Earlier, by Michelle Malkin: A Day Without American Tech Workers
"We're full, our system's full, our country's full!" That was President Donald Trump last year at our southern border.
"
"Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families." That was Trump in January 2017 at his inaugural address.
"The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult... to earn a middle class wage." That was presidential candidate Trump in 2016.
Contrast those clarion "America First" statements with the apparent hysteria of Trump's current acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who was caught on tape telling a private audience of elites in England last week: "We are desperate—desperate—for more people. We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we've had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants."
Mulvaney reportedly went on to push for "expanding" merit- and employment-based immigration to fill all the high-skilled jobs that Americans purportedly aren't capable of filling. By how much, for how long, in which visa categories and under what conditions this "expansion" should happen, Mulvaney is not reported to have detailed. (He will be featured at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning. It would be nice if someone asked him to elaborate, wouldn't it?)
"Running out of people" is typical Beltway swamp talk from a big business lobbyist trafficking in open borders "Chicken Little" alarmism. Has Mulvaney opened a newspaper or browsed the internet in the last 10 years? How about the last week? Over a 48-hour period, I compiled a Twitter thread of more than 50 stories of tens of thousands of recent U.S. worker layoffs in tech and other high-skilled industries. Among the U.S. corporations and institutions responsible for laying off, replacing, offshoring, and outsourcing tens of thousands of American jobs:
Wayfair, TripAdvisor, LogMeIn, Inc., Zume Pizza, VMWare, Shutterfly, Intel, Comcast, Xilinx, 23andMe, NortonLifeLock, AT&T, Macy's, Walgreens, Uber, Lyft, UCSF Medical Center, Baptist Health, Sysco, WeWork, American Family Insurance, Tennessee Valley Authority, Amway, UPS subsidiary Coyote Logistics, Comcast, Lime, Bird, Unicorn, Getaround, Cerner, Oracle, Samsung US, Edmunds.com, Textron Aviation, Morgan Stanley, Spirit AeroSystems, Mozilla, UiPath, Plexus, Cisco, Ancestry.com, Clover Health, State Street Corporation, Anthem, Transamerica, Verizon, MassMutual, Disney, Carnival, Abbott Labs, EmblemHealth, Harley Davidson, Cargill, Eversource Energy, Best Buy, Southern California Edison and Qualcomm.
The most recent entry in my U.S. worker layoffs thread came in Monday from Expedia, which announced it is laying off 12% of its information technology workforce (roughly 3,000), including 500 employees at its Seattle headquarters. Tip of the iceberg. As leading American workers' employment attorney and Protect US Workers advocate Sara Blackwell (right) points out, "so many companies are able to conduct this awful business model under the radar." And they get away with it because it's legal, workers are silenced, and most Americans "just do not care because it does not yet touch them personally."
The most recent entry in my U.S. worker layoffs thread came in Monday from Expedia, which announced it is laying off 12% of its information technology workforce (roughly 3,000), including 500 employees at its Seattle headquarters. Tip of the iceberg. As
Do we "need more immigrants," as Mulvaney claims? Marie Larson, an American mom who founded the American Workers Coalition with Barbara Birch and Hilarie Gamm, told me: "I talk to Americans almost daily who are being discriminated against, who keep getting laid off by Indian managers, who have to train their foreign replacements to get the much-needed severance packages, who have to pull kids out of college because they can't afford it, even having to sell their houses. These are STEM workers, who got the 'right' degrees and did everything they were supposed to do, only to have our government turn their back and sell out to big businesses push for even more H-1Bs." Tech firms cut 64,166 American jobs in 2019, up 351% from 14,230 in 2018.
Are we so "desperate" for more bodies to "fuel economic growth?" Let's recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn't include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign "students" now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.
"We" ordinary Americans don't need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They've been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation's Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
Remember: The only persistent tech worker shortage in America is a shortage of workers at the wage employers want to pay. Beltway swampers gnashing their teeth over barren American worker recruitment pools are full of it.
COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM
Michelle Malkin [Email her] is the author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin is also the author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies, ,Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs, and Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers.
