Biden’s DHS Gives 281,000 Green Cards to Foreign Contract Workers

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded 281,000 green cards to corporate-hired foreign graduates in 2022, double the huge giveaway of 140,000 cards in 2019.

The revelation comes just after the House delayed floor debate on the EAGLE Act, which seeks to accelerate the government delivery of green cards promised to Indian H-1B visa workers by Silicon Valley investors, the Fortune 500, and their many subcontractors.

But the investor-backed EAGLE Act also includes a sneak plan that would let U.S.-based employers offer the huge prize of lifetime U.S. work permits to an unlimited number of foreign workers. Those dangled work permits would be swapped by companies to many foreign workers in exchange for a few years of cut-rate blue-collar or white-collar service.

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DHS boasted about the huge corporate giveaway on December 7, which was achieved because the agency converted green cards for family migrants into visas for corporate migrants:

Backed by crucial fiscal support from Congress, USCIS [U.S. Citizneship and Immigration Services] restored fiscal stability and turned the tide on backlog growth …. [and] in coordination with the Department of State, the agency utilized more than 281,000 employment-based visas, twice the typical statutory annual allotment. This was made possible due to the large number of family-sponsored visas that remained unused in FY 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The EAGLE Act bill is being pushed by Lofgren and is backed by tech investors in her district who recruit foreign workers with the dangled promise of green cards and renewable work permits.

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The five-fold increase for Indian workers under President Joe Biden happened while many U.S. companies continued to hire many foreign visa workers — and to fire tens of thousands of American graduates.

The tech layoffs have a broad impact. Each unemployed U.S. graduates tend to apply for jobs in related fields, so pushing other American graduates out of many varied job opportunities.

“Since the start of 2022, more workers in tech have been laid off than in 2020 and 2021 combined,” Yahoo! News reported on December 1.  The layoff number reached 146,000 on December 7, according to a count by Layoffs.fyi.

That layoff number is roughly equal to the number of foreign workers who g0t green cards from DHS in 2022.  The higher 281,000 number announced by DHS includes the employees and family members, which typically amounts to half the yearly total.

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Federal rules allow companies to hire visa workers regardless of how many qualified Americans want the job.

Amid the layoffs, Biden’s deputies continue to print work permits for foreign workers — and even to open more opportunities for U.S. employers to hire foreign graduates in place of Americans.

For example, on Tuesday, Biden visited a new factory in Arizona for manufacturing critical computer chips. But the Taiwan-based firm, TSMC, is using DHS’ visa worker programs to hire cheap foreign workers for entry-level jobs at the plant, according to guestworkervisas.com.

The site uses government data to display companies’ requests to import foreign graduates via the visa worker programs. For example, the site shows that TSMC is seeking to hire 35 foreign tech workers, Ten of those jobs pay less than $77,000.

Nationwide, Fortune 500 companies, their subcontractors, other firms, and universities employed roughly 1.5 million visa workers in jobs that could otherwise be accomplished by American graduates. {snip}

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But Fortune 500 executives prefer to hire visa workers for many jobs.
In 2022, Amazon, for example, asked for visas to hire more than 16,000 H-1B foreign graduates for U.S. white-collar jobs. In 2019, the company also hired almost 3,000 recent foreign graduates of U.S. colleges via the fast-expanding Optional Practical Training program.

Another site, MyVisaJobs.com, also uses government data to show the corporate hiring of visa workers. The site also shows wide

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The pending bill would dramatically raise the number of indentured workers because it allows companies to recruit foreign workers at low wages — but also pay them the deferred bonus of renewable work permits after several years.

The “green card lite” or “work-for-work-permits” language is hidden in Section 7 of the bill — and it would likely flood the labor market for the young, swing-voting American graduates who prevented a GOP blowout in the 2022 election.

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