Lobbyist Says U.S. Critics Are ‘Racist’ for Opposing Stealth Transfer of Millennials’ Jobs to Indian Migrants

Alexandria, UNITED STATES: Permanent residence cards, known as green cards, rest on the ch
JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty
Neil Munro

Lobbyists working for thousands of Indian contract workers are promising to overwhelm GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s opposition to a bill which puts many Indian temporary workers on a fast-track to permanent green cards.

“We have lots and lots of doctors in Kentucky, both in Louisville and in Lexington, and in other cities around Kentucky, who can all express how important this bill is to them, and how they literally can’t afford to be doctors anymore,” said Leon Fresco, a former congressional staffer who is quarterbacking the contract workers’ campaign for green cards.

Fresco spoke via phone on June 30 to some of the contract workers in the group, named Immigration Voice. Fresco disparaged critics of the bill which offers U.S. green cards to roughly 1 million Indian graduates over the next decade, providing they take U.S. jobs sought by U.S. graduates:

All of our opponents can be lumped into one of two categories, very simple. Either you are an ethno-racist … Or you are what I would call a for-profit racist, meaning, ‘I have figured out a way to make money from the racist system, and if this racist system goes away, I’m not going to make money anymore.’

Both of those are disgusting, OK? Whether you are a racist or a for-profit racist, you’re still a racist, and anyone who is taking money from ethno-racists or from for-profit racists or benefiting from ethno-racism or from for-profit racism, is going to be called out by us in the next few weeks  and no-one — whether it is Sen. Paul currently or any other Senator who wants to object to this [bill] — is going to be able to survive the scrutiny that we are going to bring.

On June 27, Fresco’s plans were hit when Sen. Paul put a hold on the surprise Senate “Unanimous Consent” request made by Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee, the chief advocate for the outsourcing plan.

Paul’s sudden opposition blocked Lee’s bill – titled S.386 — which is getting almost zero attention from the college-grad journalists in established media outlets.

Fresco’s strategy is to pass Lee’s legislation by stealthy “Unanimous Consent” through the Senate. The quiet process ensures that only Lee needs to support the bill publicly. Once through the Senate without a recorded vote, advocates are confident that House judiciary chairwoman Rep. Zoe Lofgren will rush an identical bill — H.R. 1044 — through the House, likely without a recorded vote, so delivering the final green-card giveaway to President Donald Trump’s desk.

Lofgren can push her copy of the bill through the House because support from many GOP legislators and allows her to trigger a fast-track House approval process.

Lee “will keep bringing up this bill until it passes,” Fresco told the Immigration Voice listeners.

Fresco did not return messages from Breitbart News. 

Fresco’s bill is titled “Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants,” and it would abolish the “country caps” which diversify the annual award of 140,000 green cards to the various foreign nationals of American companies.

The prime beneficiaries of the “country cap” bill are the many Indian contract-workers who arrived on temporary H-1B visas, and who then avoided going home by getting their employers to nominate them for green cards. At least 200,000 Indians have already obtained green cards via the employer process during the last decade.

But the huge number of Indian who volunteered to take Americans’ jobs via the H-1B visas are jammed by the “country cap” on green cards for Indians. Perhaps 300,000 resident Indian contract-workers and 300,000 family members are waiting in several backlogged lines for roughly 23,000 green cards issued to Indians each year.

If Lee’s bill become law, the Indian share of the employer green-cards could quickly quadruple to at least 100,000 cards a year, or 1 million per decade.

That offer of at least 75,000 extra green cards per year would create a huge incentive for more young Indian graduates to take U.S. jobs at very low wages.

The extra Indians would be able to get jobs via the uncapped H-1B visas and the uncapped Optional Practical Training program. The resulting flood of workers would allow many more Indian graduates to take many prestigious college-graduate jobs sought by younger American graduates, to force down the Americans’ salaries, and to create yet more economic problems for the disadvantaged Millennial generation.

This huge international movement of college-graduate labor is being encouraged by U.S. investors as well as by the Indian government’s economic development strategy.

The bill’s focus on removing country caps ignores useful alternatives and useful reforms. Alternative fixes could provide a fast-pass to contract-workers who stay for a decade in the backlog, or a fast-pass to higher-paid workers over lower-paid workers. The useful reforms ignored by the bill include a rule that would bar companies from nominating more than 140,000 employees to the backlog list every year, or a rule allowing contract-workers to change jobs once they enter the backlog. But those alternatives and reforms would reduce companies’ current ability to keep their temporary contract-workers in the United States for many extra years by shifting them into the backlog.

