Rep. Banks Introduces GOP Bill to Curb Fortune 500’s Use of Visa Workers

GOP centrists in the House have introduced legislation to shut down the visa worker pipelines which stall innovation by feeding hundreds of thousands of subservient foreign graduates into the Fortune 500 careers needed by U.S. professionals.

“Big Tech is setting aside some of the most lucrative and valuable career opportunities in America and giving them exclusively to foreign guest workers,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who chairs the conservative Republican Study Committee. He continued:

They’re cutting out Americans to save a few bucks. It’s domestic outsourcing. This shocking disregard for American workers and their role in our nation’s future is unpatriotic. We must fix Big Tech’s incentives, so they begin putting Americans first.

The American Tech Workforce Act would end President George W. Bush’s “Optional Practical Training” (OPT) pipeline, and curb the similar H-1B program.

The two programs keep roughly 1 million foreign graduates, mostly Indians, in U.S. white-collar jobs.  This imported workforce shoves at least one million Americans out of upwardly mobile careers, decent homes, and security for their families.

The pro-American bill will be opposed by business groups, universities, and by many Republicans and Democrats. Already, top Democrats have included a huge expansion of the visa worker programs in their Build Back Better bill.

But the visa programs are so unpopular that even President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputy has called for reforms.

However, the donor-dependent GOP leadership prefers to downplay the pocketbook damage caused by migration and to instead focus public attention on border chaos. This silence continues despite the GOP’s growing need to win more swing-voting suburban Americans, many of whom are losing careers and homes to the Fortune 500’s visa workers.

The Banks bill is backed by several immigration reform groups.

“The American Tech Workforce Act of 2021 would end OPT and put American workers and the rule of law first,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations at NumbersUSA. She continued:

Chairman Banks’ legislation would help ensure that Big Tech companies can no longer use the H-1B program as a cheaper alternative to hiring American workers, which would also protect foreign workers who are too often exploited by unscrupulous employers. This bill is an opportunity for all Representatives to make clear that they stand with American workers.

The first wave of co-sponsors for the bill include Reps. Mary E. Miller (R-IL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Eric Crawford (r-AR), Steven M. Palazzo (R-MS), Kevin Hern (R-OK), Austin Scott (R-GA), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Dan Meuser (R-PA), Beth Van Duyne (R-TX), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA).

A statement from Banks’ office described the bill’s contents:

1. Creates a wage floor for [85,000 annual] H-1B visas set at the higher of the annual wage last paid to an American worker who filled the position or $110,000 (adjusted for inflation).
2. Creates a true marketplace where eligible visa applications are awarded based on the highest bidder.
3. Eliminates the Optional Practical Training program that allows [annually at least 200,000] foreigners that came to the U.S. under a student visa and have graduated to work in the U.S. for up to three years if they have a STEM degree and allows their employers to avoid paying payroll taxes on the visa-holder’s wages.
4. Limits the ability of Big Tech firms to contract with third-party companies to fill spots with H-1B recipients sponsored by the third-party company by limiting the maximum validity period of the visas to 1 year.

The visa programs are widely used by many Fortune 500 companies and their tiers of Indian-run outsourcing firms. The companies which use the most H-1Bs and OPTs include banks, insurance companies, airlines, retailers, healthcare providers, manufacturers, and especially, technology companies.

Imported Indian visa workers “have influence in the entire [information technology] market in America,” said Aabha, an Indian in North Carolina, adding:

Every position that is a manager position or at least senior president position in every company that I’ve interviewed, it’s an Indian. For sure it’s an Indian, and they do not take the people that are qualified now, they are taking people who they can get [faked] reference [and] … get some sort of kickback from.

Lawsuit explains how the H-1B program is entangled in massive lottery fraud.
These visa programs put 1M+ mid-skill, low-wage, no-rights migrants in careers & houses needed for US grads.
Investors love the programs.
So hired US journos won't show costs. https://t.co/Vw1LV3XRKc

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) November 24, 2021

The Fortune 500 lobbies strongly favor the visa programs, which provide them with a huge flood of subservient gig-workers.

Companies often favor foreign workers over U.S. graduates because the foreign graduates are working to win government-supplied green cards. This means they are cheaper to hire, can be fired and sent home without appeal, and are utterly subservient to U.S. managers. So the foreign graduates are willing to work long hours, cannot quit to join a rival company, rarely testify in courts, and cannot act like the U.S. graduates who are professionally required to argue against cost-cutting managers in favor of raising product innovation, safety, quality, and security.

The resulting damage is exemplified by Boeing’s cost-cutting executives, who boost the company’s short-term profits by discarding U.S. professionals and hiring Indian contractors to perform core engineering tasks. The short-term policy contributed to the Boeing 737 Max air crashes in 2019 that slashed roughly $100 billion from Boeing’s stock market value.

Similarly, U.S. tech firms boosted profits by hiring Indian and Chinese visa workers — and allowed Chinese firms to take the lead in critical 5G communications technology.

Because the value of the dangled green cards is so huge, most of the Indian visa workers accept jobs in a U.S.-based, Indian-run, unregulated, isolated, sweatshop economy of subcontractor kickbacks, cliques, fraud, backstabbing, and blame-shifting, according to numerous Indian sources who speak to Breitbart News. “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million,” an Indian visa worker told Breitbart News.

Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents.

Migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.