GOP, Democrats Allow Mike Lee’s Middle Class Replacement Bill to Pass Senate

Every Republican and Democratic senator has let Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pass a bill through the Senate that will supercharge the outsourcing of the white-collar jobs needed by America’s professional class and its college-educated children.

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 while promising to curb immigration and the huge H-1B program, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, a group that opposes the visa worker programs. He can veto the bill, or he can sign this bill when it is buried in the huge coronavirus bailout bill, Lynn said, adding, “If this is what Trump wants to be his legacy, well, good luck with that.”

“They’re going to turn millions of white-collar people into blue-collar people,” said Jay Palmer, a civil-rights activist working against human trafficking and the corporate displacement of Americans.

The bill hits “doctors, accounting, insurance people, teachers, graphics designers, pharmacists … [denies] college students from ever having an opportunity to get meaningful jobs, it floods the market, draws down wages, and makes people dependent on big government,” he said.

“Ninety percent of the Senators do to know what this bill means,” he added.

Lee’s S.386 bill helps the Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley firms to annually trade green cards to 140,000 mid-skilled foreign workers in exchange for taking the starter jobs and routine jobs needed by U.S. graduates of all ages — especially as the country emerges from the coronavirus crash.

The bill is carefully designed to help the Fortune 500 companies reward their imported workforce of roughly 400,000 Indian workers who are waiting to get the green cards they expected in exchange for taking jobs from Americans years ago.

Under current rules, U.S. companies can only provide about 70,000 green cards to foreign workers per year, with a maximum of about 11,000 for Indian workers. But the Lee bill would bump that number up to a maximum of 140,000 cards, including perhaps 100,000 cards for Indians per year.

More importantly, the tenfold increase in green cards for Indians will allow U.S. companies to recruit and import many more lower-wage graduates from India via the uncapped Occupational Practical Training (OPT) work permit program.

At least 500,000 additional lower-wage foreign graduates — mostly Indians — have taken mainstream while-collar jobs to help them compete for slots in employer-run H-1B program. Once in the H-1B program, the lower-wage workers compete to get sponsored green cards and then continue working for additional years until they finally get their green cards, and soon after, their citizenship.

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India’s government has pushed for the Lee legislation, partly because its economic strategy relies on deal-making with U.S. investors and CEOs to put millions of Indian graduates in white-collar jobs throughout the United States. In turn, U.S. companies get easier access to India’s growing marketplace.

The bill also cements the tech sector’s control over technology because it allows CEOs to corral the technology by minimizing the recruitment, training, and promotion of the U.S. graduates who may later quit to develop rival products. {snip}

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Lee used a little-known “Unanimous Consent” process to pass the bill, without any hearings or floor debate.

The process is normally used to pass minor uncontroversial bills, and it allows a senator to pass a bill if no other senators stand to object.

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More obviously, if even one Democrat and Republican senator had objected, Lee’s bill would have failed.

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