House Democrats — aided by some Republicans — are using the pending 2023 defense bill to subordinate the careers of U.S. professionals to the interests of investors and Fortune 500 executives.
The proposed amendment to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act would allow “any alien” with a claimed Ph.D. in science to apply for a green card from the Secretary of Homeland Security, a position Alejandro Mayorkas currently holds.
The amendment sets the bar for migrants so low that it provides green cards to an unlimited number of Indian, Chinese, and other foreigners who earn degrees in their home-country universities. Foreigners who get U.S. degrees from a lower-tier “historically Black college or [minority-serving] university” in the United States would also be allowed to get green cards.
The amendment would also expand an existing law that allows U.S. CEOs to hire foreign graduates with dangled promises of green cards. That law is now used by executives to reward roughly 70,000 foreign graduates for taking jobs from U.S. professionals.
The three-cornered amendment would allow government officials to flood the labor market and so suppress salaries for American professionals. It would even make it more difficult for the professionals’ children to get places in good universities.
“This is the kind of [skilled immigration plan], that when reported [by the media] as the supporters are framing it, sounds plausible enough,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. But, he added:
There is literally no way that it would be limited. It just cannot happen. Over and over and over again, we’ve seen immigration proposals that sound plausible on their face end up being perverted … There’ll be a guy who has a PhD in economics and [officials will] say, “Well, this is a STEM field, so okay. “And then there’ll be a PhD in home economics, and they’ll say, “Well, okay, you too.” There’s no way they’ll limit it.
The Democrat party is increasingly reliant on votes from white-collar professionals, yet it keeps trying to outsource their jobs to migrants, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers:
What they’re signaling is there is no place for professionals in the Democratic Party … They’re literally voting the professionals out of the party [coalition] and replacing them with [visa workers and] immigrants that can’t vote.
The outsourcing amendment is being pushed by Democrat Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Jim Langevin (D-RI), and by Republican Reps. John Curtis (R-UT) and Peter Meijer (R-MI).
Lofgren represents the investors in Silicon Valley who use visa workers to spike the stock value of their companies.
Meijer is an heir of the wealthy Meijer fortune. He is facing a stiff primary challenge this year after already voting for a 2021 plan to massively increase the inflow of cheap blue-collar migrants into jobs held by American residents of rural districts. That cheap-labor policy impoverishes rural districts because the migrants earn little and buy much less in local shops and communities.
The Democrat-run Committee on Rules will decide Tuesday afternoon whether or not to allow the amendment — and other migration-related amendments — to stay in the bill. If they keep the Lofgren measure, it will pressure all Democrats to publicly vote on the House floor against the core economic and civic interests of their professional-class voters.
The committee is chaired by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), and it includes several pro-migration Democrats, such as Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC), and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO).
Ross, for example, has drafted an amendment that would further reward Indian graduates who take outsourced jobs from her home-district American college-graduate voters. The reward would consist of guaranteed, no-cost green cards for their Indian-born children. That government-delivered reward is hugely valuable for Indians, so it serves as a hidden subsidy for the CEOs who cheap Indian graduates for jobs that can be done by American professionals in Ross’ own district. Her giveaway amendment is backed by Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA). and GOP Rep. Brian Patrick (R-PA).
Another amendment would offer green cards to any Russian with master’s degrees in science and technology. That amendment is being pushed by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), whose district includes part of Silicon Valley.
The GOP minority on the rules committee is led by pro-migration Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) but also includes Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX).
The Lofgren-Meijer amendment comes as West Coast investors are lobbying Congress to expand the inflow of foreign graduates for jobs that would otherwise go to U.S. professionals.
One of the leading investors is Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google. He is now an investor who wants to maximize his supply of cheap, controllable, skilled labor. In 2013, he helped form the secretive FWD.us lobby group which consists of wealthy West Coast investors, such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
In 2015, Schmidt called for the government to import more consumers for Google’s advertisers.
In 2020, Schmidt demanded the importation of “Top Tier” talent to help U.S. companies outpace China’s government-aided companies, many of which rely on Chinese-born, U.S.-trained workers. However, the visa-worker programs cited by Schmidt are mostly used by CEOs to displace American professionals with inexperienced, cheap, and controllable foreign graduates from very low-grade Indian universities.
In 2022, Schmidt pushed the claim that an uncapped inflow of foreign graduates is needed for national security jobs, such as cyber-security or for manufacturing computer chips. That plan was added to an anti-China technology bill by Democratic leaders in the House, but it has been rejected by GOP Senators — principally, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) — partly because the Schmidt plan would sideline many professionals in their Midwestern states.
