Kamala Harris Is Silicon Valley’s ‘Dream of Political Control,’ Say Critics

2020 Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) greets residents and sta
ALEX EDELMAN/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Californian Democrat Sen. Kamala Harris is one of the original authors of Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 white-collar outsourcing bill, so spotlighting her close alliance with Silicon Valley’s tech leaders, say her critics.

“She’s a sponsor of s.386 — that should tell you something right there,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

President Donald Trump “has to recognize Kamala Harris is their [tech leader’s] candidate … If he tries to compete with her for those establishment votes and themes, he will lose his base because people will think they only have a choice of either the New York swamp that they know or the Silicon Valley swamp,” she said.

“We know where Kamala Harris’ allegiance lies,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “It’s with big tech in Silicon Valley, it isn’t with the shop owners in San Franciso who are getting mauled … Trump needs to get serious about keeping the promises of 2016, and right now, … he has to look at his cabinet, and honestly appraise which one of his cabinet members has the interest of employees.”

Lynn has rallied white-collar opposition to Harris’s S.386 bill because it would invite more foreign workers to take many American white-collar jobs in the tech sector.

The invitation is created by the bill’s requirement that the tech sector’s foreign contract workers be fast-tracked into green cards and a new “Green Card Lite” status. That status would reward the tech CEOs and their subcontractors for indirectly selling the jobs, careers, and salaries needed by American college graduates to many millions of desperate, eager, and compliant foreign graduates.

Most of those contract workers — including the workforce of 600,000 H-1B visa workers — are from India, the home country of Harris’s Indian mother.

On August 5, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) blocked passage of the S.386 bill, which has been given passive approval by all other senators. Scott reportedly blocked the bill at the request of the White House, but Trump has not formally denounced the bill.

The S.386 outsourcing bill is being pushed in a stealth lobbying campaign by Fortune 500 groups, ensuring minimal media coverage except by Breitbart News. But the tech lobby’s support for the campaign is also periodically exposed by corporate endorsements, such as from Microsoft Corp.

“Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party,” said a 2019 article by Joel Kotkin in City Journal. “Increasingly under fire from both left and right for abusing its power, Silicon Valley could find  Kamala Harris a convenient way to counter criticism while maintaining a tolerant “woke” facade,” he said, adding:

Given the media’s obsession with style, race, and gender, we would do well to understand what agenda lurks behind Harris’s atmospherics. The reality: if she wins, the tech oligarchy—titans of today’s Gilded Age—will have achieved commanding influence, not just in the information business and the media, but in the White House as well.

Kotkin’s article is headlined, “Candidate of Big Tech: Kamala Harris is Silicon Valley’s dream of political control.” Tech dominance is also a family business for Harris, Kotkin wrote:

Harris has not called for curbs on, let alone for breaking up, the tech giants. As California’s attorney general, she did little to prevent the agglomeration of economic power that has increasingly turned California into a semi-feudal state dominated by a handful of large tech firms.

…

Harris seems a sure bet for the tech leaders. Her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable Partners, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and trade associations opposing strict Internet regulations.

To beat Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, “the President is going to have to work even harder to show voters that he’s the one who is looking out for their interests while Harris is sucking up to big tech,” said Vaughan.

Silicon Valley will not do any favors for Trump while they hope to elect their favorite daughter, said Lynn.

But Trump won in 2016 because he was willing to defy the establishment and the Golden Key of populism, Lynn said. “He has to pick it up again.”

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