GOP Rep. Scott Fitzgerald: EAGLE Act is 'End Run' Around Immigration Caps

The Democrats’ pending EAGLE Act includes an end-run around the current annual caps on legal immigration, says a GOP legislator.

Section 7 of the bill “is an end-run around the annual green card limit,” Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) told the Committee on Rules, which sets the rules for each floor debate in the House.

The bill would encourage temporary visa workers to become permanent workers by taking the jobs needed by Americans, he said during the Monday meeting:

It allows certain temporary visa holders to file an application for Adjustment for Status, despite the fact that no green card is available to them. The result is that many temporary visas will essentially become permanent because the alien visa holders will be able to live and work in the U.S. as if they had a green card. Of course, this will further strangle the ability of Americans to get good-paying jobs in tech and other sectors.

The EAGLE Act is marketed as a “country cap” reform to aid disadvantaged Indian visa workers.

But the bill enables corporations to recruit an uncapped number of foreign workers with dangled promises of renewable work permits in exchange for a few years of uncomplaining, l0w-wage work in the United States.

This work-for-work-permits exchange would expand companies’ economic incentive to lock out the hard-working Americans who must be paid wages and salaries, not work permits.

The cheap foreign labor would also encourage more corporate hiring for jobs in California and other expensive coastal worksites, Ths coastal encouragement would discourage the hiring of Americans in the cheaper inland states, such as Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.

The work-for-work-permits corporate giveaway is being hidden deep in the bill. Many polls show the public strongly opposes corporate labor migration into the jobs that Americans need for middle-class lives, homes, and families.

Congress now allows roughly 1 million people into the United States as immigrants each year. The legal immigrant total includes roughly 140,000 migrants sponsored by companies, which also employ roughly 2 million temporary visa workers in a wide variety of jobs that would otherwise be held by skilled Americans. President Joe Biden’s deputies also encouraged the inflow of roughly 2 million illegal migrants and refugees in 2022.

“If Congress wants to raise the overall annual green card limits, then that is what Congress should do,” Fitzgerald continued. “We should not instead create a special green-card-lite treatment for certain aliens [workers].”

The top Democratic sponsor of the bill. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), dodged Fitzgerald’s criticisms about the end-run in Section 7.

She instead touted several small but useful curbs on the H-1B visa program that imports roughly 100,000 foreign white-collar graduates each year.

Lofgren represents the views of Silicon Valley investors, including the billionaire investors at FWD.us who are backing the bill. The investors expect to gain financially when the bill’s provisions incentivize many poorly paid foreign graduates to fly into the Americans’ white-collar labor market.

The Democrats’ work-for-work-permits bill would do the greatest economic damage to the coastal U.S. college graduates that were a critical part of their 2022 coalition.

The work-for-work-permits bill is numbered H.R.3648, and is titled the “EAGLE Act of 2022.” It has 83 sponsors, including eight Republicans.

GOP Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) also spoke out against the visa-worker incentive, saying

There were 250 Disney IT employees that were laid off and required to train their [Indian visa-worker] replacements … That is the type of story that when ordinary Americans read, they don’t understand why they cannot have the full protection of law, and furthermore, why Congress would be passing a law that would advance [foreign] people who are going to take their jobs — and then they’re forced to train them if they’re to preserve their severance package and not find themselves a subject of a [hiring] blacklist — … I don’t think language we’ve got in the bill in front of us today would prevent that from happening.

The senior GOP member of the rules committee, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) did not mention the end-run provisions that are hidden in Section 7 of the bill, or the likely pocketbook hit to U.S. college graduates.

But he talked about how government-linked China nationals could use the work-for-work-permits law to gain U.S. jobs, green cards, and citizenship.

 I am troubled that the Majority chose to take out a critical provision of the Senate bill, such as a provision banning the admission or the adjustment of status of aliens affiliated with the military forces of Communist China or the Chinese Communist Party. If we can all agree on one thing, surely it should be that the United States should not be allowing members of the Chinese Communist Party to receive adjusted immigration status in the United States. I find it astonishing that the Majority removed this commonsense provision..

In response to Cole, Democrats argued that existing law, and a planned amendment to the bill, would exclude government-tied Chinese graduates.

For many years, GOP legislators have vocally denounced amnesty bills that would convert migrants into citizens who would likely vote to eject GOP politicians from their jobs.

But those GOP leaders have studiously avoided direct opposition to bills and regulations that allow companies to transfer Americans’ jobs to visa workers who cannot vote against politicians.

For example, Lofgren’s corporate giveaway bill is backed by eight GOP candidates, including Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), the GOP’s incoming party whip for the 2023 Congress.

Emmer got elected by Republicans to the whip job after he ran a partly successful 2022 election campaign. Amid the donor-funded campaign, GOP leaders suppressed mentions of migration’s huge and growing pocketbook damage to American families.

Critics of the Lofgren bill say that it will dramatically increase the resident population of visa workers, far above the current population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar workers, and roughly 400,000 blue-collar workers.

In time, that population will lobby for more corporate-sponsored green cards, the critics say. Democrats will likely portray them as another population of victims, like the so-called “DACA” population of migrants brought to the United States by their illegal migrant parents.

A wholescale GOP surrender on the EAGLE Act is unlikely because roughly one in six GOP voters described immigration as their single top issue in 2022. But GOP leaders in the Senate may let the bill pass while they theatrically oppose the giveaway.

The hidden giveaway to foreign workers and their Fortune 500 employers are being ignored by the corporate-owned establishment media. For example, a Washington Post article about pending immigration bills summarized the EAGLE Act giveaway as a bill to “phase out the per-country cap on employment-based immigrant visas” for Indian visa workers.

The Work Permit Giveaway

The work-for-work-permits giveaway is hidden in Section 7

The section creates the permanent work permits — dubbed the “green card lite” — and then covertly expands eligibility to many visa-worker programs beyond the familiar H-1B program.

The bill offers permanent work permits just two years after each foreign worker is approved for a green card — regardless of how many foreign workers are waiting in the growing backlog for green cards annually given to workers sponsored by companies. The backlog is growing because companies have an economic incentive to hire and sponsor far more foreign workers than the annual supply of 140,000 new green cards.

The dangled “Employment Authorization” permits are extremely valuable because they allow foreign workers to work in many U.S. jobs until they can receive their promised green cards.

The green cards can then be traded to get the deferred mega-bonus of American citizenship for themselves, their families, grandchildren, and all of their descendants.

There are no limits on the number of foreign workers who can be hired and then paid with the bill’s renewable work permits. These eligible workers could arrive via uncapped H-2A visa for agricultural workers, the L-1 visa for corporate transfers, or the H-1B visa for white-collar workers, the E-2 for franchise operators, or the F-1/OPT rules for foreign graduates of U.S. universities.

The bill “just blows the limits [on the hiring of temporary visa-workers] out in the water and makes all of these temporary worker programs permanent, so that all of these jobs will be permanently removed from American workers,” Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations at NumbersUSA told Breitbart News.

“Congress is using an immigration ploy to lock Americans out of a growing part of the labor market … [Democrats] are dead serious about it,” she said.

“My [Democratic] colleagues have brought us here today to move legislation which makes exceptions to the rules for [the benefit of] aliens who violated our law … that floods the labor market with foreign workers to the detriment of American workers,” GOP Rep. Fitzgerald told the committee.

“Americans can breathe a sigh of relief that the Democrats will no longer control the House legislative agenda a few short weeks from now, but on their way out the door, Democrats are trying to go and do even more damage to our immigration system,” he added.