GOP Sen. Mike Lee Thanks India’s Visa-Workers for Pressuring U.S. Senators to Export U.S. Jobs

Neil Munro

A GOP Senator met with more than 100 Indian contract workers in Congress and publicly urged them to lobby U.S. Senators for passage of his legislation to give citizenship to more Indian workers who push middle-class Americans out of college-graduate jobs.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) made the request on Thursday, shortly his fourth bid to pass his S.286 green-card giveaway bill. The bill was quickly blocked by an objection from a Democratic Senator — while the other 52 GOP Senators did not speak out. “We’re now down to one objector, just one,” Lee claimed, adding:

What we don’t know is how long any one objector will continue to object to something that does as much good as this bill does while doing no harm. It is pretty hard to do that … I’m going to have to keep doing it until I lose my voice.

“Over time, [objectors] tend to get tired of objecting, in part, because they hear from good people like you who tell them this legislation is good, this legislation needs to pass,” Lee told the Indian workers, most of whom voluntarily took white-collar jobs, salaries and even careers from American graduates in exchange for their employers’ promises to give them green cards.

“I want to come here and say thank you,” Lee told the applauding foreign workers. likely including some of who have taken jobs and money from Lee’s Utah constituents, adding;

Thank you for living in this country and for wanting to be here, thank you for your willingness to speak about and educate your fellow beings about this issue. Thank you for defending me online — I’ve seen so many who have been part of your organization who have stepped up online as the attacks have come, and have clarified the truth and have done so with unmistakably well-informed words, never unkind, always informative and ultimately very persuasive.

“We’ve never been as close as we are today, right now” to pass the outsourcing bill, the GOP Senator told the foreign workers, who are neither citizens and nor legal residents of the United States:

We’re now down to one objector, just one. What we don’t know is how long any one objector will continue to object to something that does as much good as this bill does, while doing no harm. It is pretty hard to do that.

Lee’s call for foreign lobbying was echoed by Leon Fresco, a Democrat who works with the Indian group, and who helped write the Gang of Eight” amnesty bill in 2013:

Lee insisted that the other 53 GOP Senators really do support his outsourcing legislation: “If this bill were on the floor today for an up or down vote, it would pass overwhelmingly.”

Few GOP Senators want their voters to see them voting for Lee’s bill, which exports the college-grad jobs needed by their husbands and wives, sons and daughters. But no GOP Senator has publicly denounced Lee’s business-backed giveaway bill, which has been twice blocked by Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin.

But Durbin blocked Lee’s bill because he thinks it does not provide enough green cards to foreign workers. In turn, Lousiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy has blocked Durbin’s “RELIEF Act,” which would annually allow roughly 100,000 Indian workers to get green cards providing they take good jobs from Durbin’s constituents.

Lee also blamed Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell for not allowing a formal vote on his bill, and for forcing Lee to see passage via the fast-track –and easily blocked – “Unanimous Consent” process. “Strategic judgment calls made by those who set the calendar for the Senate — it is the source of great frustration,” he told the foreign contract-workers.

Watch the video here.

“Anyone watching the events over the past couple weeks would have arrived at the conclusion this is a globalists wet dream come true,” said a statement from Kevin Lynn, founder of Progressives for Immigration Reform.  “Not only are our legislators subject to bribery through our corrupt campaign finance system, they are subject to intimidation by hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals living within our borders whose presence in the country was and continues to be predicated on the displacement of American workers [whom] corporations have deemed to be expensive and expendable.”

Lee repeatedly touted his outsourcing bill as a noble effort against supposed anti-Indian “discrimination.”

Lee argued that his bill is morally good because it would remove the so-called “country caps” which are intended to diversify the award of green cards to people from many countries. That diversity counts as “discrimination” because it ensures that only about 10,000 Indians workers can get green cards each year, he said. Hill bill would allow up 60,000 Indian workers to get green cards.

Removing country caps “stands to reason; it is a matter of simple logic to conclude … it does not make any sense to put an arbitrary cap on the basis of what country someone came from,’ he told the Indians.

“That’s unfair discrimination. That is not what this country is about … We’ve got almost no-one on in the Senate who pushes back against the underlying idea of the bill … literally no-one in the Senate thinks the underlying concept is a bad idea,” he claimed.

But no Senator or staffer in the Senate says President Donald Trump’s curbs on China’s government’s aggressive economic policy is anti-Asian discrimination.

The country caps on Indian migration curb the Indian government’s economic policy of sending their workers into the U.S. economy. That policy already has a name — “the U.S-India Outsourcing Economy” — and it provided $78 billion in trade to India in 2018 by transferring at least 1.5 million college-level jobs to Indians in the United States or in India.

So Lee’s removal of the “country caps” would supercharge the Indian government’s ability to transfer millions of Americans’ jobs to Indian graduates — just as Congress’ approval of free-trade rules allowed China’s government to transfer millions of blue-collar Midwestern factory jobs back to China.

Roughly 800,000 Indian college-graduate visa-workers now hold a wide variety of U.S. jobs in technology, healthcare, accounting, and business. Moreover, these visa workers have helped to move more than one million additional U.S. jobs back to teams of graduates working in India.

