GOP Leaders Run Away from EAGLE Act Corporate Open Borders Bill

immigration
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Democrats ducked and dodged while GOP representatives used a Tuesday debate on the House floor to slam the Democrats’ open borders EAGLE Act outsourcing bill.

The bill would allow CEOs to import an unlimited supply of foreign hires to work several years of cheap labor in exchange for the deferred bonus of government-provided work permits and U.S. residency.

Despite its massive reach, news about the bill has been suppressed by the establishment media, even though it will allow CEOs to open U.S. borders to endless foreign workers.

The bill is “a big fat middle finger to America’s working families,” Rep. Tom McClintock, (R-CA) said during the Tuesday afternoon, one-hour exchange on the House floor. He continued:

The most pernicious provision [of the bil] allows certain temporary visa holders to file an application for adjustment for status despite the fact that no green card is available to them … The result is that many temporary visas will essentially become permanent because the alien visa holders will be able to live and work in the U.S. as if they had a green card. That raises an important question: What is it that the Democrats have against American workers? This bill is a direct attack on their job opportunities and livelihoods — so much for the advice to unemployed fossil fuel workers, “Well just learn to code.”

Those rules would also give government progressives far more control over the nation’s labor supply. That power shift would force business leaders to align with Democrats if they want the same cheap foreign workers granted to their commercial rivals.

“The bill also threatens our national security” by pressuring companies to hire more Chinese workers, McClintock said:

China has been stealing U.S. technology for years through programs like the H-1B visa. According to The Washington Post one such initiative resulted in quote, “the arrest of six Chinese researchers accused of lying on their applications about their ties to the People’s Liberation Army” and quote “more than 1000 researchers who had hidden their affiliation with the Chinese military” fleeing the US within months.

The bill was touted by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), whose district is home to the many of the West Coast investors who are pushing the bill through the House. She dodged McClintock’s point, saying that “this bill does not add any additional visas to the visa system.”

But McClintock was referring to Section 7 of the bill.

That little-noticed section allows companies to pay renewable work permits — not green cards — to their foreign workers just two years after they are sponsored for a future green card. Once made law, Section 7 could be used by companies to sell the hugely valuable renewable work permits to foreign workers who have a visa for the uncapped H-2A, H-1B, L-1, J-1, or OPT programs.

Each year the U.S. admits roughly one million legal immigrants — plus almost one million temporary visa workers who could stay permanently in the U.S. under the EAGLE Act’s new indentured service rules.

The rules would at least double legal immigration — and likely create intense pressure for an amnesty that would send millions of former indentured-service workers to the ballot boxes.

So far, GOP leaders in the House and Senate have not moved to block the outsourcing bill, and have gotten very few media questions about the outsourcing bill.

The GOP’s House leaders — including GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and GOP Whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) — were absent for the TV-covered exchange of claims.

Also absent were the two GOP legislators who are competing to win the chairmanship of the House homeland security committee. The two absent legislators were Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn., who founded a staffing company that rents medical professionals to fill outsourced jobs at U.S. hospitals.

The bill is backed by Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) who managed the House GOP’s expensive campaign in 2022, and who is slated to serve as GOP whip in 2023.

If the bill passes the House on Wednesday, business advocates will try to push it through the Senate via the fast-track “Unanimous Consent” process.

So far, not one GOP Senator has promised to stop the bill — despite the huge economic and civic damage it will do to American voters and to GOP-led states.

That is a risky strategy for the GOP — if it wants to win future elections with its current base of pro-American voters.

In the 2022 election, 16 percent of GOP voters said that immigration was their top priority, according to a mid-November Harvard Harris poll of 2,212 registered voters.

Even as Lofgren pushes her outsourcing bill, many CEOs in her district, state, and West Coast are laying off hundreds of thousands of Americans, including some foreign contract workers.

