NYT Invites U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Slam Trump’s Curbs on Visa Workers

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AP Photo/Altaf Qadri
Neil Munro

The New York Times provided a protected op-ed slot to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to explain why it is asking a judge to veto President Donald Trump’s June 22 curbs on visa workers.

“These are the most restrictionist immigration policies in nearly a century,” said chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, in his July 23 op-ed defending the chamber’s lawsuit:

If you want businesses to grow and the economy to rebound, you allow skilled workers to come here legally to work and contribute to the well-being of our nation; you don’t lock them out. If you want the next revolutionary start-up to be founded in America, you welcome foreign students; you don’t threaten to upend their lives and send them home during the middle of a pandemic. And if you want children to grow up to reach their potential and live their American dream, you give them the tools and certainty to succeed; you don’t kick them out of the only country they’ve ever known.

…

Taken together, these decisions form a broader policy that essentially says, “keep out the skilled, the brilliant, the young seeking to help us grow.”

But Trump’s reforms are good for American graduates, employees, and for long-term U.S. innovation, said Kevin Lynn, director of the U.S. Tech Workers.

“U.S. workers are being displaced [by visa workers], and those about to enter the workforce never get the opportunity to compete for these jobs,” he said.

Also, business and technological innovation are stifled when CEOs can hire compliant Indians instead of innovative and outspoken Americans, said Lynn, who has built up a grassroots group of white-collar lobbyists. The graduates’ groups helped block the S.386 green card giveaway to the Fortune 500’s labor force of visa workers and also helped to persuade Trump to approve the June 22 revamp.

Fortune 500 companies use at least 1.3 million foreign contract workers to outsource millions of white-collar jobs to cheap and compliant Indian workers, located either in India or in the United States.

Lynn is now working to block the outsourcing of jobs at the Tennessee Valley Authority, via the huge H-1B visa worker program.

But the NYT and other media are not following the money through the public debate over the visa workers, Lynn said:

Americans workers are being shut out of jobs, and American voters are being cut out of the public feedback loop by the media. [Wealthy advocates] can afford to pay for advertising, and to have articles written for them [by powerless reporters], and to have opinion pieces published.

But the [establishment media is] not allowing the public feedback that is needed to show how these articles are wrong-headed.

The NYT disabled the comments section on Donohue’s article.

This economic debate over visa workers gets little coverage in the NYT, even though the policy damages the careers and political clout of its primary readers, U.S. college graduates.

The NYT‘s editors have minimized coverage of Trump’s unprecedented June 22 revamp of the nation’s huge visa worker economy. For example, the NYT editors put the subheadline, “Corporate America’s visa anger,” on a June 23 business column that echoed comments from the many Fortune 500 CEOs who oppose Trump’s visa reform.

“They’re desperate to keep this cheap pipeline of labor going, and they will not allow dissent on that,” said Lynn.

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