Democrats Favor Jobs for Visa Workers Over U.S. Graduates
A plurality of Democrats and liberals say the government should allow Fortune 500 CEOs to import white-collar visa workers for the good career jobs needed by U.S. college graduates, according to a February 9 poll by Rasmussen Reports.
In contrast, Republicans and swing-voters overwhelmingly prefer that CEO hire American graduates before importing more visa workers, according to the January 31 to February 4 survey of 1,250 likely voters. U.S. companies now employ at least 1 million foreign graduates instead of American gradautes.
The poll asked, “Should Congress increase the number of foreign workers taking higher-skill U.S. jobs or does the country already have enough talented people to train and recruit for most of those jobs?”
The electorate split 2-to-1 against a greater inflow of non-immigrant contract workers.
Sixty-one percent agreed that “The country already has enough talented people to train and recruit for most of those jobs,” while just 28 percent agreed with the call to “Increase the number of foreign workers taking higher-skill U.S. jobs.”
GOP voters split 78 percent to 14 percent against, and swing-voting “other” split 66 percent to 22 percent.
Conservatives split 74 percent to 19 percent, and “moderates” split 61 percent to 27 percent.
But more Democrats and liberals approved the corporate inflow than supported U.S. graduates.
Democrats split 45 percent for foreign hiring, but just 41 percent against the inflow. Liberals split 46 percent for CEOs’ preferences, to just 39 percent for hiring U.S. graduates.
“All indications are the companies that make money from these non-immigrant worker visa programs are feeling pretty good right now,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which opposes the graduate displacement programs. President Joe Biden and the Democrats favor the visa program, Lynn said, because:
They are no longer the party of the working people, the productive class, of the people who are paid hourly. They are the party for the people with salaries and benefits … and they don’t believe that someone from another country doesn’t have a right to a job here in America. They believe that everyone has a right to jobs here in America.
Many non-political graduates who vote Democratic do not see the danger posed by the Democratic-backed outsourcing machine, he added. “They don’t see it because they are not being sidelined right now: Eventually, they will be sidelined … But they honestly believe that their college degrees are going to save them.”
Curiously, the political divide narrowed when Rasmussen asked about importing blue-collar voters. Republicans opposed that blue-collar outsourcing by 78 percent to 14 percent — while Democrats opposed it by 56 percent to 26 percent.
The partisan divide over the college-graduate jobs was exposed on the Senate floor on February 5, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) offered an amendment to block any expansion of visa worker inflows in the Democrats’ pending reconciliation budget.
The Cruz curb would have blocked a budgetary increase in the annual inflow of roughly 650,000 white-collar H-1B, J-1, L-1, and OPT workers, as well as the far lower inflow of blue-collar H-2A, H-2B, and J-1 visa workers.
Cruz introduced his amendment, saying:
Mr. President, before this coronavirus pandemic hit this country, our economy was booming. Jobs were soaring. Over the last year, our country has suffered tens of millions of job losses. This amendment creates a point of order against any legislation that would increase legal immigration until we return to where we were before this pandemic. I believe in legal immigration. We are a country built by immigrants, but legal immigration is meant to serve … American workers, and I do not believe we should be significantly increasing legal immigration at a time when tens of millions of Americans are out of work.
Forty GOP Senators voted for Cruz’s curbs – but all Democratic Senators voted against the proposed curbs.
Democrats opposed the measure, in part, because they want Fortune 500 CEOs to pressure the GOP legislators to approve an amnesty. Democrats are dangling the reward of more via workers for the CEOs if they get the GOP to vote for an amnesty.
But 10 GOP Senators also voted against the Cruz curbs.
The ten GOP Senators were Susan Collins (R-ME), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Rand Paul (R-KY), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Tim Scott (R-SC), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), John Thune (R-SD), Pat Toomey (R-PA).
All of those GOP senators represent voters who want good jobs and wages — but also many employers who import H-2A workers for agriculture jobs, as well as H-2B and J-1 workers for tourism jobs.
Employers in Toomey’s Pennsylvania also import many H-1B and J-1 visa workers for white-collar jobs. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer touted the use of foreign H-1B and J-1 laboratory workers in a July 2020 article critical of President Donald Trump’s popular reforms of the visa worker programs:
Cesar de la Fuente is at risk of losing more than half of his research lab to deportation.
Tighter visa restrictions have the University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor fearing that the eight international researchers in his 10-member lab might be forced to leave if they can’t find an exception to the new [H-1B] regulations. “We only have two Americans in the lab right now. So everyone else, I’m worried for them.”
[…]
His own path shows the power of that mechanism. De la Fuente emigrated from Spain to attend the University of British Columbia in Vancouver with a Canadian visa before using a J-1 visa to become a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cruz’s amendment is one sign of growing GOP opposition to the white-collar visas that keep at least one million U.S. graduates out of good jobs — including many swing-voting graduates who might vote for the GOP in 2022 and 2024.