“The magnitude of the layoffs is of the likes I have never seen before,” Tahmina Watson, an immigration lawyer in Seattle, told the New York Times on November 9. She continued:

Not only are tech companies laying people off in unprecedented numbers, but they are also implementing hiring freezes,” she said, “and thus, there are likely few alternative jobs for immigrant workers.”

…

[Two Indian visa workers] women quickly realized that the reach of the layoffs [of visa workers] extended beyond the software industry. “It’s all over, anywhere that tech touches,” said Ms. [Shruti] Anand, “people in health care, food industry are losing their jobs.”

Alongside Lofgren, the outsourcing bill is also backed by immigration advocates Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) and by Indian-born Rep. Pramila Jyapala (D-WA), who heads the far-left Progressive Caucus.

The bill’s outsourcing is also backed by India’s government. The government uses leading Indian companies to grow corporate wealth in the country by exporting Indian workers into jobs throughout the United States and Europe. It is not clear what role India’s government is playing in pushing the legislation, although India’s ambassador recently met with the two Indian-born CEOs of Google and Microsoft.

Both CEOs are former visa workers who displaced American workers and executives – and are enormously popular in India.

Amazon also supports the bill, which is marketed as an effort to remove “country caps” that limit the annual supply of green cards for Indian visa workers.

The outsourcing bill is backed by FWD.us, which represents West Coast investors and their outsourcing companies.

The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at the other sites. The 2013 founders included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Matt Cohler at Benchmark, and Reid Hoffman, a partner at the Greylock Partners investment firm who also sits on Microsoft’s board.

“There’s too much money involved for it not to pass,” said Jay Palmer, an Alabama-based immigration and human trafficking expert, and a former advisor to President Donald Trump.

Palmer closely tracks the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to subcontractors and staffing companies — including major Indian companies. Those companies are paid to fill millions of U.S. jobs with wage-cutting, rent-boosting visa workers and with legal, quasi-legal, or illegal migrants. For example, thousands of young migrants are employed by chicken processing firms throughout Alabama and Georgia, he added.

On Tuesday, McClinton was joined by three other GOP legislators who oppose the bill.

“The EAGLE Act will do nothing to secure our border or address the crisis that this administration has created,” said GOP Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who added:

It will dramatically alter our legal immigration system in ways that most members do not understand or fully appreciate — even the American Immigration Lawyers Association has opposed the bill … The House should be debating and passing legislation to request [homeland security] Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas to enforce the law.

Biggs is expected to challenge McCarthy for the job of House Speaker in January.

The bill “is loaded with exceptions that [help] by agents of the Chinese Communist Party to come into the United States, exploiting this greater latitude for these visas,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC).

“Why do the hospital associations oppose this?” asked Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX):

Could it be that there’s Filipino nurses and others who can be left behind [and] are going to have to go to the back of the line [for green cards]? The Filipino nurses that were crowding the room in which I was being treated for cancer at MD Anderson? … This body is about to jam through a garbage immigration bill that will undermine people around the world seeking to come here, who are going to be put to the back of the line — while colluding with big tech and big corporate interests … We’re here trying to defend the interests of having an immigration policy that is not based on the interest of one industry at the expense of countless other industries.

McClintock re-emphasized the pocketbook threat caused by the open-borders Section 7:

Under this bill … once an alien has filed an Adjustment of Status application, he or she is eligible for a [renewable] work permit. However, unlike an employment-based green card, which generally requires a [documented] showing that the wages and conditions of Americans are not adversely affected, this work permit is considered an open market Employment Authorization Document, meaning the alien can take any job at any wage, and there are no protections for American workers.

So this bill essentially converts temporary visa holders to permanent status at the expense of American … workers. This rewards the very same companies who for years have fired their American workers only to replace them with cheaper foreign labor. American workers, particularly black and Hispanic Americans, are going to be particularly hard hit.

“This measure assures that competition for those [job] positions will become much greater and the wages much lower,” McClintock said.

 

 

 

 

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.