EAGLE Act to Spike More Corporate Scandals Like Twitter, Theranos

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Neil Munro

The Democrats’ pending EAGLE Act that is being pushed by West Coast investors would create more corporate scandals by allowing CEOs to hire more subordinate and silent visa workers instead of outspoken American professionals.

The investor-backed GOP leadership has yet to rally against the EAGLE Act, which may come as early as today, December 13.

The vote would come just a week after the Pakistan-born president of Theranos Inc. was sentenced to 11 years in jail for a series of corporate crimes that were enabled by the company’s replacement of American professionals with powerless H-1B visa workers.

“The biggest problem of all [at Theranos] was the dysfunctional corporate culture in which it was being developed,” wrote a former Wall Street Journal reporter, John Carreyrou, in his book about Theranos, titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup: 

[Founder] Elizabeth [Holmes] and [Pakistan-born] Sunny [president Ramesh Balwani] regarded anyone who raised a concern or an objection as a cynic and a naysayer. Employees who persisted in doing so were usually marginalized or fired, while sycophants were promoted …

For the dozens of Indians Theranos employed, the fear of being fired was more than just the dread of losing a paycheck. Most were on H-1B visas and dependent on their continued employment at the company to remain in the country. With a despotic boss like Sunny holding their fates in his hands, it was akin to indentured servitude. Sunny, in fact, had the master-servant mentality common among an older generation of Indian businessmen. Employees were his minions. He expected them to be at his disposal at all hours of the day or night and on weekends. He checked the security logs every morning to see when they badged in and out. Every evening, around seven thirty, he made a fly-by of the engineering department to make sure people were still at their desks working. [Emphasis added]

The same chaos was created at Twitter, where top managers relied on a huge inflow of powerless foreign technology graduates to write the software while it hired myriad U.S. non-technical graduates to throttle Americans’ free speech.

The site, MyVisaJobs, uses government data to show that the company tried to hire more than 1,000 foreign Indian, Chinese, and other graduates in the last four years.

Unlike U.S. professionals, these foreign contract workers do not have the professional autonomy or legal standing to disagree with profit-maximizing CEOs and senior managers who want to dodge federal rules and professional quality standards.

But if passed, the EAGLE Act would allow executives to replace many more U.S. professionals with subordinate and compliant visa workers.

The act would turbocharge the Fortune 500 practice of annually recruiting more than 200,000 foreign college graduates — mostly from India and China —for the white-collar careers that are needed by young American graduates. Indians are mostly hired by technology subcontractors for mid-skill jobs, but the Chinese are often imported for high-end research and banking jobs.

These foreign graduates take U.S. jobs via the uncapped H-1B, L-1, OPT, TN, and J-1 programs. Each year, roughly 70,000 foreign workers are given the deferred bonus of green cards by U.S. executives as compensation for a decade of subservient labor. Roughly 1.5 million foreign college graduates now hold indentured-service jobs. The EGLE Act bill would lift some diversity rules and so allow the Fortune 500’s mid-skill Indians to take nearly all of the annual supply of 140,000 corporate green cards for many years.

But Section 7 of the EAGLE Act would expand and accelerate this indentured-service outsourcing. It would allow U.S.-based employers to quickly trade the huge prize of lifetime U.S. work permits to foreign workers in exchange for several years of cut-rate blue-collar or white-collar service.

This fast-track, government-granted Section 7 bonus, if made law, would pressure U.S. companies to replace Americans with many more of the lower-wage foreign workers who help keep payroll and profit margins at levels demanded by Wall Street’s stock pickers.

Section 7 of the bill “is an end-run around the annual green card limit,” Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) told the House Committee on Rules on December 5. He added:

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.

Legal immigrants with green cards, including Indian and Chinese graduates, are much better able to push back against reckless CEOs — especially if they have been directly hired by Americans rather than by networks of home-country allies.

The EAGLE Act giveaway to Fortune 500 companies is being pushed by West Coast tech investors and executives who are trying to spike short-term stock prices.

Those investors include many people who held shares of the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid to buy Twitter — despite the growing evidence of large-scale fraud and crime by Twitter’s imported workforce of Indian managers and workers.

A July lawsuit by Twitter company’s top information security manager described the Twitter chaos under CEO Parag Agrawal, another Indian who was hired by Twitter as a visa worker:

In this submission, Mudge [Alabama-born Peter Zatko] makes protected, lawful disclosures of original evidence showing that the corporation CEO Parag Agrawal, particular senior executives, and particular members of its board of directors since 2011 and on an ongoing basis have engaged in:

A. Extensive, repeated, uninterrupted violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act by making false and misleading statements to users and the FTC about inter alia the Twitter platform security, privacy, and integrity

B. Violations of SEC rules governing public companies including, inter alia, auditing requirements,

C. Fraudulent material representation communication with the Board of Directors and investors, constituting securities law violations,

D. Negligence and even complicity with respect to efforts by foreign governments to infiltrate, control, exploit, surveil and/or censor the company’s platform, staff, and operations.

