Has Donald Trump been telling us one thing and planning another?
That’s the question of the week, as the government prepares to unleash a horde of visa applicants, beginning Thursday. Suddenly, more than 400,000 foreign workers will be allowed into the country to compete for jobs at a time of high unemployment here.
Nearly all the visa-seekers will be from China or India.
Trump promised in 2016 to protect American jobs from unfair immigration, and has continued to voice his support of visa reform in this year’s Presidential campaign. Opening the borders to hundreds of thousands of new, “temporary” workers is the opposite of that promise.
Perhaps the real question is whether Trump is being fooled again by his “trusted” appointees? It won’t be the first time – remember James Mattis, John Kelly, Michael Cohen, John Bolton, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson and Anthony Scaramucci?
Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), said:
The people who are getting screwed are likely Trump voters. This policy is sticking a knife in the back of (college graduates) people, who would be his supporters.
Meanwhile, the lawyers who profit from bringing in foreign workers seem very pleased. Greg Siskind, an immigration attorney in Memphis, TN, said:
This is the news that a lot of people have been waiting for a long time.
The jobs’ giveaway by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a “crazy [good] thing,” Siskind said last week.
“Good times,” he tweeted.
Siskind said foreign applicants should file quickly, because Trump may reverse the DHS action “if he finds out about it.”
Shouldn’t the President already know about a threat to American jobs and wages? This is swamp government at its worst.
The person most responsible for informing Trump about the backdoor plan to reduce American wages by bringing in more foreign workers is acting chief of DHS, Chad Wolf.
Sadly for the rest of us, the President recently picked Wolf to formally run the Homeland Security department, and Trump is currently pushing for Senate approval of this conflicted nominee.
Wolf is the former lobbyist for NASSCOM, the multinational trade group that promotes the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
No surprise – he has made minimal effort to control anti-labor, white-collar immigration programs. The result of Wolf’s negligence has harmed both STEM wages and employment, along with other professions.
Wolf’s plan, that devastates employment and lowers wages, has two parts.
First, the State Department will offer green cards to 120,000 additional visa workers. They will gain cards originally set for family migrants, who have been blocked by the coronavirus shutdown. That’s above the normal award of 140,000 to new foreign employees of American companies.
The second, and bigger plot by DHS officials, includes vastly increased access for a backlog of Chinese and Indian visa job applicants.
For example, Indian visa workers, who asked for green cards prior to 2015 via the track for ordinary workers, can now receive a renewable work permit – the Employment Authorization Document, also called a “green card lite.”
It is not a green card, but it is damn near close, lawyer Siskind explained.
“Get that (application request) stuff to them as quickly as you can,” he told Indian visa workers in an online presentation.
He said that an additional 300,000 experienced Indian workers can now switch from their current EB-2 immigration track to get the DHS benefit for lower-skilled EB-3 workers.
Meanwhile, some GOP Senators have repeatedly blocked a bill to allow an early-filing giveaway to Indian visa workers. This legislation (S.386) is co-sponsored by Senators Mike Lee and Kamala (comma-la) Harris, as part of a so-called “bipartisan” push to lower wages in STEM and other professions.
NASSCOM and Silicon Valley are tightly connected. The following nine tech leaders are on its Executive Council.
- Anant Maheshwari
President, Microsoft Corporation, India - Nivruti Rai
General Manager, Intel Technology, India. - Sameer Garde
President, India & SAARC, Cisco - Rahul Sharma
President, Amazon Internet Services, India and Asia - Dattatri Salagame
Vice President, Chief of Digital Business, Bosch - Sandip Patel
Managing Director, IBM, India - Sindhu Gangadharan
SVP and Managing Director, SAP Labs, India - Alok Ohrie
President & Managing Director, Dell International, India - Ajay Prabhu
Chief Operating Officer, QuEST, Global
Other members include firms that supply hundreds of thousands of visa workers to American companies.
You can fool nearly all the people... 