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

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

The jobs-for-India bill also supercharges the hidden green card economy. 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 get their green cards, and soon after, their citizenship.

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. “There’s collusion within these big tech companies to preserve their monopoly status,” said Lynn. “The best way to do that is to block the sneakernet, you know, one person going from one company to another taking what’s between their ears with them.”That labor policy has already damaged the nation’s technology leadership, insiders tell Breitbart News, partly because the foreign workers have no workplace rights and cannot enforce professional standards whenever executives demand more cost-cutting, for example, in the design of passenger aircraft, government software, computer chips, or wireless technology.

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.

During 2020, Lee’s tactic was blocked by single objections from Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL). Each time, Lee negotiated a deal with the objecting senator and returned with another Unanimous Consent motion.The Senate is akin to a club where the senators quietly offer each other informal favors to get reelected or pass legislation. That quiet cooperation ensures that Lee could not have passed his outsourcing bill without quiet approval from GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and many GOP senators.More obviously, if even one Democrat and Republican senator had objected, Lee’s bill would have failed.

For example, shortly before Lee spoke on the Senate floor, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) was on the floor denouncing the Trump administration for not protecting the workplace safety of blue-collar meatpackers. Brown could have blocked Lee’s damaging bill but declined to do so.

Activists hoped that Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) or Perdue would block the bill, but both were campaigning in Georgia. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) also declined to block the bill.

McConnell did not stop Lee’s bill even though it threatens the GOP’s weakening position in states such as Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina where the visa worker programs have imported many Indian, Chinese, and other foreign workers. The inflow of visa workers has already helped the GOP lose control of Virginia and New Jersey.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also allowed the bill to pass even though it will deeply damage the income and professional status of the Democrats’ core group of college graduate progressives.

Lee’s bill may yet be quietly blocked by McConnell — but it can also be copied by House Democrats into the pending coronavirus spending bill. In turn, GOP senators could pretend to oppose its inclusion in the spending bill — but then sent it to the White House for Trump’s signature.

Trump may promise to veto the bill — but he too is being pressured by business groups while he considers whether or not to run for the White House in 2024.

The massive white-collar replacement bill has been quietly marketed by investors and corporations for many years as a no-fuss correction of a difficult-to-understand quirk in immigration law. In 2019, the business groups, for example, slipped it through the House as H.R. 1044, as the “Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act.”

This stealth strategy has muffled Hill opposition, partly because it minimizes publicity from white-collar journalists at the pro-diversity New York Times, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, or the corporate ABC, NBC, and CBS TV networks.

The stealth strategy was adopted after the public rejected the high-profile Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013 and 2014 and ejected five Democratic senators in the 2014 election.

The stealth strategy is also aided by the investor-funded push to protect the DACA migrants and is also being used to put migrants into skilled blue-collar jobs.

Lee’s bill bars the award of green cards to Chinese workers. That section will give GOP senators something to tout if the legislation is included in a coronavirus bill — even though it will likely later be stripped out by the Supreme Court.

Breitbart News has extensively covered the campaign to pass Lee’s S.386 giveaway.

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