This onshore/offshore process is described in a discrimination lawsuit against one of the Indian-owned outsourcing firms, Larson & Toubro Infotech.

The firm won a technology-support contract from Iconix Brand Group Inc. in New York. The support was managed by one American employee of Larson & Toubro, according to the lawsuit filed by the D.C. firm of Kotchen & Low. The single American ran a New York team, which consisted of roughly eight Indians who likely arrived with H-1B work visas, the lawsuit says. But the single American also ran a team of 20 Indians in India, and he reported to two Indian managers in India. So the visa programs allowed the Indian company to take roughly 30 good jobs from U.S. white-collar workers with just eight visas, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit noted that “from 2013 to 2018, LTI received 9,785 new H-1B visas (or visa amendments) and almost 200 new L-1 visas (or visa amendments) – far more positions than could actually exist given that LTI only employs about 7,500 employees in the U.S.” The surplus of visa workers allows the company to sideline American job-seekers and instead hire lower-wage Indian visa-workers.

The use of cheaper Indian labor created payroll savings for Iconix and profits for Larson. In turn, those profits boosted the company’s stock values for U.S. investors, including the Vanguard International Stock Index.

But those cost savings came from the pockets of American workers — and from the towns and cities where single Indians fill many of the jobs and communities once occupied by middle-class American families. For example, Indian workers in the United States sent almost $12 billion back to India in 2015. Those remittances, however, are small compared to the vast shift of wealth from U.S. college graduates to stock-market investors and coastal landowners.

This Iconix/Larson example is just one tiny corner of the vast U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, which has received minimal coverage in the U.S. media, despite its huge impact on college-graduate Americans.

Many former visa-workers have become citizens — and they also sharpen foreign competition for U.S. jobs, amid growing evidence that Indian managers and recruiters actively discriminate in favor of other Indians when hiring people for jobs in the United States.

This outsourcing economy has helped to deny jobs to millions of American graduates and to cut salaries earned by American graduates, both young and old. That pressure helps to explain why wages for blue-collar jobs are now rising faster than salaries for white-collar jobs.

But this U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy has grown so much that it has clogged the U.S. immigration system.

The clog is forcing many of the contract-workers to wait more than a decade to get their green-cards they were promised by employers in exchange for taking Americans’ jobs.

That long wait helps the companies by keeping their many contract-workers stuck in their jobs, tied to their employers — often at substandard wages.

But the long wait also makes it difficult for outsourcing companies to recruit more Indian workers. After all, fewer Indians will sign up for the outsourcing industry if the companies cannot deliver the fast-track green cards.

That green-card clog is also a huge problem for India’s government because its entire economic strategy is built around the export of workers into foreign economies.

India’s government is pushing for passage of Lee’s bill. “I must compliment the U.S. House of Representatives for adopting the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants bill which removes country caps on the H1B visas,” Indian ambassador Harsh Shringla told a July meeting of lobbyists and advocates in Washington D.C. “We have worked with congressmen across the board, and we’re happy this is a bipartisan initiative in Congress, and we’re hopeful the Senate would follow course and also adopt the bill.”

India’s economic strategy seeks to grow the economy by exporting many workers. In February 2019, the Forsyth County News reported:

Ani Agnihotri, program chair of the USA-India Business Summit … said India has a massive and young population that could provide skilled, English-speaking workers ready to relocate “even at a seven-day notice” and said the majority of doctors in the United Kingdom and about 15 percent in America are of Indian descent.

“India has the youngest population in the world. About 25 percent of the population of India, which is 1.25 billion, is below the age of 25,” he said. “We will be the provider of the workforce of the world in about 15 years, after 2035.”

The clog is also a huge problem for U.S. investors who need additional cheap Indian workers to meet the stock market’s demand for economic growth and continued gains. For example, business groups want to recruit more Indians to fill Americans’ jobs in hospitals and healthcare centers around the nation.

Many high-tech companies and investors also want India’s government to help them get into Indian’s growing marketplace, especially as the trade war with China heats up.

So Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple’s Tim Cook, and many others are working with Lee to unclog the outsourcing and recruiting process by removing the “country caps” which delay the award of green card to Indian visa-workers.

The pipeline of Indian workers into the United States is built on the H-1B program.

The H-1B program is uncapped for non-profit employers, but companies can get 85,000 new H-1B workers into the United States per year. Each H-1B worker must go home after six years, so capping the companies’ workforce of H-1B workers at around roughly 480,000 workers.

That workforce provides companies with roughly equal to one Indian worker for every nine Americans who graduate with skilled degrees each year.

But that resident H-1B workforce is just a start.

In 1990, Congress decided to let workers in the H-1B program — and in the smaller, lesser-known L-1 program – to apply for green cards.

This 1990 decision created the huge citizenship prize which is pulling many Indians into the H-1B program — and ensures they will brave low wages, tough conditions, and often illegal working conditions to win the prize.

Few Americans appreciate the huge value of green cards and citizenship.

