GOP Politicians Help the Fortune 500 Discard GOP Voters

SARASOTA, FL - JULY 03: People listen to former U.S. President Donald Trump during a rally
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Neil Munro

Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and 12 other GOP legislators are pushing legislation to help Fortune 500 companies hire foreign visa workers instead of hiring the American graduates who might vote for the GOP.

Miller-Meeks, who won her district in Iowa by a mere six votes in 2020, touted her bill in a December 30 tweet:

My America’s CHILDREN Act would support lifelong Americans like @uiowa‘s @PareenMhatre. They grew up here, went to college here, and positively contribute to our communities. I am proud to lead the effort to help these students. #YearInReview

The bill — numbered H.4331 in the House and S. 2753 in the Senate — offers no compensatory gains for Americans, such as reforms to reduce the Fortune 500’s incentives to import foreign workers instead of hiring American graduates in states such as Iowa and Kentucky.

“The antidote to a bad bill … is sunlight,” said a statement from Kevin Lynn at U.S. Tech Workers. The main sponsors, Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) and Miller-Meeks, “need to be exposed for being toadies to the corporations and not sticking up for wage-earners,” he added.

The vast majority of the beneficiaries are the adult children of Indian’s massive workforce in the United States. The bill is being pushed by an advocacy group for Indian contract workers who have taken Americans’ jobs and homes, and it is backed by 32 members in the House and by seven members in the Senate.

That bill is also being boosted by an ethnic Indian, pro-Democratic advocacy group, which helps Democrats gain power as the Fortune 500 converts roughly 25,000 Indians per year into citizens.

Indian visa workers and their lobbyists have relentlessly lobbied U.S. legislators for more green cards during the last several years. Much of their lobbying takes place in face-to-face meetings where legislators are aggressively pressed by empathy-inducing groups of doctors or by attractive young graduates. In 2019, for example, Leon Fresco, a former congressional staffer, pushed a similar bill using similar lobbying tactics against Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY) who is sponsoring Miller-Meeks’ bill in the Senate:

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.

Many of the Indian visa workers and their advocates are eager to smear disagreement by Americans as racism. For example, Fresco said in 2019:

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.

Miller-Meeks is a doctor and worked with medical groups in Iowa. She cited the case of Indian-born Pareen Mhatre, who has been living in the United States while her parents held university jobs that would otherwise have gone to U.S. STEM graduates.

Her tweet prompted much criticism from American voters.

The Indian advocate, Patre, insists that Americans’ homeland was created for migrants — not for Americans — and that Americans’ laws should be changed to help her group:

Miller-Meek’s office evaded when asked by Breitbart News about the impact of the legislation on Americans. Her spokesman portrayed the bill as a fix for problems with temporary visas, not about green cards and citizenship. “The Congresswoman personally knows many [foreign] individuals who have been impacted by the issues with renewing visas,” said her spokesman Will Kiley.

Kiley also tried to portray the legislation as a fix for a policy problem in President Joe Biden’s administration: “The State Department backlog under this Administration has created many issues for legal residents and businesses alike, and this legislation would aim to fix that,” he added. In reality, the problem was created in 2000 when Congress allowed H-1B temporary workers to stay in the U.S. for decades.

Sen. Rand Paul’s office declined to answer questions from Breitbart News.

The bill pushed by India’s Patre is being backed by ten House Republicans and four Senate Republicans.

They GOP supporters include Miller-Meeks,  Rep. Young Kim (R-CA),  Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL), Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA),  Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), Rep. Carlos Gimenez, (R-FL), Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), plus Rand Paul, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-IA), and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).

Miller-Meeks, Giminez, and Meijer are members of the House homeland defense committee. Rutherford and Hinson are members of the homeland defense panel of the House committee on appropriations.

Under current subsidy rules set in 1990 and expanded multiple times since then, Fortune 500 companies are allowed to hire an unlimited number of foreign graduates for U.S. jobs by dangling a bonus of government-provided green cards and then citizenship. That bonus is so valuable that roughly one million mid-skill foreign graduates are now working in U.S. jobs for many years to get their valuable green cards, often in lower-wage, gig-work jobs for Fortune 500 subcontractors.

This cheap, disposable, and compliant “green card workforce” is excellent for investors — but it profoundly distorts the white-collar labor market and regional economies in the United States.

