House Democrats Sneak Visa Worker Giveaway into Pentagon Bill

Almost every House Democrat voted on Thursday to reward Indian H-1B visa workers by offering the huge prize of citizenship to their adult children in exchange for their parents taking Fortune 500 jobs from American graduates.

Sixty-two Republicans also voted for the corporate giveaway within the defenses authorization bill for 2023.

But the legislation was rejected by most of the GOP’s leadership — including Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Jim Banks (R-IN), and Jim Jordan (R-OH).

The GOP leadership’s opposition may help stop Senate approval, said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA. But, she warned, “We have our work cut out for keeping this off the Senate version.”

“Your green card expansion will not be in the final [Pentagon bill] after [the joint House-Senate] conference, we will make sure of that,” said a tweet from the Federation for American Immigration Reform to the leading Democratic sponsor, Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC). {snip}

If approved by the Senate, the giveaway legislation will make it easier for Fortune 500 companies — and their many subcontractors —  to fill corporate jobs with more Indian visa workers instead of American professionals.

Many corporations use the H-1B visa program to dangle the prize of citizenship before cheap and compliant Indian graduates when recruiting for jobs that would otherwise go to skilled, underused, innovative, and outspoken American professionals. This replacement process spikes the stock bonuses of C-suite executives but undermines the companies’ ability to innovate amid growing foreign competition.

The existing visa worker system has brought at least 1.5 million foreign contract workers into coastal-based jobs at many Fortune 500 companies.

This huge inflow of foreign workers drains investment from GOP-majority Midwest and Southern towns and it demotes millions of the ambitious sons and daughters of American parents. The giveaway legislation benefits the visa workers and their foreign-born children but provides no compensation to Americans or their communities.

The chain migration giveaway also threatens the jobs of GOP members. Naturalized Indian immigrants are one of the most pro-Democratic voting blocs, partly because they feel little pressure to give up their ancient caste culture to better integrate into U.S. society.

All but three of the 218 Democrats voted for the chain migration giveaway.

This lockstep Democratic support for corporate outsourcing may be risky. A July 5-7 poll of 849 registered voters by Siena College showed that Democrats have the support of 57 percent of white college graduates. That group — and their children — are most impacted by the expanded giveaway of benefits to foreign contract workers. The clear opposition by the GOP leadership gives the GOP an opportunity to reduce that crucial Democratic advantage — if the GOP leaders are willing to anger their national corporate donors in the Fortune 500.

The giveaway bill is marketed as a humanitarian benefit to roughly 200,000 older children of visa workers from India. Each year, the federal government offers 140,000 green cards to visa workers and their families. But the huge surge of Indians into Americans’ jobs has created a massive backlog in the giveaway process. The backlog ensures that some of the Indian workers’ children age out of the legal process as they turn 21. This lifts the age limit, so allowing the adult children of visa workers to potentially benefit from their parents’ job offer. Jenks said:

It is ridiculous that people who come here on a [parents’] temporary [work] visa believe they have a right to stay permanently. They have decided, unilaterally, that it doesn’t matter what the law says, it doesn’t matter what rational expectations might be — they are entitled to remain in the United States indefinitely.

“Congress has a responsibility to American citizens,” said Jenks. “To ignore the needs of Americans and ignore the cost to Americans, and to instead grant special favors to the foreigners, is ludicrous,” she added.

These adult children are good for campaign P.R., especially because few reporters show any skepticism, or even recognize that the children’s taxpayer-funded education in the United States makes them valuable hires in their homeland. Much of the stealth campaign for the expansion included personalized arguments during face-to-face lobbying of legislators in their home districts, usually by the visa workers, Indian doctors, and their children

Advocates for the giveaway campaign also added the adult children of non-Indian E-2 visa holders. The E-2 visas allow some foreigners to stay in the United States while they are running a business.

The corporate giveaway was backed by some GOP leaders. The yes voters included Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), a former lobbyist who now runs the GOP’s 2022 campaign committee; Tom Cole, the pro-outsourcing top Republican member of the rules committee, and Rep. John Katko (R-NY), the top Republican on the homeland security committee.

The giveaway was also backed by anti-Trump Republicans, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), and Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI).

Many of the GOP supporters have influential groups of Indian visa workers in or near their district. This group includes Herrea-Beutler and Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), the leading GOP sponsor of the legislation with Deborah Ross (D-NC). “Today the House passed my amendment which will protect over 200,000 documented dreamers,” Miller-Meeks said in a tweet. “These dreamers grew up in the United States and call this place home. Sadly, due to a broken immigration system, many of them are forced to leave.”

The MyVisaJobs.com site sketches out the number of H-1B in each state — North Carolina, for example. Those numbers show perhaps one-quarter of the resident population of white-collar outsourcing workers, such as H-1Bs, L-1s, J-1s, H4EADs, TNs, B-1/B-2s, and OPTs. That white-collar inflow does not include the inflow of legal immigrants and the semi-legal inflow across the southern border.

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The GOP’s rising number of pro-migration Latino representatives mostly voted for the corporate giveaway to the Indian white-collar workers {snip}

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