Malkin is author of the book, "Open Borders, Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction," available directly from VDARE.com in hardcover. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM
More 100,000 Indians roared for President Trump when he spoke alongside India’s Prime Minister Nareendra Modi last week [Trump dazzled by 'stunning display of India's culture and kindness' at welcome rally, by Courtney Subramanian, USA Today, February 23, 2020]. The meeting was Trump’s second with Modi in six months, the first being at a rally in Houston, Texas. Of course, Trump wants good relations with India, but he’s also angling, foolishly, for the Indian-American vote in 2020. Unfortunately, this pandering means he might just back a bill that would give more green cards to Indian immigrants. That would be catastrophic for the American workers who elected him in 2016.
Trump seems to have a particular affection for Indians. He has long done business with them here and in India. He called Indians a “very, very special people” in a November 13, 2018 tweet celebrating a Hindu holiday. He courted the Indian vote in 2016 and even released ads in Hindi. “The Indian and Hindu community will have a true friend in the White House, that I can guarantee,” he said at one event. Needless to say, this earnest courtship didn’t end in electoral nuptials: More than 80 percent of Indians jilted him for Hillary Clinton [Very Special People, by Meena Venkataramanan, Harvard Political Review, June 26, 2019].
Why might that be? Sixty-two percent of Indians identify as Democrats [2018 Asian American Voter Survey, Civic Leadership USA]. And they lean to the Left on nearly every issue of importance to the Historic American Nation. Sixty-five percent of Indians support Amnesty for illegal aliens, 60 percent believe states should issue drivers’ licenses to illegals, 65 percent have a favorable view of Black Lives Matter, and 55 percent say the visa backlog is a serious issue [2016 Post-Election National Asian American Survey, by Karthick Ramakrishnan, Janelle Wong, Jennifer Lee, and Taeku Lee, May 16, 2017]. Asian-Americans in general overwhelmingly favor stricter gun control by a 7-to-1 margin, the 2018 Asian American Voter Survey showed; 84 percent of Indians would grab your gun given the chance.
“Guns, that is the most pressing issue for me,” said Vijay Katkuri, 38, a software engineer from southern India, explaining why he voted for a Democratic challenger on Tuesday. “There are lots of other issues, but you can only fix them if you are alive.” nytimes.com/2019/11/09/us/…
903 people are talking about this
No wonder the Asian American Voter Survey also showed that just 28 percent of Indians approve of Trump’s job performance.
Of course, most Indian-American politicians are hard Leftists. Every U.S. congressman of Indian descent is a Democrat. Two of the most high-profile: Ro Khanna of California and Pramila Jayapal of Washington. Both are far-Left progressives who support Bernie Sanders and Open Borders. Khanna and Jayapal are co-sponsors of the New Way Forward Act, which would decriminalize illegal immigration and make immigration enforcement all but impossible. Jayapal, an immigrant herself, has bragged that she subverted immigration law to help “refugees” from Central America apply for asylum.
Other Indian Democrats are California-born Ami Bera, the child of immigrants who represents California’s 7th District, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, who was born in New Delhi and represents Illinois-8.
California’s hard-left Sen. Kamala Harris is the child of an immigrant Indian mother and immigrant Jamaican father.
Nor is the Indian attachment to the Democrat Party new. The first Indian elected to Congress, Punjabi Sikh Dalip Singh Saund, was a Democrat who represented California-28 from 1957 to 1963.
(Indian Leftists are also penetrating state legislatures. In November, Del. Ghazala Hashmi, an Indian Muslim from Hyderabad, unseated an incumbent Republican to represent Virginia’s 10th House district in the Old Dominion’s General Assembly. Tennessee-born Jay Chaudhuri represents North Carolina’s 10th Senate district and is the party’s Minority Whip.)
Yet Trump still loves these Indians. He’s hired more than two dozen for top jobs and is on pace to break Barack Obama’s record of Indian appointments [Donald Trump praises 'incredible' role played by Indian-Americans in his administration, Times of India, November 14, 2018]. They include Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina (where she removed the Confederate Flag from a State Capitol memorial) and Trump’s envoy to the United Nations, Ajit Pai, Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, and former deputy press secretary Raj Shah.
Many, of course, are Establishment snakes. Raj Shah wanted Trump to lose in 2016. Nikki Haley compared Trump to Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof and supported the U.N.’s globalist pact on immigration that Trump opposed [Trump Ignores Nikki Haley, Pulls U.S. Out Of Global Immigration Pact, by Carlos Ballestros, Newsweek, December 3, 2017].