Fresco’s green-card bill is close to passage because of Fresco’s tactics and connections.

Fresco is an immigration lawyer who worked as Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer’s chief immigration lawyer in the disastrous “Gang of Eight” amnesty-and-cheap-labor bill. That amnesty would have shifted the nation’s economy towards the wealthy, and allowed an unlimited inflow of foreign graduates. Understandably, it prompted a voter pushback which helped the Democrats lose nine seats in the 2014 election and helped Donald Trump win the White House in the 2016 election.

Fresco’s new bill is backed by many prestigious U.S. business groups, such as FWD.us, which is a lobbying group founded by West Coast investors.

But Fresco’s greatest advantage is the large population of Indian contract workers who have the incentive, time, and connections to lobby for the huge prize of green cards and U.S. citizenship.

Many of the activists in the Immigration Voice group have been in the United States for a decade, can speak English, have U.S.-born children, and are eager to lobby U.S. politicians.

Fresco’s group won a big victory this year when they pressured Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley to support the bill in exchange for some modest changes to the H-1B program. Fresco said:

Immigration Voice was very, very persuasive — just like we are planning to be with Sen. Paul — in the case of Sen. Grassley in providing the case for why not passing this bill was harming the economic interests of Iowa. And [Indian] people were very passionate about making this case to Sen. Grassley when he was back home in Iowa. We would not be in the position where we are today if it was not for courageous Immigration Voice members who went to Sen. Grassley and made this case and explained why the current system is treating them like indentured servants who basically have no hope, no rights, nothing for their children.

Fresco predicted Indian doctors in Kentucky would push Sen. Paul to reverse his opposition:

They can’t start clinics, they can’t go travel home for funerals and weddings … and all of these human rights issues this backlog causes … We have the colleagues of your people at the hospitals who can talk about this as well …. So the key is that we want Sen. Paul to see this from his neighbors’ [perspective] … We know we have enough support in Kentucky to show he is doing massive harm to Kentucky if he holds [up] this bill. So that’s our plan.

Many U.S. towns and counties rely on foreign doctors, partly because Congress has failed to fund extra doctor-training slots since 1997.

Fresco also argued that Paul is being misled by other Indian activists who prefer a different version of the green-card bill:

We believe this hold [by Sen. Paul] will be gone … [It was] was placed for a misguided reason based on misinformation from for-profit racists, that when it is uncovered and revealed, Sen. Paul will have no desire to continue with his hold any more.

Paul’s spokesman declined to respond to questions from Breitbart News.

Immigration Voice’s activists have won support from 20 Republican and 15 Democratic Senators, including Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst.

Fresco also encouraged Indian contract-workers to press their home-state senators to support Sen. Lee’s bill:

We need you to be able to activate your services, your hard work, your resources, everything, to get it across the finish line. If we call you and say we need you in Washington, we need you to drop whatever you are doing and come to Washington … This bill is passing in 2019 —period. Because anybody who tries to get in our way is now in the middle of a moving freight train … We will not be stopped, the concerns of racists and for-profit racists will fall by the wayside.

Fresco’s aggressive claims of racism in America’s multi-racial society were made on behalf of Indian graduates whose homeland society is rigidly divided by an extreme caste system set 4,000 years ago.

The caste system is still enforced by stigma against cross-caste marriages and by ruthless intra-caste nepotism, even in the U.S. workplaces run by Indian managers. The Hindu caste system is so ingrained in Indian society, marriage rules, parenting, education, and careers that it is visible in Indians’ DNA, according to a 2013 press release by Harvard Medical School:

“This genetic data tells us a three-part cultural and historical story,” said [Harvard professor David] Reich, who is also an associate member of the Broad Institute. “Prior to about 4000 years ago there was no mixture. After that, widespread mixture affected almost every group in India, even the most isolated tribal groups. And finally, endogamy [marriage within caste] set in and froze everything in place.”

A 2001 study by the University of Utah reported:

A new study of genetic data shows that the ancestors of Indian men came from different parts of the world than those of Indian women and produced modern upper caste Indian populations that are genetically more similar to Europeans and lower caste populations that are more similar to Asians. These findings support historical data suggesting that West Eurasians migrating into India during the last 10,000 years more often left descendants in the higher rather than lower castes.

