Amy Klobuchar Hides Her Support for Exporting College Graduate Jobs to India

Sen. Amy Klobuchar leans on Midwest background in presidential bid
UPI
Neil Munro

Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar is touting her support for amnesty and easy migration of blue-collar workers — but she is hiding her support for laws that allow employers to hire foreign graduates for the white-collar jobs needed by Klobuchar’s college graduate progressive voters.

“We know that immigrants don’t diminish America, they are America,” she told a February 13 event in Nevada organized by the League of United Latin American Citizens. She continued:

We also know that we need workers in our fields, in our factories, to start more small businesses, in our nursing homes, working as doctors, and [in] our hospitals and [as] nurses. So I think that economic case … is the case I’ve been making in every state. …. In nearly every town hall meeting, I would bring up immigration, because I just think it’s so important for people, even in states that don’t have big Hispanic communities, to start thinking of it as an economic imperative.

Klobuchar has a long history of support for white-collar migration, despite the impact on college voters in her home state.

In 2015, for example, Klobuchar backed a bill by then GOP Utah Sen. Orin Hatch that would allow universities and companies to cooperatively import an unlimited number of foreign graduates for the jobs sought by American graduates. ComputerWorld reported:

Technically, the bill is a reintroduction of the earlier “I-Square” bill, but it includes enough revisions to be considered new. It increases the H-1B visa cap to 195,000 (instead of an earlier 300,000 cap), and eliminates the cap on people who earn an advanced degree in a STEM (science, technology, education and math) field.

Hatch, who is the No. 2 ranking senator in the GOP-controlled chamber, was joined by co-sponsors Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in backing the legislation.

…

“This bill is basically a wish list for the tech industry,” said [EPI’s Daniel] Costa.

In 2020, Klobuchar is also sponsoring the updated version of the Hatch bill. The bill, titled S.386, is being championed by Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee. His bill would not change the overall number of green cards for foreign employees, but it would roughly quintuple the award of green cards to the unlimited number of temporary status Indians graduates who can take jobs from American graduates via the Optional Practical Training, L-1,  and the H-1B programs.

The resident population of roughly one million Indian graduates has created a U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy throughout the U.S economy, which pushes many American graduates out of good jobs. The outsourcing economy has imposed Indian-style workplace rules on Americans’ professional workplaces, despite U.S. laws against discrimination, favoritism, and kickbacks.

Klobuchar’s support for middle class outsourcing is a fundamental economic threat to her own voting base of white-collar college graduates.

She came in third in the New Hampshire primary race partly because she won the biggest share of college voters, according to the exit polls. She won 25 percent of the votes from college grad Democrats, narrowly beating the shares won by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. But she only won 14 percent of blue-collar votes, far behind Sanders’ share of 31 percent and Buttigieg’s share of 24 percent.

But the victims of this Indian outsourcing include many young, mid-career and older graduates in her home state of Minnesota.

Numerous Indian-run, Indian-staffed outsourcing firms have set up satellite offices in Minnesota. They include Infosys, Cognizant, Tata, Larsen & Toubro Wipro, IBM India, and IBM, which recently appointed an Indian CEO to run the firm.

The federal data showing the H-1B job losses are presented MyVisaJObs.com. The site shows the number of H-1B visa workers requested by Minnesota employers to take jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.

In 2019, Minnesota-based Best Buy asked for visas to import 59 foreign graduates, at expected annual pay of $113,000. Minnesota-based Target sought 288 visas for jobs paying an average of $124,000. Cargill Inc. asked for 23 visa workers for jobs paying $117,000, the University of Minnesota asked for 245 graduates at an average pay of  $80,000 and Medtronic asked for 263 graduates at an average pay of $99,000.

SAITJ.org displays the same data from 2017, and it shows that half of the requested workers would earn less than $70,000 a year, while 14 percent would earn more than $100,000.

Minnesota-Total-2017 (2)

The outsourcing economy also hits older workers. In 2007, for example, Minnesota’s Best Buy retail company settled a lawsuit by American workers who were replaced by H-1B workers from the Accenture consulting company, according to ComputerWorld’s report:

Best Buy Co. this month quietly settled an age discrimination lawsuit filed in 2004 by 44 former IT [Information Technology] workers who had been laid off, most of them after the electronics retailer outsourced its IT operations to Accenture Ltd. earlier that year.

“The matter has been resolved on a mutual basis,” said Stephen Snyder, a Minneapolis attorney who represented the former Best Buy employees. Neither Snyder nor officials at the retailer would comment on the details of the settlement deal approved by a U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota.

When the outsourcing deal was announced, Best Buy told its 820 IT workers that only about 40 of them would remain with the retailer. About 650 others were expected to be shifted to Accenture and continue working at Best Buy’s offices, while the remaining 130 or so workers were told their jobs would be eliminated.

Mid-career professionals also lose out.

“She’s the ‘Minnesota nice’ version of [Democrat Rep.] Zoe Lofgren … [who is] the congresswoman from Silicon who is a complete foreign-labor dumping shill,” said a Minnesota-born software professional who has lost jobs to Indian outsourcing. He continued:

In 2004, I’m in Chicago, on the near-north side, near one of the restaurant districts, and this Indian guy comes up to me and asks me for directions. It turns out I end up talking to him for two hours or so, him and his sister. He told me he is working at the Best Buy headquarters in Richview, Minneapolis … He explained how he was told by a manager to lie to an American programmer, tell him there was no more work — but to [secretly] shift work overseas [to India]. The American looked at him and said, ‘What am I supposed to do? I have a mortgage and I have a baby on the way.”

If [the Indan] did not play ball, he was going to be on the first plane back to India.

“Klobuchar knows about this [outsourcing[… she is complicit,’ he said.

The Indian outsourcing has accelerated in the last decade, partly because Klobuchar and other politicians protect the business — and even used the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill to expand the flow of visa workers and foreign graduates. Klobuchar reiterated her support of the 2013 bill at the Nevada event:

I have been a long supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. I think that is the best answer and in 2013, we did, and as I mentioned, when President [George W.] Bush was in and he really wanted to get it done. And we got close, but we had a lot of pushback actually from right-wing talk radio and other things.

Then it got to President [Barack] Obama’s time, and he wanted to get it done too. And in 2013, we put together a bill that was supported both by the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL CIO, by the migrant groups as well as the Farm Bureau and the farmers union. And we got that through [the Senate] with bipartisan support. I was on the judiciary committee, am on that committee and worked on that bill hard, and then it died somewhere over in the House, next to the frozen peas in [House Speaker] John Boehner’s freezer, I don’t know. It never got through, and it was a very sad thing because we had such bipartisan support.

Klobuchar’s opponent, Sen. Sanders, opposed the 2013 bill:

Klobuchar promises to push for a similar bill if she is elected President:

I am convinced that we can get this done. I think a lot of the Republicans do not want to cross Donald Trump right now. But there are a lot of them that know that we need to get it done. I am committed to getting it done in my first year. I’m not gonna wait because that would have a path to citizenship, as well as do something of course with the ‘dreamers’ and give them citizenship, as well as dealing with temporary status workers.

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