Still, Trump seems to believe that appearances with Modi, tax cuts, differentiating illegal from legal immigration, and, importantly, criticizing Islam, will invite Hindu votes at the polls November. Many Hindus hate Muslims and some groups praised his travel ban on predominately Muslim nations. And they certainly like Trump’s refusal to condemn Modi’s nationalism and anti-Muslim policies [At a rally like no other, Trump woos Indian American voters ahead of 2020, by Anita Kumar, Politico, September 22, 2019].
But Indian-American politicians are confident these tactics won’t work. They claim Indians are committed to helping their fellow Indian immigrants and non-whites in general.
“It’s the Gandhian philosophy of pluralism, of respect for fellow human beings, of dialogue for peace that define the values of the Indian American community,” Khanna said after Trump’s Houston rally with Modi. “The president is misinformed if he thinks showing up at this rally is going to help him with the Indian American vote.”
.@RoKhanna points out that 80% of our Indian-American brothers & sisters oppose Trump despite this Houston Trump/ Modi rally
665 people are talking about this
“I believe the Indian American community will overwhelming[ly] reject Donald Trump because his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies run completely counter to our community’s story in America,” Chaudhuri told Politico’s Kumar.
“Not only are they immigrants, but also, they are brown-skinned, often in minority religions and discriminated in society in various ways,” Ramakrishnan, director of the Asian American Voters Survey at the University of California, told NPR this month. “So, yes, people could try to drive a wedge between Indian Americans and other immigrant communities, but the reality of racial discrimination in the United States makes it more difficult” [One Group Whose Political Leanings May Be Changing: Indian Americans Who Are Hindu, by Tom Gjelten, NPR, February 22, 2020].
On that note, here’s another datum from Ramakrishnan’s election report to put the Indian vote in perspective: Indians are most likely among Asians to claim employment discrimination in hiring and firing, [p. 37-38] and to suffer the injustice of name mispronunciation.[p. 48]
In other words, Indian-Americans are a natural part of the Democrats’ anti-white fringe coalition of self-proclaimed victims.
The president knows that Indian immigrants are more loyal to their homeland than to America. Why else would he think a foreign leader gets him votes in America? Oddly enough, though, this approach will only help him with less assimilated Indians.
That’s because Asians in general are more likely to vote Democrat if they were born in America and speak English well [New results—AALDEF 2018 exit poll of 8,058 Asian American voters, by Asian American Legal and Defense Education Fund, December 26, 2018]. Twenty-six percent of foreign-born Asian-Americans approve of Trump, while only 7 percent of American-born Asians approve of Trump. Thirty-five percent of Asian-Americans with limited English proficiency support Trump, but only 15 percent of fluent English speakers support him.
So will Trump shape his immigration policy around Indian demands and support Senator Mike Lee’s Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (FHSIA)—which should really be called the Indian Overclass Importation bill?.
Recall what this atrocious bill would do: Scrap country caps on visas, which prevent certain nationalities monopolizing visas and overwhelming our immigration system. Under current law, one nationality is limited to 7 percent of visas allocated annually. By eliminating that ceiling, FHSIA would permit Indians to gobble up more than 90 percent of professional employment green cards for the next 10 years because so many are here already on “temporary” H1B visas, waiting to become permanent residents.
The Indian ethnic lobby strongly backs the bill and is pushing Republicans to support it. Like Mexico and Central America, India benefits immensely from immigration because remittances are nearly 3 percent of its GDP.
Of course, Big Tech will benefit, too. About 71 percent of Silicon Valley’s workforce is foreign-born. If FHSIA passes, Big Tech can obtain even more cheap foreign labor rather than hiring actual Americans.
The people who will lose the most are high-skilled American workers, the communities in which Indians settle, and, of course, the GOP. Indians have transformed many of the communities they live in—and not for the better. Many suburbs of Seattle now resemble South Asian colonies, with Indians occupying entire classrooms and apartment complexes. Towns such as Redmond, Washington used to be Republican strongholds. Thanks to Indians, these suburbs now elect far-Left Democrats.
If FHSIA passes, those communities will spread like coronavirus—a contagion that invites this observation about Indians: A strikingly high number commit medical fraud. So they steal not only jobs but also benefits.
Trump should stop wasting his time. He’ll get more votes if he stands with American workers against the agenda of this ethnic lobby imported by the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act—whose proportion of the U.S. population, by a pleasing coincidence, now amounts to a literal “one percent,” just like the financial elite that the Left claims is running the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment