Democrats Push ‘Foreign Graduates First’ Clause in Coronavirus Bill

Many millions of Indian graduates should be allowed to take white collar jobs from U.S. co
Alex Kotliarskyi/Unsplash
Neil Munro

The House Democrats’ coronavirus recovery bill allows several hundred thousand foreign workers to get college jobs or blue-collar jobs while millions of Americans lose their careers.

“I can’t even believe they have the nerve to spit in the face of Americans who are now unemployed,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the NumbersUSA. The GOP and President Donald Trump must oppose the “Foreign Workers First bill,” she said. “Americans are being laid off right and left … Americans are going to need all the help they can get.”

“Congress seems hell-bent on replacing Americans with foreigners,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “We’re going to have 30 percent unemployment or more — higher than the Great Depression — and yet we are going to bring in more people from abroad? It surreal.”

“This House bill is disgusting,” said Marie Larson, a co-founder of the American Workers Coalition, which organizes U.S. graduates to oppose companies’ growing use of foreign visa workers. “It is an overreach; it has to be called out.”

“During the public health emergency …. [officials] shall temporarily suspend or modify any procedural requirement with which an applicant, petitioner, or other person or entity must otherwise comply under the immigration law,” says Sec. 10607 on page 63 of the 1,119-page House draft.

The suspensions are intended to “ensure the timely and fair adjudication of applications or petitions … [to] prevent hardship to applicants, petitions, beneficiaries, or other persons or entities, including by granting automatic or other extensions or renewals when necessary to protect individuals from lapses in status or work authorizations.”

The bill would even allow H-1B visa workers to stay long past the six-term limit on their temporary stays. For example, the foreign workers who are expected to go home in the next 12 months will instead be allowed to “automatically extend such status or work authorization for the same time period as the alien’s prior status or work authorization.” For H-1Bs, the “same time period’ is three years.

The bill would keep several hundred thousand white-collar visa workers and several hundred thousand blue-collar work-permit workers in the U.S. labor market, even as unemployment is expected to spike past 20 percent.

The bill would also provide a massive giveaway to the many technology, banking, insurance, and staffing companies that have replaced a huge number of U.S. graduates with large blocs of compliant Indian and Chinese graduates.

Without the House language, these wealthy companies would be forced to hire hundreds of thousands of American graduates if their lobbyists cannot persuade the administration to renew the foreign workers’ expiring permits during the massive surge of unemployment among white-collar Americans before the 2020 election.

The visa extensions are backed by FWD.us, a lobby group for West Coast Investors.

The legislation also matches the goals of Compete America. The lobby group has been pushing Congress to pass the S.386 green card giveaway to roughly 300,0000 Indian Hi-1B workers who are employed in the United States by technology, banking, insurance, and staffing companies.

In mid-March, the Department of Homeland Security said it had not stopped plans to deliver 85,000 college-graduate H-1B visa workers to U.S companies.

“You could make an argument for extending current visas, just to prevent disruption,” said Krikorian. “Paired with that would have to be a freeze on future visas [because] you can’t have it both ways – then everyone gets to stay, and more new people would be allowed in,” he said.

‘If your time is up, you should need to go home,” Krikorian added.

“I would hope that the administration would oppose it,” said Jenks, adding:

American workers are going to need all the help they can get. We need to focus on putting Americans back to work … Hopefully, we will start getting the economy rolling again in less than 43 months, and those jobs are going to be needed by Americans who are being laid off.

“I’m not sure this would be [bad] enough for Trump to veto this bill,” said Kirkorian, adding:

There is so much else going on and in such a panic. I expect that the tech lobbyists’ are counting on Trump being very reluctant to veto this bill. Really, the responsibility is on Republican legislatures to make sure he is not presented with that choice. The problem is that the Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats when it comes to preferring visa workers over Americans, but there are some honorable exceptions.

Democrats are trying to make Trump eat a “cap sandwich,” Krikorian said. The Republicans’ job “is to make sure the President is not presented with distasteful actions like this.”

American professionals have organized to lobby against the H-1B program via the American Workers Coalition, U.S. TechWorkers, and ProUSworkers. The new TechsUnite.US site was created to help U.S. graduates anonymously collaborate while shielded by encryption.

In turn, these groups are backed up by a few sites that track the scale and location of the outsourcing industry in each legislator’s district. The sites include SAITJ.org and H1BFacts.com. “The scope of this thing is really unbelievable,” said one researcher.

Other sites document the conflicts created by diverse foreign business practices in the United States. The non-political MyVisaJobs.com site also provides much information about H-1B outsourcing and green card rewards in multiple industries.

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