Caste distinctions are almost completely invisible to Americans, but Indian Hindu H-1B workers have told Breitbart News that distinctions can be obvious in casual contact and in business developments.

Many American professionals who have been sidelined by the H-1B program say this Indian caste system enforces deep-rooted discrimination against other Indians and against Americans, regardless of the Americans’ ethnic origin or color, or the nation’s anti-discrimination rules. In a lawsuit against a leading Indian company, Infosys, American witnesses reported;

Hiring Manager Instructions: an Infosys hiring manager admitted “There does exist an element of discrimination. We are advised to hire Indians … because they will work off the clock without murmur and they can always be transferred across the nation without hesitation unlike [a] local workforce.”

Talent Acquisition Unit Observations: Recruiters in Talent Acquisition observed that Indians were highly favored, and it was extremely difficult to move non-South Asians ahead in the hiring process. Non-Indians were regularly rejected as being “not a good fit,” – an Infosys euphemism for “non-Indian.” This discrimination is on-going. In 2016 for example, an Infosys manager in their Talent Acquisition Unit observed that of Infosys’ 2,900 hires in the United States, 2,200 (76%) were Indian. She observed a similar hiring disparity in prior years.

Applicant Data Manipulation: Infosys manipulates applicant tracking data in such a way that consideration of non-South Asians and non-Indians is minimized, and the hiring of South Asians is maximized. For example, recruiters have observed that non-South Asian applicants were repeatedly deleted from Infosys’ applicant tracking system, forcing one recruiter to keep a separate spreadsheet of applicants on his computer. Recruiters have also observed South Asian applicants, located by Infosys’ “sourcers” in India, manually entered into the applicant tracking system despite those individuals not having formally applied, thus streamlining the hiring process. Individuals sourced in this way were moved “to the front of the line” ahead of applicants in the U.S. A recruiter also observed that applications for United States positions were regularly not reviewed, and in 2016, approximately 11,000 to 12,000 were rejected en masse.

So Fresco’s legislation has fueled a pushback by American professionals.

Many Americans say their incomes have been slashed by companies’ use of the green-card system to attract and pay much cheaper labor from India. During the last year, these professionals have organized into several groups, include the American Workers Coalition, doctorswithoutjobs.com, ProUSworkers, No on H.R. 1044, and The Multinational Coalition Against H.R. 1044/S. 386.

In turn, these professional groups are backed up by websites which are tracking the scale and location of the outsourcing industry in each legislator’s district. For example, SAITJ.org is a sharp critic of Immigration Voice, and presents evidence that some Immigration Voice members have encouraged each other to pretend to be constituents when calling legislators’ offices.

During the Fresco phone call, Vikram Desai, one of the group’s co-founders, rebuked a suggestion that the Indians flood Paul’s phone-mail system. “That would be a bad idea… Only people in Kentucky should be making those phone calls. If you are in Kentucky, or if you have friends in Kentucky … or if you have colleagues, who are still there …. we need all their help,” he said. 

Other sites document the conflicts created by diverse H-1B business practices in the United States. The non-political MyVisaJobs.com site provides much information about H-1B outsourcing and green card rewards in multiple industries. The federal USCIS agency provides some data, including some data about the uncapped OPT program.

Fresco and Desai also hinted at splits within the Indian population in the United States.

Some groups of Indians say the legislation should allow more green cards and should put all family members on one green card, said Fresco. “Why don’t we say you go from a student [visa] to green cards? Of course … but those things can’t pass,” he said. 

“They cannot be added to this bill,” said Desai. “Subsequent to this bill … we will be supportive of all those ideas.”

Fresco also slammed Indians for disagreeing with his strategy:

If there is any human being who claims to be on the side of the backlogged community and is saying they had anything to do with Rand Paul blocking this bill, there is literally no place in hell that serves their purpose. I mean they are literally the worst human being in the world. Why would anyone want to engage in such a human being in any further conduct?

Throughout the conversation, Fresco and Desai were very complimentary about Rep. Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer who now represents voters and businesses in Silicon Valley, where many jobs have been set aside for Indian contract-workers.

“We welcome anything Congresswoman Lofgren wants to do,” said Fresco. “She’s doing everything she can to make sure final passage [of the bill] is what we are all shooting for, he said, adding that “Lofgren was the original writer of this bill.”

“You owe a lot to Lofgren,” Desai told his listeners. “So when the bill passes, you should all write a thank-you note to her.”

 

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