lockstep Democratic support for corporate outsourcing may be risky. A July 5-7 poll of 849 registered voters by Siena College showed that Democrats have the support of 57 percent of white college graduates. That group — and their children — are most impacted by the expanded giveaway of benefits to foreign contract workers. The clear opposition by the GOP leadership gives the GOP an opportunity to reduce that crucial Democratic advantage — if the GOP leaders are willing to anger their national corporate donors in the Fortune 500.
The giveaway bill is marketed as a humanitarian benefit to roughly 200,000 older children of visa workers from India. Each year, the federal government offers 140,000 green cards to visa workers and their families. But the huge surge of Indians into Americans’ jobs has created a massive backlog in the giveaway process. The backlog ensures that some of the Indian workers’ children age out of the legal process as they turn 21. This lifts the age limit, so allowing the adult children of visa workers to potentially benefit from their parents’ job offer. Jenks said:
It is ridiculous that people who come here on a [parents’] temporary [work] visa believe they have a right to stay permanently. They have decided, unilaterally, that it doesn’t matter what the law says, it doesn’t matter what rational expectations might be — they are entitled to remain in the United States indefinitely.
“Congress has a responsibility to American citizens,” said Jenks. “To ignore the needs of Americans and ignore the cost to Americans, and to instead grant special favors to the foreigners, is ludicrous,” she added.
These adult children are good for campaign P.R., especially because few reporters show any skepticism, or even recognize that the children’s taxpayer-funded education in the United States makes them valuable hires in their homeland. Much of the stealth campaign for the expansion included personalized arguments during face-to-face lobbying of legislators in their home districts, usually by the visa workers, Indian doctors, and their children
Advocates for the giveaway campaign also added the adult children of non-Indian E-2 visa holders. The E-2 visas allow some foreigners to stay in the United States while they are running a business.
The corporate giveaway was backed by some GOP leaders. 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 of the GOP supporters have influential groups of Indian visa workers in or near their district. This group includes Herrea-Beutler and Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), the leading GOP sponsor of the legislation with Deborah Ross (D-NC). “Today the House passed my amendment which will protect over 200,000 documented dreamers,” Miller-Meeks said in a tweet. “These dreamers grew up in the United States and call this place home. Sadly, due to a broken immigration system, many of them are forced to leave.”
The MyVisaJobs.com site sketches out the number of H-1B in each state — North Carolina, for example. Those numbers show perhaps one-quarter of the resident population of white-collar outsourcing workers, such as H-1Bs, L-1s, J-1s, H4EADs, TNs, B-1/B-2s, and OPTs. That white-collar inflow does not include the inflow of legal immigrants and the semi-legal inflow across the southern border.
Like many other Americans, Miller-Meeks’ Iowa constituents lose local white-collar jobs — and wage increases — because of the visa workers.
But they also lose possible jobs, wealth, and status because the federal migration economic policy sends myriad new workers, renters, and consumers to coastal investors in their coastal states. The population pipelines minimize pressure on coastal-based investors to hire people and serve consumers in distant Midwestern states.
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).
In contrast, the many coastal Democrats who voted for the giveaway strengthened the federal incentives that enrich home-state investors and landlords. Their support for the surge of wage-cutting and rent-boosting visa workers also hurts their districts’ American employees and renters.
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 include Rep. Mayra 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).
Democrats padded the final result –277 yeas to 150 nays — by combining Miller-Meeks’ giveaway amendment into a difficult-to-resist “en bloc” mega-amendment of almost 140 different amendments. The bloc of amendments included roughly 21 amendments proposed by Republicans, including:
[Andy] Barr (R-KY) – Amendment No. 468 – Requires the Secretary of State to report on Chinese support to Russia with respect to its unprovoked invasion of and full-scale war against Ukraine
Cammack, Kat (R-FL) – Amendment No. 479 – Requires a report on the feasibility of establishing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Preclearance Facility on Taiwan
[Dan] Crenshaw (R-TX) – Amendment No. 498 – Requires Sec. of State reporting on what is needed to provide access to free and uncensored media in the Chinese market
[Virginia] Foxx (R-NC) – Amendment No. 512 – Creates an Inspector General for the Office of Management and Budget to bring transparency and accountability to the agency
[Claudia] Tenney (R-NY) – Amendment No. 422 – Restricts the ability of covered entities (owned, directed, controlled, financed, or influenced directly or indirectly by the Government of the People’s Republic of China, the CCP, or the Chinese military) from using federal funds from engaging, entering into, and awarding public works contracts
Barr, Tenney, and Foxx voted for the en bloc amendment, but Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) voted no.
The Democratic leaders buried their giveaway in an en bloc amendment to help protect their members from the voter opposition to the giveaway, said Jenks. “Any member of Congress who voted for this can say “Oh, no, I didn’t vote for it because of that [giveaway] amendment. I voted for it because of X, Y, or Z amendment,” she said.
“Some of the Republicans didn’t even know the amendment was in there, and they voted for it to get something completely different, and now they’re like, ‘Oh, crap, I voted for that,'” Jenks added.
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.