For many people around the world, getting a green card is better than winning a massive lottery: It allows them to escape the poverty and culture of their home country, to vault themselves into the world as American citizens, to bring their spouses, children, parents, and relatives — plus all of their descendants — into a modern society protected the U.S. constitution, culture, military and equal treatment under the law. It is the closest thing to Earthly heaven for many people unlucky enough to be born in India, Africa, or Asia.

Yet Congress allows U.S and Indian investors to freely trade this citizenship prize to 10,000 Indian graduates every year in exchange for a decade or more of profitable work.

Of course, millions of foreigners will accept that giveaway deal — and millions of foreigners feel a moral duty to shove Americans out of their jobs, homes, and careers win so they can grab the fantastic prize for their spouses, children, and grandchildren.

Lee’s bill will allow companies to make that barter with roughly 60,000 Indian graduates per year, up from 10,000 per year under current “country cap” rules.

Congress also allowed companies to keep their H-1B workers in the United States long after the six-year term is up if the companies nominate the workers for green cards.

Many companies have grabbed this freebie from Congress, and now about 300,000 Indian H-1Bs are still working in the United States, long after passing the six-year limit on their H-1B visas.

This work-and-wait workforce is dubbed the “EB workforce” — and it bumps up the resident population of H-1B workers to roughly 800,000, most of whom are Indians.

But the federal government has quietly created many other programs which allow foreigners to easily take jobs in the United States, regardless of whether Americans want those jobs.

Federal law allows an unlimited number of Indians to get jobs in the United States via the B1 visa for foreign workers, the TN program for businesses based in Canada and Mexico, as well as the uncapped “Optional Practical Training” and “Curricular Practical Training” work-permit programs for foreign students and graduates at U.S. colleges.

The Indian government is encouraging U.S. companies to hire more  Indians who get OPT work-permits. “Indian students are an important part of the, let’s say, [trade] engagement,” Indian ambassador Harsh Shringla told the D.C. meeting of lobbyists and advocates in June.

There are over 200,000 Indian students studying in the United States …  If you are able to use the expertise of some of these people, highly trained and educated in the United States, for short-term employment, I think you would have a very useful source of professionals to maintain the competitiveness of U.S. high-tech industries … at very, very, very competitive … rates.

The mass of OPT and CPT workers in the United States have their own sweatshop economy, where they crowd into shared housing while they work as temporary contract workers for the middlemen subcontractors which are quietly hired by brand-name Fortune 500 firms.

These middlemen companies are supposed to be the first step for most U.S. graduates into the technology sector — but the growing share of Indian managers and recruiters have a financial and ethnic incentive to hire Indians OPTs instead of American graduates.

But many Indian graduates do not want to join the OPT sweatshop economy — unless they can also get promoted into the L-1 or H-1B program to get green cards.

So if Lee unclogs the green-card pipeline, then more Indian graduates enter the feeder pipelines created by teh B-1, TN, OPT, and CPT programs so they can get green cards after being promoted into the L-1 and H-1B  programs.

Current data shows that roughly 800,000 Indians work in the United States — including many who are working-and-waiting for more than 15 years to get one of the 10,000 green cards issued to Indians each year.

If companies can offer 60,000 cards a year, then more Indians will rationally work-and-wait for those cards.

U.S. companies will also use those extra Indians to move more jobs back to India.

For example, Walmart is boosting its stock value by outsourcing 569 finance and accounting jobs in North Carolina to cheaper H-1B workers from India. If the company saves $10,000 per employee, Walmart will save $5.7 million per year. On Wall Street, Walmart’s price to earnings rate is 25 to one, so the $5.7 million in payroll savings will boost its stockholders’ value by $142 million.

Walmart picked an American company, Genpact, to supply the Indian workers. The company is a spin-off of General Electric, and it prospers by providing Indian H-1B workers to many companies in the United States. For example, the company asked for 271 H-1Bs in 2018, 410 H-1Bs in 2017, and 307 H-1Bs in 2016. In 2018, Genpact also got 160 L-1 visas, which allow Indian employees to work in the United States at Indian-level wages.

Genpact’s H-1Bs work on the U.S. side of the vast and growing U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, now worth roughly $78 billion per year. Part of the H-1Bs’ job is to funnel additional work back into India. For example, Genpact may only need to use 100 H-1Bs and 20 L-1s in North Carolina to help steer the work of the 569 fired American finance experts back to large teams of low-wage Indian graduates in India.

Genpact’s $3.3 billion in revenue is enough to generate $7.5 billion in stock value for its investors, which include Bain Capital, Blackrock, and Charles Schwab Investment Management.

Walmart is hoping to expand into India, and so it needs strong support from the Indian government as it competes with Jeff Bezos’ Amazon for shares of India’s colossal retail market.

Walmart’s ability to win the support of India’s government is aided by its policy of employing thousands of Indian H-1B in Arkansas and other states. Those H-1B Indians are leased to Walmart by Indian “body shop” companies, such as Cognizant, Tata Consulting, Infosys, HCL, or Larson & Toubro. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a noted opponent of cheap-labor migration, does not oppose Lee’s bill.

 

 

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