Jessica Vaughan: Senate Votes Today on Green Card Giveaway to Indians Who Take U.S. Jobs

Indian undergraduate students code on their computers as they take part in HackCBS, a 24 h
XAVIER GALIANA/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

The Senate has scheduled a stealth “unanimous consent” vote today for the S.386 bill, which would offer valuable green cards to many Indian graduates if they take jobs from American college graduates.

The stealth vote bypasses “the committee process,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, adding, “So there have never been any hearings on this idea. There’s no opportunity for amendments to this bill. There’s no public debate. They want to do this without even a roll call of who voted for it and against it. They want it to be, you know, so-called unanimous consent. And that that should be a warning sign.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) will ask the Senate to pass the bill by unanimous consent, but he will be blocked if even one of the 99 other GOP and Democrat senators objects to the proposal.

The bill would allow at least 100,000 Indian visa workers and family members each year to get paid with green cards, up from the current “country caps” limit of 20,000 green cards for Indians. This expansion would allow their employers and Silicon Valley’s investors to hire more cheap Indians with the promise of more green cards, to sideline more American graduates, and to maximize their Wall Street stock value.

Most Indian workers are hired via the H-1B program.

The program has a cap of 85,000 visas per year — but that cap only applies to for-profit companies, not non-profit hospitals and research centers. Also, the H-1B workers are allowed to stay long past their visa expiration once they are nominated for green cards, so the resident population of H-1B workers is roughly 800,000.

Also, there is no cap on the “mini-H-1B” program, dubbed the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. Any foreign student and graduate can get multiple one-year or three-year work permits to build the experience needed to get a job in the H-1B program. Many OPT workers do work at low wages to get promoted into the H-1B program, which allows employers to pay their foreign workers with H-1Bs. Currently, up to 250,000 Indians are enrolled in colleges in the United States, and many are already working in OPT jobs.

The S.386 bill eliminates the pro-diversity “country caps” and instead allocates green cards on a first come, first served basis, regardless of the impact on imported workers from other countries. This change rewards the Indian government, which works with Indian and U.S. companies to pack the green card line with hundreds of thousands of Indian graduates who will export additional U.S. jobs back to India via the “U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.”

Vaughan joined Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Brandon Darby.

“It is primarily technology workers working for Indian owned outsourcing companies that have displaced American workers. And this would mean that they would all of a sudden shoot up to the front of the line to get their green cards,” Vaughan explained. “And USCIS says that if this [S.386] bill were to pass, almost all of the green cards would go to citizens of India for at least the next ten years, closing out applicants from all of the rest of the world and preventing employers that use highly skilled workers, that want to recruit uniquely qualified, talented individuals from other countries. They would not be able to do it because instead, the green cards would be all used up by these folks who have come in on temporary visas for the last ten, 15 years.”

Companies refuse to hire Americans when they can hire Indians who will work long hours at lower wages to get green cards, she said. The bill will worsen the problem because it encourages more Indians to join the OPT and H-1B programs in search of green cards, she said.

“The American workers don’t have a job anymore. The [Indian] contract workers still have their job, but the Americans don’t. So this makes no sense to try to fix the system in this way, that benefits the employers and the contract workers but perpetuates a flawed system that is displacing Americans, and that it is only going to get worse if this changes made,” Vaughan said.

“If you want to fix the system,” she continued, “let’s move to a truly merit-based employment system [where] it doesn’t matter what country people come from, just give [green cards] to the most meritorious applications.”

Indian workers are also victims of this process — but they are willing victims, Vaughan said. “The thing to remember is, you know, I do feel for some of these Indian workers who came here on the visas,” she said. “They were told that they were going to be able to get a green card. So they agreed to work at very low salaries and poor working conditions because they thought they were going to get a green card eventually … were sold a bill of goods by these employers. And now the employers are demanding that Congress change our [green card] law to make good on their promises to these workers.”

“But, you know, nobody’s making these contract workers go home. Congress has created exceptions and given them extensions on their visas. So they’re allowed to stay until they get a green card … they’re able to live [and work] here in legal status,” Vaughan said.

Leon Fresco, the Democrat lawyer who was hired to help pass the S.386, posted a video suggesting the Senate will pass the bill on Thursday. But the video shows an American technology expert is being threatened in his own spaceship by an alien force:

Lee will ask the Senate to approve his Indian outsourcing bill via “Unanimous Consent.” If no senator objects, the radical bill will be considered to have passed the Senate. A similar bill has already passed the House, numbered HR.1044, with the aid of 140 GOP votes.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has the power to block the unanimous consent vote, as does any single Democrat or GOP senator.

Officials working for President Donald Trump have not said if he will support or block the outsourcing bill.

The senators backing the S.386 outsourcing bill are being praised by Fresco’s client, a group titled Immigration Voice:

On behalf of a grateful community, we would like to relay our gratitude to Senator Lee and Senator Harris, along with Senator Kevin Cramer, Senator Jerry Moran, Senator Roy Blunt, Senator Chuck Grassley, Senator Tom Cotton U.S. Senator Susan Collins, Senator Tom Carper, Senator Ron Wyden, Senator Maria Cantwell, Senator Cory Gardner, Senator Tammy Baldwin, Senator Jeff Merkley, Senator Michael Bennet, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Senator Rob Portman, Senator Roger Wicker, Senator James Lankford, Senator Tammy Duckworth, Senator Mike Crapo, U.S. Senator Martha McSally, Senator Mike Braun, Senator John Hoeven, Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Senator Chris Coons, Senator Jim Risch, Senator Doug Jones, Senator Mark Warner, Senator Todd Young, Senator Mitt Romney, John Cornyn, Senator Joni Ernst, Lisa Murkowski, U.S. Senator Tina Smith, and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.

 

 

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