CEOs Balloon Captive ‘Green Card Workforce’ in U.S. Jobs

CEOs have quietly expanded their captive workforce of non-immigrant, non-temporary foreigners who must remain with their employers while they wait for the arrival of promised green cards.

The non-immigrant, non-temporary workforce reached at least 600,000 in April 2020, according to a routine November report by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency.

The work-and-wait captured workforce reached 592,322 on April 20, 2020, up from 507,993 in November 2019, and up from 395,025 in April 2018. The list grew even as roughly 130,000 foreign workers escaped the backlogged work-and-wait list by getting their green cards and joining the normal American labor market.

The little-recognized sponsored workforce is growing because Congress set no annual limit on the number of foreign workers (plus spouses and children) who can be sponsored by CEOs, even though it has capped the actual award of “Employment Based” green cards at roughly 140,000 a year.

Congress also gives CEOs a big incentive to sponsor their foreign temporary workers because the sponsorships allow them to permanently stay and work in the U.S. jobs while they wait for the promised green cards.

Moreover, many CEOs use the dangled promise of sponsorship to recruit additional foreigners who will work long hours at low wages in the hope of getting sponsored for green cards. There is no limit on the number of foreign graduates who can legally take U.S. jobs — providing they first get universities’ approval to get into the federal Optional Practical Training work-permit program.

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The foreign workforce will likely grow even faster if President Donald Trump signs the S.386 green-card giveaway bill that Sen. Mike Lee pushed through a carefully empty Senate chamber on December 2. Lee’s bill would multiply tenfold the number of Indian workers who can get green cards, so it would greatly increase the incentive for Indian graduates to take U.S. jobs in the hope of getting green cards. India’s government has pushed for the Lee legislation, partly because its national economic strategy seeks to trade its huge labor force to foreign companies in exchange for remittances and corporate investment in India’s vast economy.

The green card labor force consists of the many foreigners who are trying to win sponsorship from U.S. employers, plus the sponsored workers who must continue working while they wait years to get their hoped-for green cards.

The workforce includes at least 1.3 million people, most of whom are kept in the white-collar jobs needed by U.S. graduates. That workforce is more than big enough to displace many of the 800,000 Americans who graduate each year with skilled, four-year degrees in healthcare, science, engineering, healthcare, or technology.

The work-and-wait sponsored workforce likely has grown rapidly since April 2020 because of Trump’s curbs on new foreign workers. Trump’s curbs benefited American graduates — but also give CEOs an incentive to keep more of their temporary foreign workers in the U.S. jobs by sponsoring them for green cards.

The April 2020 numbers showed 92,000 extra Indian workers, even though roughly 14,000 Indian workers — plus roughly 14,000 Indian spouses and children — got off the list by getting green cards since 2018.

Most of the 398,000 Indian graduates on the work-and-wait list were recruited by Fortune 500 companies via the H-1B, L-1, and H4EAD pipelines, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Indian government. For years, Indian workers and India’s government have lobbied hard to change the green card rules in India’s favor because the rules include a so-called “country cap” that is intended to diversify the award of green cards to people from many countries.

The diversity rule set a limit of about 7,000 green cards for Indian workers each year. This means the 398,000 sponsored Indian workers have collectively clogged the green card line for fellow Indians and are forcing each other to work and wait for many years until they can get their green cards.

This resident army 0f India’s contract workers has also displaced millions of American professionals and has forced many into retirement or alternative careers, including real estate and journalism. The CEO-imported laborforce of Indian workers, managers, and subcontractors has also imported India’s workplace culture, pay scales, and labor practices into the U.S. white-collar labor market.

The process of sponsoring foreign workers for green cards is “highly susceptible to fraud,” says a November report by the Department of Labor’s Inspector General about the green card process. The process “relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria,” the report said, echoing decades of systemic fraud described by cops, federal agencies, embassy officials, and advocates for Americans.

The new USCIS documents also showed a new work-and-wait population of 40,000 non-Indian graduates from other countries, such as Canada, Brazil, and Costa Rica, plus roughly 10,000 workers from the Philippines. {snip}

The chart also shows that CEOs have begun using the green card process to displace many Americans from blue-collar workforces.

The CEOs are allowed to get green cards for roughly 11,000 blue-collar workers each year via the “Fourth Preference” category of the EB process. The 2018 data showed a work-and-wait workforce of just 737 non-college workers. But the 2020 data shows a work-and-wait population of 7,000 non-college workers.

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The estimate of 1.3 million in the green card workforce does not include the growing number of white-collar illegals and foreign workers who illegally take short-term jobs after arriving on a six-month B1/B2 visitor visa.

The green card workforce does not include the temporary foreign workers who are imported for a few months to learn how to “offshore” U.S. jobs to planned worksites in India, China, and elsewhere.

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