Joe Biden Promises High-Tech Jobs for Midwest – Plus Migrants to Fill Them

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 01: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union addres
Win McNamee/Getty
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden is loudly promising a new era of high-tech jobs for Americans in the heartland states, but he is quietly backing legislation and regulations that would allow CEOs to fill those jobs with foreign workers.

“To compete for the best jobs of the future, we also need to level the playing field with China and other competitors,” he declared at his 2022 State of the Union Speech on Tuesday. He continued:

That’s why it is so important to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act sitting in Congress that will make record investments in emerging technologies and American manufacturing. Let me give you one example of why it’s so important to pass it.

If you travel 20 miles east of Columbus, Ohio, you’ll find 1,000 empty acres of land. It won’t look like much, but if you stop and look closely, you’ll see a “Field of dreams,” the ground on which America’s future will be built. This is where Intel, the American company that helped build Silicon Valley, is going to build its $20 billion semiconductor “mega site.” Up to eight state-of-the-art factories in one place. 10,000 new good-paying jobs.

Some of the most sophisticated manufacturing in the world to make computer chips the size of a fingertip that power the world and our everyday lives. Smartphones. The Internet. Technology we have yet to invent. But that’s just the beginning. Intel’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who is here tonight, told me they are ready to increase their investment from $20 billion to $100 billion. That would be one of the biggest investments in manufacturing in American history.

And all they’re waiting for is for you to pass this bill. So let’s not wait any longer. Send it to my desk. I’ll sign it.

But the House version of the bill includes several hidden measures that would allow Intel and other companies to import foreign workers for the heartland jobs, instead of hiring young and experienced Americans for these high-tech jobs. Breitbart News reported on February 1:

The draft “America COMPETES Act of 2022” would allow foreigners to win an uncapped number of green cards by studying to become ordinary chemists, doctors, engineers, and statisticians — or accountants, tax experts, computer security experts, statisticians, ecologists, and many other types of professionals.

“It’s insanity — the idea that you would create a bill that supposedly improves America’s competitiveness [against China] by outsourcing all of the [skilled] labor is just nuts,” said Rosemary Jenks, government relations director for NumbersUSA. “It’s dystopian.”

The bill emerged from the House shortly after the Senate blocked the Build Back Better bill, which tried to create new pipelines for foreign graduates to get U.S white-collar jobs.

SInce 2000, Congress has delivered at least 1 million workers to the Fortune 500 and at least 1 million workers to the healthcare sector.

Congress also allows CEOs to keep a population of roughly 1.5 million non-immigrant contractors workers in white-collar jobs throughout the United States. The contract workers arrive on visa programs, such as the H-1B visa, and they remain cheap and compliant workers for many years in the hope of getting the huge prize of green cards and citizenship. Many of those visa workers already hold jobs at Intel Corp.

Biden’s deputies are now working to expand the inflow of migrants and visa workers for the midwest jobs needed by U.S. graduates and blue-collar workers.

These imported workforces have taken many of the jobs that emerged after the government-backed destruction of the Midwest’s industrial economy.

Unsurprisingly, Biden downplayed his willingness to steer migrants into the jobs needed by Americans and also used his speech to rebuke Democrats who urged migration as a cure for inflation.

But he did not denounce the hidden outsourcing rules in the pending “America COMPETES Act.” In fact, Biden stealthily endorsed CEOs’ claims that they should be allowed to hire foreigners instead of Americans for U.S. jobs, saying:

We can do all this while keeping lit the torch of liberty that has led generations of immigrants to this land—my forefathers and so many of yours. [Congress should] Provide a pathway to citizenship [amnesty] for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers, and essential workers. [Congress should] Revise our laws so businesses can have the workers they need.

Earlier in his speech, Biden had also suggested that climate-change programs would deliver blue-collar jobs to Americans who did not go to college:

We’ll create good jobs for millions of Americans, modernizing roads, airports, ports, and waterways all across America. And we’ll do it all to withstand the devastating effects of the climate crisis and promote environmental justice.

We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, begin to replace poisonous lead pipes—so every child—and every American—has clean water to drink at home and at school, provide affordable high-speed internet for every American—urban, suburban, rural, and tribal communities.

4,000 projects have already been announced. And tonight, I’m announcing that this year we will start fixing over 65,000 miles of highway and 1,500 bridges in disrepair.

Most Midwest legislators have looked away as CEOs steer their migrants and visa workers into the midwest jobs needed by displaced industrial workers.

Some GOP politicians are recognizing the economic reality of international labor migration.

If Congress seeks to import workers, “we need to do it smartly, in order to once again ensure that those new workers aren’t competing with our existing workers for jobs, competing for wages and salaries,” Sen. Todd Young (R-IA) told Punchbowl’s Anna Palmer in a January 25 interview. “This is how we’ll build majority support for immigration reform,” said Young, who is up for election this year.

In his speech, Biden mentioned Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH):  “As Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown says, ‘It’s time to bury the label “Rust Belt.'”

However, Brown supports generous asylum rules for migrants and faces few skeptical questions about the labor migration’s impact on Ohioans. “We can’t abandon our values, the same values that made the United States a beacon of hope around the world for generations,” he said in 2019.

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of immigrants and non-immigrant visa workers from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.

The economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while also raising their housing costs.

Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland states. The economic strategy also kills many migrants, separates families, and damages the economies of the home countries.

An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another:

 

 

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