Joe Biden Promises to Let Mayors Import Foreign Workers

SAN RAFAEL, CA - MAY 23: Illegal immigrants Misael Amrocio (L) and Jose Augustine, both of
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Neil Munro

If Joe Biden is elected president, mayors and county executives will get a pipeline of foreign workers for local CEOs who say they cannot recruit Americans for the jobs, says Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign platform.

“It is the Democratic version of [President] George W. Bush’s [2004] ‘Willing worker, willing employer’ proposal,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. The Bush proposal, he said, would have allowed:

Any employer to import any number of workers from anywhere in the world to do any job at any wage above minimum wage. What Biden wants to do … is to give city and county governments the ability to import people and then give them to the employers.

In exchange, Krikorian said, “the [employers] would express their gratitude with donations and consulting contracts for the [politicians’] cocaine-addicted sons.”

Biden’s local migration plan is described in his immigration platform titled, “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants”:

As president, Biden will support a program to allow any county or municipal executive of a large or midsize county or city to petition for additional immigrant visas to support the region’s economic development strategy, provided employers in those regions certify there are available jobs, and that there are no workers to fill them. Holders of these visas would be required to work and reside in the city or county that petitioned for them.

The imported workers would not be legal immigrants, according to the plan. They would be visa workers who likely could eventually apply for green cards, presumably if they have earned the approval or CEOs or mayors.

Even without approval from Congress, the plan is doable because it builds on the existing pipelines of foreign workers.

For example, both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama cited section 1324a of the 1965 immigration law to create and expand the Practical Training pipeline, which provided work permits to roughly 500,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges in 2019. In contrast, President Donald Trump has trimmed the program.

Obama used the same 1324a claim to bypass Congress, as he provided work permits to at least 800,000 younger illegal immigrants under the so-called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

For more than a decade, lower courts have ping-ponged two lawsuits by the Immigration Reform Law Institute challenging the 1324a claim. The Supreme Court declined to address the legality of the 1324a claim when it rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to cancel the program.

Also, Congress has declined to block the work permit programs, and in 2019, apparently affirmed a “Parole in Place” presidential authority that could be cited in presidential amnesties.

Moreover, there is no annual limit on the number of foreign temporary workers who can be nominated for green cards. This means that Fortune 500 CEOs can import short-term workers and then extend their stay by nominating them for green cards. Many CEOs prefer indentured workers because they are unable to leave their employers until they get their green cards, perhaps after a decade of compliant work.

The Biden program is pitched as a stimulus for interior states who have been left behind as Congress’s immigration programs deliver millions of new workers and trillions of dollars in new wealth to coastal investors, states, regions, and counties.

Biden’s plan says the new pipeline would:

…allow cities and counties to petition for higher levels of immigrants to support their growth. The disparity in economic growth between U.S. cities, and between rural communities and urban areas, is one of the great imbalances of today’s economy. Some cities and many rural communities struggle with shrinking populations, an erosion of economic opportunity, and local businesses that face unique challenges. Others simply struggle to attract a productive workforce and innovative entrepreneurs.

The language in Biden’s plan echoes the pitch by the investor-created Economic Innovation Group, which is lobbying legislators to back a new immigration program dubbed the “Heartland Visa.” The group’s pitch says that “A place-based visa program would allow mutually-advantageous matches to be made between skilled immigrants and places wishing to attract more human capital.”

The group sold its idea to the New York Times, Pete Buttigieg, and others. Buttigieg’s 2020 vision, titled, “Investing in an American asset: Unleashing the Potential of Rural America,” said:

Pete will create a new, place-based Community Renewal visa to provide opportunities for people who want to move to America and help build our economy where they are needed most and where they will do well. These visas will be targeted toward counties that have lost prime-working-age population over the last 10 years, and smaller cities that are struggling to keep pace economically with larger cities.

The EIG is run by wealthy investors who would gain from any increased inflow of cheap workers, consumers, renters, and home-buyers — especially if the immigrants needed federal aid. The group is particularly interested in raising real estate prices, saying, “The relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand.”

The EIG group did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.

The EIG plan would flood local labor markets and make it difficult for American workers — especially marginalized workers — to argue for good jobs and decent wages.

Biden’s plan is a “terrible idea for a whole bunch of reasons,” said Krikorian.

The program would create a local laborforce of indentured migrant workers, who would be stuck in the district until they eventually get green cards, said Krikorian. “The indentured side of it is appalling …  Are they going to send ‘immigrant chasers’ after them as they move to the next town?”

The plan would encourage corrupt deals with employers, he said. “When politicians have authority over importing visas, businesses have a real interest in currying favor with those guys —  the certainty of corruption will be the subject of news stories as long as this kind of thing lasts,” he said. 

The plan is bad for local government because the easy alternative of cheap foreign workers will make it difficult for local officials, citizens, and executives to make difficult resource decisions about education and infrastructure spending, said Krikorian:

Businesses and local governments would no longer have an incentive to make the hard choices about investing in community college, training programs … they won’t have to. They’ll just call up their Congressman, and order up a bunch of foreign workers.

EIG’s “place-based visa plan” won’t help the places that hope for foreign redemption, said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigraiton Reform Law Institute. “It will never work — people will just move to where they want to go,” which is usually close to similar people, usually in coastal states, he said. But that movement would be no problem for the EIG investors who have ties to many companies around the nation, he said. 

By allowing politicians to deliver short-term workers to cooperative CEOs, the Biden plan would dramatically increase government power over the CEOs, Krikorian said. But that is not a problem for business advocates of immigration, he said:

Their goal is maximizing immigration regardless of how it happens. Yes, they would prefer it happened in a libertarian-ish fashion the way George W Bush offered, where the government was not involved, but they’ll settle for Biden’s version. It increases the number of people moving here because that is the goal.

The better alternative to more visa-worker migration would be to reduce the distorting impact of the federal government’s cheap-labor immigration policy, say reformers.

For example, CEOs will move their coastal jobs to cheaper U.S. locations if they have to pay fair-market pay rates, Miano said. “If you cut off H-1B visas, there will be a rush of coastal jobs to Kansas, Montana, and those kinds of places,” he said. 

Trump’s 2020 platform promises to end cheap labor replacement of American employees. 

“The solution has always been to tighten up the labor market,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “We’ve seen it in the [Trump-enforced] exit of  J-1s [visa workers] — when all of a sudden, job opportunities are created for college students.”

“It is a virtuous circle when you tighten the labor market,” he said.

The inflow of immigrants and visa workers has changed the nation’s workplaces, economy, and labor force.

For example, the H-1B visa pipeline delivers roughly 100,000 foreign graduates to CEOs each year. Most of those H-1B workers are hoping to get green cards from their CEOs, so they are willing to work long hours, without complaint, for lower salaries, for many years, in the so-called Green Card Economy.

The H-1B program is just one of several programs that provide CEOs with a  workforce of at least 1 million indentured foreign graduates who have few legal rights to demand higher wages, to complain to a federal agency, or to testify in court.

This huge population of foreign graduates reduces nationwide pressure for pay raises, reduces gateway jobs for young American graduates, reduce the workplace status of American professionals, reduces turnover and innovation in the tech sector, and reduces the creation of new companies that threaten the tech CEOs’ control over their technology.

Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.

He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.

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