For example, the skewed labor market makes it extremely difficult for U.S. graduates to compete for starter jobs against visa workers who can be paid with the alternative currency of free, government-delivered citizenship. The imported foreign workers will work for lower wages and long hours — and without complaint — because they carry little college debt and are eager to leave China or India to take any job in the United States.

“Corporations make extraordinary efforts to not hire Americans, and they can do this … by attracting vast numbers of employment-visa [foreign] workers with [offers of] a pathway to citizenship,” said Kevin Lynn, who is the founder of U.S. Tech Workers group which campaigns against the visa programs.

So the programs concentrate economic and political power in the hands of a few coastal investors. They also exclude many young Americans from many white-collar careers, force down professionals’ salaries, and break the careers escalators that once trained young Americans for professional leadership positions.

The programs’ most insidious damage is inflicted on U.S.-style professionalism. When U.S. executives appoint foreign managers, U.S. professionals are subordinated to foreign workers’ visa priorities and to foreign workplace cultures. For example, the Indian workplace culture is so ruthless that Indian managers fire accomplished U.S. professionals so they can sell those jobs to bribe-paying, mid-skilled Indian visa workers, according to numerous Indians who still hope to become U.S. professionals.

Many Americans are pushed out of high-tech careers by U.S. executives’ preference for compliant visa workers. Verge.com reported in 2017:

After being let go from Eversource Energy, [Craig] Diangelo was unemployed for a while. He lost out on a lot of his pension because he was forced into early retirement. Eventually, he found a new job as an IT consultant. While it doesn’t pay as much as his last gig, Diangelo considers himself lucky. “Last week I got together with six of my former co-workers, and I’m the only one that’s fully employed. After three years there is one guy who is driving a school bus, there is another guy working at the local supermarket stocking shelves, there are other people who are not working at all.” Diangelo tears up a bit when discussing their plight. “I look at my co-workers, people with advanced degrees, and they are working at the supermarket stocking shelves or driving school buses. Really? It does become humiliating.”

This brutal process also strips the surviving U.S. professionals of their power to promote quality and innovation in the face of profit-maximizing executives. This loss of tension between executives and professionals cripples innovation and efficiency in companies, including Boeing, Theranos, and Intel.

The skewed labor market ensures that Congress’ visa-worker programs also divert investment, wages, and wealth from heartland GOP states towards the Democratic-dominated coastal states and from rural towns in each state to the major cities.

The visa programs shift heartland wealth to coastal states and also pump foreign visa-workers into the leftover heartland state jobs. This process blocks many young Americans from starting professional careers. It sucks wealth and people from heartland states. It drains life from towns in Iowa, Kentucky, West Virginia, Michigan, Georgia, upstate New York, and many other places.

The Miller-Meeks bill would extend this outsourcing process, even though there is no shortage of labor in a nation of 190 million working-age people and roughly 150 million jobs.

The bill offers companies the ability to promise green cards and citizenship to the foreign children of foreign workers who take U.S. jobs. Advocates say for the bill say 200,000 foreign-born adult children of foreign visa workers will get an immediate benefit. But the benefits for children also encourage more Indian visa workers to sign up for U.S. jobs and to not quit and go home as they wait years to get their own cards. 

“It seeks to give permanent resident status to the child of an alien here on a TEMPORARY work visa,” said Lynn. “Given the wording of the bill, any child of an H-1B visa worker will be given a pathway to citizenship.”

IMMOKALEE, FLORIDA - FEBRUARY 19: Workers register in the morning before heading out to pick tomatoes at a farm owned and operated by Pacific Tomato Growers on February 19, 2021 in Immokalee, Florida. The workers, who are in the country on an agricultural visa, are mostly from Mexico. The agricultural community in Florida is vital to the state’s economy and has had to adapt to health measures during the Covid-19 outbreak in order to continue their operations. Workers at Pacific Tomato Growers farms are tested regularly, provided with face coverings, get daily temperature checks and have access to hand washing stations. Workers for the company are also part of the Fair Food Program which ensures that workers receive fair wages and better working conditions in the tomato fields. The fair Food Program was begun by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in 2010. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Workers register in the morning before heading out to pick tomatoes at a farm owned and operated by Pacific Tomato Growers on February 19, 2021 in Immokalee, Florida. The workers, who are in the country on an agricultural visa, are mostly from Mexico. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The bill would also give those benefits to the children of the E-2 visa workers who buy and operate Fortune 500 franchises for hotels, stores, trucks, and many other businesses. This expansion would subsidize many Fortune 500 who hire foreign managers to run their low-productivity U.S.-based franchises. 

