NTF ISSUE PAPER: S. 386 WILL ALLOW FOREIGNERS TO STEAL AMERICAN JOBS

NTF Issue paper: illegal161.doc. 9-19.
NEBRASKA TAXPAYERS FOR FREEDOM ISSUE PAPER:
S. 386 WILL ALLOW FOREIGNERS TO STEAL AMERICAN JOBS.

BACKGROUND. Currently, every country in the world receives the same number of U.S. visas per year regardless of population size or demand. The Immigration and Nationality Act dispenses 140,000 employment-based and 226,000 family-based immigrant visas annually, which may become exceeded, if the prior year allocation not fully used. The annual 7% cap on green cards (work permits for foreigners) for citizens of any one country has led to waits of many years for foreign nationals seeking to work in the U.S. on the H-1B visa and seeking permanent residency, citizens of India and Red China waiting the longest, because they dominate the H-1B system. Now, liberals want to exacerbate this system to the further detriment of American workers.

BAD BILL. Sen. Mike Lee (UT.) introduced S. 386, an immigration bill to increase the per-country cap on family-based immigrant visas from 7% of total immigration visas available every year to 15% and end the 7% cap for employment-based immigrant visas. It would eliminate per country green card limits. The bill also would allow increased immigration from Red China. Within 3 years, 85%, then 90% allocated to populous countries like India and China, the rest to remaining nations. The bill currently is in the Judiciary Committee, but sponsors want to advance it without a full committee hearing. Liberals seek a unanimous consent request, permitting them to bypass the committee process, hearings, and a public debate. Sen. Lee by seeking unanimous consent would avoid floor votes and media coverage. Supporting Lee is Sen. Kamala Harris, the California radical running for president. Note that her family is from India, and its wealth has allowed her to stay close to their interests. They flew in from India to attend her installation as senator. Her uncle has long worked as a policy maker for the government of India, especially in nuclear matters. S. 386 actually would give priority to India, which, over the next decade, would receive 600,000 green cards, to the exclusion of other educated foreigners waiting in line. The legislation would almost guarantee permanent residency for tens of thousands of Indians. The bill would allow cheap labor to expel U.S. citizens from high-paying jobs. Sponsors would increase the number of Sen. Mike Lee visas from 140,000 to 270,000 and grant work permission to spouses and teenage children. Under this provision, an applicant would receive ongoing employment and travel authorizations for however long it takes to approve a permanent residence case.

CONSERVATIVE OPPOSITION. Leading the Senate opposition to S. 386 is Sen. David Perdue (GA.). The bill drastically would alter our system for awarding employment green cards that would displace thousands of American workers. It strengthens and continues a system that actively unemploys Americans, offering a major concession to employers who regularly ignore Americans seeking work, and not reforming the system to reduce guestworker admissions or prevent businesses from replacing U.S. employees with cheaper-paid foreigners. The bill ends a per-country cap control that measures issuance of green cards, so that they distribute to applicants from all nations before citizens from 1 nation can become considered above a set number. Indian contract workers waiting for a green card may apply for a visa extension and not forced to return home, retaining their jobs previously occupied by citizens. Supporters want to admit 5,000 foreign nurses on temporary visas for 10 years, bowing to U.S. hospitals that prefer to import foreign nurses than expand the number of slots for citizens to enter American nursing schools. The Labor Dept. can conduct annual compliance audits of H-1B employers, but if no willful failure found, no further annual compliance audit can occur for a period of at least 4 years. Applicants in countries which previously have not experienced a significant wait time in the employment-based preference categories will see an increase in wait times. Immigration policy analyst David Bier estimates that eliminating the per country cap would result in an average wait time of 6-7 years for all applicants processing in the EB-2 and EB-3 visa categories. Companies that want to sponsor workers from the other more than 150 countries that receive employment green cards would have to wait at least a decade. This bill is great for Silicon Valley but bad for high-skilled American workers. Open Secrets reported a significant portion of the lobbying done in favor of the bill bankrolled by tech companies. With this act, foreign-born workers would constitute an even greater share of the tech workforce for lower pay, and Americans with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees would find fewer jobs. This addition would add a green card to the diploma of many foreign students who graduate from a U.S. college or university. According to the American Workers Coalition, 275,000 foreign students worked in the U.S. in 2017 under the OPT program. Over a 10-year period, employers hired 2.5 million OPT workers instead of American workers. There exists a huge tax incentive for employers to hire OPT workers, because they pay no 15.3% payroll tax they would have to pay for hired American workers. Unfortunately, fewer than 50% of U.S. STEM graduates actually locate jobs in STEM upon graduation as a result of the OPT program. Passing this American unemployment bill would allow an unjust system to continue unabated. Dozens of callous corporations that are pushing the bill have fired U.S. tech workers and are now whining about a nonexistent worker shortage. Since the Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B visa, tech giants and other billion-dollar corporations have dishonestly and disingenuously claimed that American women, U.S. students, minorities, and older workers are unqualified to distract public attention from discriminatory recruiting and hiring practices. The H-1B and other employment-based visa programs have undermined experienced, talented American workers. S. 386 will continue to lay off thousands of U.S. tech workers, and then their employers cynically will force them to train, at risk of losing their severance, their foreign replacements. S. 386 rewards tech and foreign outsourcing companies that have replaced American workers with hundreds of thousands of low cost, less skilled H-1B guest workers. Third Worlders can survive on lower wages than Americans. They are eagerly awaiting that green card, so that they can bring their entire family and move up to family income of $100,000 per household, while Americans suffer destroyed careers. Everyone can come here to steal our jobs, but Americans cannot emigrate to take jobs overseas.

