Liar, liar your socialist britches are on fire....

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NEIL MUNRO30 Jun 20191,604
21:58
Sen. Kamala Harris is declaring herself the supporter of working families — but she is the lead Democratic sponsor on legislation which offers green cards to hundreds of thousands of Indian college grads who agree to take middle-class jobs sought by young American graduates.

If Harris’ outsourcing law is adopted, the rush of Central Americans migrants at the southern border will be overshadowed by a huge rush of Indian college graduates walking into professional jobs throughout the United States. “It is impossible to understate the significance of this,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. Vaughan continued:

A lot of people believe this is only for IT [professionals] but the potential impact goes way beyond IT – healthcare, accountants, and other professional jobs will be at risk. These are jobs which offered a gateway into the middle class for kids from families where the parents did not have white-collar jobs… American graduates are going to see their employment prospects severely restricted by Harris’ bill.

This is “white-c0llar labor trafficking,” she added.

“Working families need support and need to be lifted up,” Kamala Harris told the TV audience at the June 28 Democrat debate, adding:

Frankly, this economy is not working for working people. For too long, the rules have been written in the favor of the people who have the most and not in favor of the people who work the most.

…

We have all been traveling around the country, I certainly have, I’m meeting people who are working two and three jobs … So when we talk about jobs, let’s be really clear. In our America, no one should have to work more than one job to have a roof over their head and food on the table.

Harris is the lead Democratic sponsor for the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act. The legislation is intended to help Indian graduates get roughly 120,000 green cards each year — or roughly five times as many green cards as they receive now.

But Harris’ bill is a special-interest fix for a problem collectively created by the federal government, India’s government, CEOs, investors, and their hired foreign contract-workers.

The huge career and financial cost of Harris’ fix will be imposed on young American graduates, including million of U.S. graduates who are likely to vote Democratic in 2020.

The Problem:

The federal government offers 140,000 green cards to foreign graduates who are nominated by their U.S. employers. Unsurprisingly, companies love this green card giveaway because it allows them to dangle green cards to motivate their foreign workers. Unsurprisingly, many foreign workers rationally will do tough work at low wages for many years to get those hugely valuable green cards for themselves and their families — and Americans companies hire them instead of more expensive American graduates.

Companies can nominate as many foreign workers as they wish, even though the federal government only provides 140,000 cards for foreign college-graduates each year. So, of course, there is a growing backlog in the green card line as companies nominate more people than there are green cards.

Only some categories of foreign workers are eligible for these green cards. The most important group is the army of the foreign contract-workers in H-1B work-visa program. Workers with H-1B visas have to go home after six years of work — unless they get nominated by their company for one of the 140,000 green cards. Once nominated, the H-1B workers continue working for the same employer until they get their green card, after which they can try to find jobs with better pay and conditions.

So companies have a huge financial incentive to hire and import cheap foreign workers on temporary visas, and to then nominate many of the temporary workers for green cards once their temporary status is about to expire. Already, companies employ roughly 1 million foreign contract-workers via the H-1B program.

That hidden subsidy to U.S. business means at least 1 million college-graduate jobs are closed to American graduates. It also means that most Americans graduates are earning lower salaries because companies do not have to compete for their skills. Instead, Americans graduates have to compete hard for jobs that pay more than the wages earned by baristas, waiters, and temps.

Indian Graduates

Almost 70 percent of incoming H-1B workers are Indian because the Indian government has used the program as an economic development policy. That government policy has been extremely successful and Indian firms have won subcontracts worth billions from American investors who want to boost their stock values by outsourcing many of their operations to cheap Indian subcontractors.

Roughly 1 million Indian foreign graduates have cycled through the H-1B program. While in the United States, the H-1B workers work closely with teams of India-based workers to boost the Indian economy with a huge variety of outsourced work — including software design, database maintenance, health-records management, banking networks, customer support services, and even the development of avionics software for Boeing aircraft. Most of these workers return home — bringing with them the skills, connections, and contracts that have created a national technology boom and a new middle-class.

Understandably, American employers have extended the stay of their Indian H-1B workers by nominating them for green cards. This has spurred the creation of many communities of H-1B and ex-H-1B workers around Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington State, around Wal-Mart in Bentonville Ark., as well as in Silicon Valley, Northern Virginia, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In January 2018, for example, the San Jose Mercury News reported:

About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born, compared to around 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward region, according to a new report based on 2016 census data … the paper’s research indicated that 63 percent of Seattle’s foreign-born tech workers were not American citizens.

In Wal-Mart’s Arkansas, the Forsyth County News reported:

“The Indian population has grown a lot in Forsyth County,” said Gina Sharma, a team leader with Keller Williams Realty North Atlanta. “I moved here in 2005 from Fulton County, and over the past years, I’ve seen personally the change in Forsyth County. A lot of people are moving here from Alpharetta into Forsyth for the schools and just overall the growth that is in Forsyth County.”

There are so many H-1B contract-workers in the United States — roughly 1 million — that they are found in every state and in every congressional district. This breadth also gives them the ability to lobby many legislators.

Country Caps

This is where the H-1B and the green card programs collide to generate even more benefits for U.S. companies.

The green card law contains a “per-country cap” which was intended to ensure that a diversity of foreign workers from a variety of countries could get green cards. In practice, the cap means that only 23,000 Indians can get green cards each year.

But American companies have imported so many Indian H-1Bs, and nominated so many of them for green cards, that there is a multi-year backlog of roughly 300,000 Indian employees — and 300,000 family members — in the green card line.