The award of green cards to adult children would be uncapped, according to the bill. So the law would add to overall migration levels — and also pressure federal officials to intrusively verify the claimed parentage of workers’ claimed children. The verification would be needed because federal officials and Indian whistleblowers have long noted extensive fraud in the selection of Indians for the H-1B VISAS.

“There is no cap for children sponsoring their parents,” said Lynn. “If only we could get Congresswoman Deborah Ross and Congresswoman Miller-Meeks to go to such lengths for American college graduates and American workers,” he added. 

The bill would be yet another subsidy for companies because it provides them with roughly 200,000 more foreign-born workers for white-collar jobs. 

Back in 2015, President Barack Obama and his deputies quietly awarded work permits to the spouses of H-1B workers without congressional approval. That similar giveaway provided businesses with at least 300,000 “H4EAD” workers for U.S- jobs and also helped persuade some of their long-standing H-1B workers to not return back to India. 

The Miller-Meeks bill also serves as a partial substitute for a prior giveaway bill that died in 2020 when the GOP and the Democrats blocked the S.386 bill that was pushed by Utah’s GOP establishment.

That S.386 giveaway would have expanded the annual awards of green cards to the visa workers from India who provide most of the mid-skill workers to the Fortune 500 companies. The Miller-Meeks bill would mimic the S.386 billion by allowing the foreign contract workers to get their desired green cards and citizens from their adult children.

The giveaway is also a partial substitute for the green card giveaways in the pending Build Back Better bill.

The Miller-Meeks giveaway is just one of many bills that seek to import workers for the companies — many of whom are complaining they have to compete for workers by offering higher wages. That competiti0n for workers — dubbed a “tight labor market” — began in 2020 when President Donald Trump and the coronavirus popped the post-1990 cheap labor bubble. Overall, the federal government imported five million fewer foreigners from 2010 to 2020 — including three million fewer from 2017 to 2020 — compared to prior decades, according to recent reports.

For example, Breitbart News reported December 31:

Due to ongoing workforce shortages our country continues to face, American farmers continue to utilize the H-2A guest worker visa program,” 35 legislators said in a December 21 letter sent to the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security, which is headed by the pro-migration zealot, Alejandro Mayorkas. But federal travels curbs against the new omicron epidemic  has stranded 7,000 South African seasonal workers, the legislators said, adding:

“Without an exemption to the recently imposed travel restrictions, South African H-2A worker absences will limit the ability of American farms to continue production of food, fuel, and fiber for our nation during this critical time.”

That letter was signed by at least 12 Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik (D-NY), who runs the House Republican Conference leadership office.

On the same day, 21 Democrats asked Mayorkas to accelerate the award of work permits to the imported wives of Indian contract workers. Their Indian husbands are using H-1B and L-1 visas to take white-collar jobs needed by U.S. graduates. “Processing delays have left [the spouses’] families without a second income, forcing them to dip into their savings, sell their homes, and take other drastic measures,” said the letter, led by Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC), and also signed by Kathy Porter (D-CA).

[…]

The H-2A letter was signed by Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich), Troy Balderson (R-OH), Glenn Thompson (R-PA), Dusty Johnson (R-SD), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Dan Newhouse (R-WA),  Troy Balderson (R-OH), Peter Meijer (R-MI), Ron Estes (R-KS), Frank Lucas (R-OK), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), Tom Cole (R-OK), Elise Stefanik (R-NY),  and Tom Emmer (R-MN).

Understandably, fewer than half of likely voters trust House GOP members on immigration issues.

Many polls show that Americans want to like immigrants and immigration. But the bipartisan federal government has exploited that openness since 1990 to extract tens of millions of migrants from poor countries to serve U.S. businesses as workers, consumers, and renters.

That economic strategy is harmful to ordinary Americans: It cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their rents.

The strategy 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.

A wide variety of little-publicized polls does show 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 growing, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

 

Find the author’s articles at @NeilMunroDC

 

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