The primary lobby group for India’s contract workers in the United States is turning its invective against Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) after he blocked the bipartisan bill to supercharge the flow of India’s visa workers into U.S. white-collar jobs.
The group, titled Immigration Voice, quickly posted a Facebook image of Scott in KKK garb after his August 5 surprise intervention in the effort by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to pass his unpopular outsourcing bill.
The group’s post was quickly removed, amid criticism by other would-be immigrants and by Americans:
Two leaders of Immigration Voice did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.
Immigration reformers and Hill sources expect the group to quickly revive claims of racism against Scott, partly because those hard-nosed claims and tactics helped to break opposition by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) to the group’s goals.
After the defeat, “they were terrorizing people last night on Twitter,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “They should not be rewarded with citizenship.”
Members of the Immigration Voice group credit their invective and their aggressive lobbying for Durbin’s August 5 decision to stop opposing Lee’s outsourcing bill.
Lee’s S.386 bill, also dubbed “HR.1044 with Lee’s amendment,” would put at least 600,000 Indian contract workers and their spouses on a fast-track to green cards. Many Indians have jammed themselves into the waiting lines for a limited annual supply of green cards, which will convert their status from foreign contract workers to legal immigrants.
More importantly, the Lee bill creates an entirely new category of “Early Filing” migrants with a legal status below native-born citizens, legal immigrants, and permanent residents, but above temporary workers.
The bill includes no caps on the “Early Filing status, effectively allowing U.S. investors to recruit and import their own workforces, and to pay them with slices of Americans’ citizenship — regardless of how many Americans are qualified for the jobs.
The hidden Early Filing backdoor in U.S. labor law was revealed by Breitbart News.
Behind closed doors, the nation’s powerful tech companies are strongly pushing for the Lee bill, a Hill source told Breitbart News. The tech companies would gain from the bill because it would flood the nation’ white-collar market with migrants from other countries.
The bill is also being pushed by India’s government, whose economic strategy calls for the export of Indian workers into jobs worldwide.
Over the last several months, the Immigration Voice group has served as the public side of this campaign.
The group repeatedly claimed Durbin is a “cruel bigot” while he blocked Lee’s bill.
Durbin demanded curbs on the tech companies’ use of visa workers and demanded the award of more green cards so that visa workers could escape their “bonded labor” status in many Fortune 500 companies.
The group’s invective continued right up to Durbin’s August 5 cave-in to Lee, when he agreed to let Lee’s S.386 bill pass the Senate by unanimous consent.
Scott then intervened to block the Unanimous Consent approval of Lee’s bill. He said he wanted to protect Spanish-language migrants to Florida, and added, “I’ve also spoken to the White House, and agree we need more time to study the proposal and to understand its impact on our immigration system,” he added.
“We were very pleased to see Senator Scott stand up for American workers, and we hope he will continue to stand up,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director for NumbersUSA.
But, she said, many Senators are afraid to oppose Immigration Voice’s aggressive tactics, which include harassing phones call to Senators’ offices.
What’s pushing this is that Durbin has demonstrators outside his office calling him a racist. It is clearly aggressive — but why would they not do so when they look around the country and see what else is happening? The difference here is that no non-citizen has a right to be in the United States, and the kind of tactics that are being used to demand a right that does not exist is concerning.
“Unfortunately, these tactics work,” said Lynn. “It is effective because American citizens still react with a modicum of civility … and what [Indians] will do is start a race to the bottom.”
Jenks continued:
The [Early Filing] legislation will make the problem worse … [because] it is basically turning a temporary visa into a permanent visa, and once you do that, anyone here on that visa will claim a right to say permanently.
This is an absolutely unprecedented change … This undermines the entire purpose of guest-workers. Tthe whole claim of guest workers is that the employer can’t find an immediate person, so someone else can take the job from abroad [temporarily] while an American is trained, graduates or moves. This blows that out the window and says these jobs will be gone from Americans permanently.
The legislation is supported by officials at the Department of Homeland Security. It has not been denounced by the White House, or even by President Donald Trump’s deputies on Capital Hill.
Up until Durbin’s capitulation, hundreds of Indian contract workers shared tweets and Facebook notices that described Durbin as a “racist,” “hurting kids,” a supporter of “racist segregation,” of “bigotry against Indian immigrants,” and also deployed children to make those charges:
The heated argument by India’s contract workers in the United States is entwined with their culture, including ancient animosity with their Iranian neighbors:
India’s culture is far more diverse than the United States, including regional and caste rivalries that pressure Indians to display contempt for people they do not like.
Americans — including many new Indian-Americans — who oppose the S.386 bill are pushing back, often by displaying stories of hatred and discrimination from India:
Poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly oppose cheap-labor immigration when Americans need jobs.