This July, Schmidt is pushing two new claims via the London-based Financial Times.
The first claim is that the foreign scientists will help launch a new industry in the United States:
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, became one of the wealthiest people in the US by specialising in software engineering. Yet, if he was starting out again today, Schmidt says he would not be targeting bits and bytes alone. The 67-year-old thinks the next big thing is the “bioeconomy”, not the internet.
…
One [problem] is the science has advanced more slowly than many hoped. Another is government regulation. There’s a more fundamental problem too: whereas a couple of teenage computer nerds can build an internet company out of a garage, creating a bioscience business requires lots of expertise, specialised talent, manufacturing-plant capacity and time. These are not things that the US venture capital industry that funded the tech revolution is widely used to handling.
However, there is no shortage of trained U.S. college graduates with Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math (STEM) degrees. A 2021 study by the Census Bureau reported that most work in non-tech jobs:
The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling. In addition, 10% of STEM college graduates worked in STEM-related occupations such as health care.
The path to STEM jobs for [American] non-STEM majors was narrow. Only a few STEM-related majors (7%) and non-STEM majors (6%) ultimately ended up in STEM occupations.
“Between 1982 and 2011, American universities awarded 800,000 Ph.D. degrees in science and engineering,” Lynn told Breitbart News, adding:
But there were only 100,000 tenured job openings. This tells you there is a surplus of advanced STEM degree holders in the U.S. As a result, approximately one-in-five STEM Ph.D.s work in non-STEM, non-academic fields. The joblessness rate among STEM Ph.D.s is only going to increase if immigration provisions ensure that anyone with a STEM degree could come to the United States and get pushed to the front of the line
But many U.S. technology graduates are pushed out of jobs by CEOs’ preference for visa workers.
CEOs prefer visa workers because their low salaries maximize stock prices and bonuses. For example, a Brookings study said President Donald Trump’s temporary 2020 curbs on visa workers cut $100 billion from the Fortune 500’s stock value.
But those salary cuts caused by the employment of at least 1.5 million visa workers in the United States radiate into many other professional sectors. “Most college graduates have actually seen their real incomes stagnate or even decline” since 2000, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in April 2022.
Executives also prefer visa workers because the foreign graduates cannot emulate the ability of U.S. professionals to form their own innovative companies that spur competition in the tech sector. The visa workers cannot even quit — not even complain about work hours or abuse — because they need the CEOs to approve green-card applications. “It’s imperative for policy-makers to understand that foreign STEM PhD holders will not spur innovation,” said a June 9 letter by U.S. Tech Workers. “Instead, they’ll keep innovation within the range of the status quo.”
The executives also use the visa workers to subordinate demands by U.S. professionals that some company revenues be allocated to public priorities, such as basic research, information security, crisis reliability, and compliance with federal laws. Unsurprisingly, companies that subordinate U.S. professionals tend to have more public disasters — for example, Intel, Boeing, Theranos, and Ernst & Young.
Faced with these congressional rejections, Schmidt and his lobbyists are also dangling the promise of high-tech jobs to skeptical Midwestern Senators. He told the July 6 Financial Times:
“It’s the new industrial age applied to the rural parts of America,” he told me, noting that unlike current tech innovation “these jobs are not in Silicon Valley and they’re not in the north-east… they’re in… the Republican States. They’re in the states with an awful lot of farming.” He hopes that the fact that these rural, agricultural states tend to be red not blue gives his pitch bipartisan appeal, since it will get Republican politicians involved.
But top Democrats aligned with President Joe Biden’s East Coast network openly oppose the displacement of U.S. graduates. For example, Commerce Secretary Gine Raimondo again spoke out fended off the pro-migration push in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd., “With respect to immigration, you know, that’s an issue for Congress to take up,” she said on July 10.
Schmidt and his fellow investors prefer to import foreign workers than to hire foreign graduates in their home countries, regardless of the damage to U.S. professionals. In general, U.S. operations are less threatened by technology theft, local rivals, security failures, and government regulations.
Thes white-collar migration amendments are more nails “in the coffin of the professionals in the United States,” said Lynn.
Legislators and corporate lobbyists are “stripping out that bottom rung [in the career ladder] and preventing Americans from having careers in STEM,” he said.
“They know this is going on, but the financial opportunities are just too great to not take advantage,” Lynn said, adding, “they’re not rewarded by market share and productivity — they’re rewarded by earnings per share.”
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers.
The inflationary policy hurts ordinary Americans because makes it difficult for them to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.
Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology. Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
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