The lawsuit detailed numerous alleged legal violations by the company and its Indian CEO:

On multiple occasions during 2021, described in greater detail below, Mudge witnessed senior executives engaging in deceitful and/or misleading communications affecting board members, users, and shareholders. In contrast, Mudge spent 2021 designing and implementing a long-term strategy to reform and address Twitter’s privacy, security, and integrity vulnerabilities. On December 14, 2021, against Mudge’s recommendation, CEO Agrawal explicitly instructed Mudge to provide documents which both of them knew to be false and misleading, regarding vital information security matters to the Risk Committee of Twitter’s Board of Directors

The company’s unorganized software and lax management procedures made it extremely vulnerable to hacker attacks, said the lawsuit:

The 2020 hack was then the largest hack of a social media platform in history, and triggered a global security incident. Moreover, the hack did not involve malware, zero-day exploits, supercomputers brute forcing their way past encryption, or any other sophisticated approach. In fact, it was pretty simple. Pretending to Twitter IT support, the teenage hackers simply called some Twitter employees and asked for their passwords. A few employees were duped and complied and — given systemic flaws in Twitter’s access controls — these credentials were enough to achieve “God Mode” where the teenagers could imposter-tweets from any account they wanted.

The company’s management allows foreign agents to monitor the use of Twitter by Americans and foreign populations, the lawsuit claimed:

The Indian government forced Twitter to hire specific individual(s) who are government agents who …  would have access to vast amounts of Twitter sensitive data … it was believed by the executive team that the Indian government had succeeded in placing agents on the company payroll …

Twitter executives opted to allow Twitter to become even more dependent on revenue coming from Chinese entities even though the Twitter service is blocked in China. After Chinese entities paid money to Twitter, there were concerns within Twitter that the information the Chinese entities could receive would allow them to identify and learn sensitive information about Chinese users who successfully circumvented the [Chinese government’s] block, and other users around the world.

…

A few months before CTO Parag Agrawal was promoted to CEO, Agrawal suggested too Mudge that Twitter should consider ceding to the Russian Federation‘s censorship and surveillance demand as a way to grow users in Russia.

Shortly before Mudge was … terminated [in January 2022], Twitter received specific information from a U.S. government source that one or more particular company employees were working on behalf of another particular foreign intelligence agency.

Many Indian visa workers and Americans have told Breitbart News about the unprofessional, racist, and destructive workplace politics imported by visa workers.

“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” an American professional told Breitbart News. However, the rules were different in his Intel Corp. office which was run by an Indian manager, he said.

“One of the things that got me in the biggest trouble with the Indians was when I found a bug … It was clearly our device causing the problem,” he said. So he released news of the problem via a department email, and the Indian manager “became unglued … screamed at me in a conference room and called me the worst engineer,” he said. The lesson, he said, is:

When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.

“Now, most of the managers [at Intel] are Indian so it is very hard for an American to get hired over there … I’d  go into a room of 30 people and 15 to 17 of them are from India,” he said, adding:

They all come from the same area [in India], they all know each other, they all hang out together … The Indians are a very, very tight group. They automatically know the caste system … The guys at the bottom, they know to suck up to the caste guys above them.

Few Indian H-1Bs can act as independent professionals because their indentured service rules allow their Indian and U.S. managers to exile them back to India if they speak against what the managers want, said Mary from central New Jersey, an immigrant software expert. “They are very subservient to higher managers,” she told Breitbart News in 2020:

I would tell [the executive]  professionally what the issue was, and she didn’t like that. You can’t oppose her in any way. If she tells you “It is black,” it has to be black even if it is white. [The Indian workers] will feed her what she wants to hear… When the information given to that manager is wrong, and that manager does not care, the professionalism of the field is gone.

This subservience echoes India’s caste culture, where high-born individuals dominate lower-people people — regardless of skill or education. This culture encourages Indian-born managers at U.S. companies to hire subordinates who promise kickbacks, either cash, gifts, or overtime and weekend work.

Indian hiring managers will stealthily sell American jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, an Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,” he said.

“There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million,” he added.

In July 2022, Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers, told Breitbart News:

I know from my conversation with managers in America’s Fortune 500 companies, particularly our Fortune 500 technology companies, that a reliance on foreign workers and foreign managers only leads to [workplace] tribalism and politics …  When we see a preponderance of people from one country — let’s just use India as an example — career movement throughout the company becomes political and not merit-based.

It becomes tribal because we also import their caste system, their regional [rivalries], their [crony] politics, and their misogyny …  They know that’s how they’re got the job, that’s how they’re going to stay in a [U.S.] job with Indian managers and get green cards.

These [workplace pressures] drive out [American] technical workers because they’re typically ill-equipped to deal with that level of office politics. They understand merit. They understand how to solve a technical problem. They can’t overcome caste and country-of-origin discrimination.

In response, Indian advocates argue that Indian visa workers are so important to the U.S. economy that Americans cannot afford to fire and deport the Indians.

“This is no longer about diversity but about survival,” claimed Shruti Rajagopalan, an Indian advocate, and investor who now works for the Koch-backed Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. She continued:

Given changing global demographics, the country caps [immigration rules] obstructing Indian talent is hara-kiri for the US labor market and innovation … If nothing changes and Indian talent cannot easily flow to the US, in a few decades, US capital and US firms will move to India.

But corporate outsourcing has been exiling American talents for decades, said one tech professional who followed her father, mother, and grandfather into the technology business. She told Breitbart News in 2020:

I told all my kids ‘Be good with computers but major in something else.” My youngest son is a biomechanical engineer with a Master’s. My middle son is a credentialed professional in environmental health and safety. My oldest son works in the defense industry. We can’t talk about what he does, but he probably makes more than the other two put together.

“My daughter married well,” she added.

 

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.