INDIAN PREFERENCE. Silicon Valley claims it loves American workers, but the industry only wants workers from one country, India. About 71% of its workforce is foreign-born. The majority are Indian nationals, almost 70% of those who come on H-1B visas, a favorite of Big Tech. Many of these tech firms have a large physical presence in India itself. Tech giants prefer Indian-born workers, because they work for far less than American workers. S. 386 would eliminate country caps on immigration and allow Indians to monopolize the majority of green cards. Indians would take at least 75% of all employment-based visas, if the bill passes. Silicon Valley and U.S. investors recruit and motivate a resident domestic army of at least 800,000 low-wage foreign workers, plus perhaps 550,000 foreign spouses and children, imported to the U.S. via the H-1B visa program. About 500,000 of these H-1B foreign graduates use 3-year work permits to work in a very wide variety of promising jobs. These companies have boosted their resident workforce by nominating 300,000 additional H-1B workers for green cards, allowing them to stay once they reach the apparent 6-year limit in the H-1B program. Thousands of Indian workers already have abused H-1B visas in detriment to Americans. Most imported workers are Indians, because U.S. companies have gradually created a bi-national outsourcing economy with Indian companies and the Indian government. This little-recognized joint outsourcing economy is enormous and very beneficial to the Indian government and to Wall Street investors, precisely because it has forced down wages for many U.S. professionals, especially for American software experts. U.S. workplace rules rarely enforced in Indian-dominated workplaces throughout the U.S. Qualified American applicants from prestigious universities seeking jobs in major U.S. companies routinely passed over, while Indian recruiters trade stolen resumes, fake interviews, make under-the-table payments, and make job offers to under-qualified Indians from favored caste or regional groups. The H-1B outsourcing industry also concentrates U.S. economic growth in a few states and cities and prevents Midwest states and cities from using their local graduates to attract new investment from investors living in major cities in California, New York, or Texas. For example, few technology jobs created in Kentucky or Indiana, partly because California investors easily can hire Indian “students” for jobs in nearby Silicon Valley. A key feature of this outsourcing economy is the existence of a hidden yet huge U.S. government subsidy, the promise of government-provided green cards to compliant foreign workers. U.S. and Indian companies dangle this valuable prize before their Indian employees to ensure they work long hours for low-wages for many years and quietly endure Indian-style working conditions without changing jobs. Extra green cards would supercharge the outsourcing economy, partly because there are no U.S. limits in any way on the number of Indians allowed to take college-level jobs throughout the U.S. Because most Indian nationals who receive employment-based green cards work in the high-tech industry, the bill would greatly increase the competition and wage pressures that American high-tech workers already face. 800,000-plus Indian visa-worker graduates work in the U.S.-India Outsourcing Financial system. That financial system now affords India with $78 billion in annual earnings. This system is backing S. 386, because it will enable more Indian graduates to work here. About 1/7th of Indians in the U.S. are illegal migrants. Approximately 4 million ethnic Indians reside in the U.S., including 1.5 million Indian-born visa workers and their families and relatives. The categorical Indian-American vote also is about 1.5 million, and they vote 5-to-1 for Democrats.

CONSERVATIVE ALTERNATIVE. Conservatives prefer to establish a merit-based system to award employment visas but only to foreigners who do not take jobs from qualified American citizens.

SUPPORTERS. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports this bill, because some of its members prefer to hire cheaper labor. Other boosters include the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Immigration Voice (Hindu contract workers), Republican Hindu Coalition, and large tech companies like Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and IBM. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft import workers from India and Red China to displace American workers. Walmart is boosting its bottom line by outsourcing 569 finance and accounting jobs in North Carolina to cheaper H-1B workers from India. If the firm saves $10,000 per employee, Walmart will save $5.7 million per year.

NEGATIVE EFFECTS. The government rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants. This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for greedy investors. The stimulus occurs, because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions. The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hinders child school and college educations. The cheap-labor economic strategy also alienates young Americans from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans. This labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Midwest to the coastal cities, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, and rewards greedy investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

TAKE ACTION NOW. We must insist that companies hire Americans before recruiting cheap labor from other parts of the world. Immigration abuses destroy the careers of aspiring American techies and other professionals. No point in an American obtaining a STEM degree, if our tech corporations will not hire Americans. After decades of steady U.S. worker displacement from the H-1B visa, Congress needs to refocus its priorities on protecting the future of American employees and job seekers and their families. Ignoring immigration legislation adverse effects on citizens, as Congress has done for almost 3 decades, is unconscionable and begs reversal. We must give U.S. workers an opportunity to climb the ladder of economic success and not permit foreigners to take American jobs. Unfortunately, for many American workers, it is already too late, Contact your 2 senators today to vote NO on S. 386, using the information given above. Email netaxpayers@gmail.com for Capitol Hill contact information and to join our NTF Project Immigration.

Research, documentation, and analysis for this issue paper done by Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom. This material copyrighted by Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom, with express prior permission granted for its use by other groups in the NE Conservative Coalition Network. 9-19 C