H-1B visas should help fill labor shortages, not help Big Tech hire foreigners instead of Americans to save money. Biden officials say reforming the program is too hard. In reality, they’re giving Big Tech donors the gift of cheap foreign labor—at the expense of American workers.
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) February 5, 2021
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and immigration in theory.
Trump lost the 2002 election, partly because he did not use his power over the visa programs to win a larger share of the college-graduate vote.
Biden's deputies cancel DHS office for seeing signs of anti-American discrimination by CEOs who hire 350K+ imported 'OPT' contract workers.
The main victims are US graduates, incl. Biden voters.
BTW, estb. media rushed to protect OPT cheats in 2019. #H1bhttps://t.co/6O4BKaPkM1— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) January 27, 2021
THESE ARE THE BIGGEST CORPORATE MONSTERS PLUNDERING AMERICA TODAY!
Tanden’s financial ties, as head of the Center for American Progress, include $5,000 to $499,999 donations from Apple, AT&T, BlackRock, CVS Health, Comcast NBCUniversal, Goldman Sachs, Lyft, Verizon, Uber, Walmart, the Bank of America, Amazon, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Facebook, Google, JP Morgan Chase, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and Wells Fargo.
Watch: Biden OMB Nominee Neera Tanden Grilled for Taking Millions from Wall Street, Big Tech
President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Neera Tanden, was grilled by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) for her financial ties to Wall Street firms and tech corporations.
Tanden, currently the CEO of the left-wing Center for American Progress and a longtime ally of failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, was questioned by Hawley for the organization’s donor list, which includes Wall Street investors, Big Tech, and foreign governments.
“Do you think that Wall Street and Big Tech companies have too much influence in our economy and society today,” Hawley asked Tanden to which she responded “Yes.”
Hawley then asked Tanden to explain how she would “advocate for working people given this history of soliciting tens of millions of dollars from the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet?”
The exchange went as follows:
HAWLEY: I also … I am glad you say that, I agree with you and I’ve talked for years now about these concentrations of power, how they stifle small business owners, and ultimately hurt working people. I want to ask you about a report from the New York Times and other outlets suggesting that you solicited tens of millions of dollars in donations from Wall Street and Silicon Valley companies as president of the Center for American Progress, including very large contributions from Mark Zuckerberg.
I understand that in early 2019, Sen. Sanders actually wrote to your organization, suggesting that these corporate interests may be inappropriately influencing your work. Can you just give a sense of how you will, if you’re confirmed as OMB Director, how you will advocate for working people given this history of soliciting tens of millions of dollars from the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet?
TANDEN: Senator, if the role of OMB is to serve the public and I am 100 percent committed to that role, and let me say that just to be clear, I believe that the Center for American Progress took funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, not Mark Zuckerberg directly. But I completely take the point about concerns about funding. I can commit to you that I will always uphold the highest ethical standards, I will work with career folks at OMB to do so but I will also say that no policy position I have taken has been determined by the financial interest of any single person.
HAWLEY: $665,000 from the personal foundation of Mr. Zuckerberg. Millions of dollars from Wall Street financiers, big banks, foreign governments, Silicon Valley, a million dollars from the managing partner at Bain Capital, $2.5 million from the UAE. That was between 2016 and 2018, given this record, how can you assure us that you’ll work to see that these Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms don’t exercise undue influence — frankly, influence that they’ve already got in the making of government policy and control of our economy.
How can you assure us that you’re going to be an independent actor when you’ve been so close to them and raised so much money over all these years.
TANDEN: I really appreciate that question and I would say that I and the Center for American Progress aggressively … take on the role of Facebook and tech companies, I’ve called for higher taxes on companies, regulations of Wall Street, financial transaction tax. I’m proud of the record of the Center for American Progress and policies that will limit the power of Wall Street, limit the power of tech companies. I would welcome the opportunity to work with you on those ideas because I do agree with you that corporate special interests have too much power in our discourse.
So whether it’s a financial transaction tax or other proposals, obviously I would take my role as OMB Director as one in which I follow the tax policy of the president, but it’s my orientation that we need to rebalance power in our economy and I hope we can work together in those areas.
HAWLEY: Good. I’ll hold you to that.
Tanden’s financial ties, as head of the Center for American Progress, include $5,000 to $499,999 donations from Apple, AT&T, BlackRock, CVS Health, Comcast NBCUniversal, Goldman Sachs, Lyft, Verizon, Uber, Walmart, the Bank of America, Amazon, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Facebook, Google, JP Morgan Chase, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and Wells Fargo.
Some of the Center for American Progress’ biggest donors in 2019 — ranging from $1 million or more and $500,000 to $999,999 donations — came from billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, hedge fund billionaire John Arnold’s Arnold Ventures LLC, and the Ford Foundation.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com.
The flow of "dark" dollars from anonymous donors to activists using a pass-through is a hallmark of the professional left, which boasts hundreds of such groups that form an outer web surrounding the Democratic Party. This echo chamber pushes the party further to the left on issues ranging from abortion on demand to gun control and campaign finance. Just how much Tides raised in 2020—which won’t be released until early next year—is expected to be even higher.