From ... in Social issues — Jun 5, 2022

Lobbies Demand Immigrant Soldiers, Cybersecurity Experts

The U.S.

government needs foreign soldiers and technology experts to defend the 285 million native-born Americans who are just too fat, drugged-out, or uneducated to do the job, say pro-migration lobbyists.

The national security pitch is a growing part of the lobbying campaign by Fortune 500 business groups to import more foreign technology workers for many ordinary professional jobs.

The groups claim that they need foreign workers to run a new generation of government-funded chip-making factories amid the rising threats from China.

Their migration legislation is included in the House’s America COMPETES Act, which is now being merged with a Senate bill that does not include migration. “Immigration is becoming a national security issue,” Remco Zwetsloot, from the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told a June 1 meeting. “One of the central lessons of the Cold War was that [migration] is an advantage,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) told Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. “I just hope we choose the same strategy that won the Cold War,” claimed Malinoskwi, who wants to accelerate migration by Hong Kong residents. “It’s offensive for someone to say that Americans cannot defend our own nation,” countered Rosemary Jenks, government relations director at NumbersUSA. “We have always had plenty of hardworking patriotic men and women serve in our military,” she said, adding: We have prosecutions ongoing of Chinese nationals who have stolen our technology — Why on earth would we put any foreigners in positions where they can do that? ...It’s the reason that people don’t trust Zoom — we’ve seen Chinese cut into [zoom] calls.

The “underpinnings of [national security] are individuals and communities that are healthy, accumulating wealth, and are contributing to society — that’s the virtuous circle,” responded Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. He added: The destructive cycle is when we stop investing in American citizens ... so we’re seeing now the degradation of national security because Americans are being displaced by foreigners that don’t share their obligations to the country.

The “national security” theme is being pushed amid the growing GOP opposition to the Fortune 500 giveaway, from such legislators as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Todd Young (R-IN).

The GOP legislators are opposed to the migration giveaway, in part, because it would allow investors to import foreign workers for ordinary white-collar jobs that would otherwise go to Midwest professionals and their families. Section 80303 of the House bill would allow a wide range of foreign graduates to pick up the green cards and to work in a very wide variety of white-collar jobs throughout the United States.

The gateway would open U.S. jobs for anyone with an ordinary one-year master’s degree, says the House bill, “in a program of study involving science, technology, engineering, or mathematics ... from a foreign institution if such degree is the equivalent to a degree issued by a qualified United States research institution.” The acceptable “program of study” includes: ...agricultural sciences, natural resources and conservation, computer and information sciences and support services, engineering, biological and biomedical sciences, mathematics and statistics, military technologies, physical sciences, health professions and related programs, or medical residency and fellowship programs, or the summary group subsets of accounting and related services and taxation.

The huge inflow would allow executives at Fortune 500 companies and smaller companies to fill career-starting professional jobs with grateful, lower-wage foreign graduates — just as farm companies now can easily hire illegal migrants at street corners for stoop labor in the fields. Many reports show the growing corporate favoritism for foreign tech workers and the continued layoffs of U.S. professionals.

The New York Post reported on May 31: Sixty-six tech firms handed out a whopping 16,800 pink slips last month. That’s more than the 13,600 layoffs across 52 companies during the first four months of 2022 combined — and the most employees to get the axe in a single month since May 2020, according to tech jobs tracking site layoffs.fyi. “Large tech firms including Facebook parent Meta and Twitter have both frozen hiring altogether for some departments, while other companies including Microsoft, Snap, Uber, Salesforce, Instacart and Coinbase have slowed hiring,” the New York Post added. Many investor-run tech companies are already dominated by Indian-born executives and managers. Google. for example, is run by an Indian former visa worker, and it has 8,000 “South Asians” — mostly Indians — working in the company, according to a June Washington Post article about the sector’s Indian-origin caste discrimination.

The replacement of free-speaking American professionals with indentured foreign labor allows executives to discard important civic priorities — such as security, privacy, and durability of high-tech infrastructure — in favor of lower costs and higher stock prices.

The resulting damage was exposed by losses at Intel, Boeing, and Theranos.

The replacement has continued for so long that a 2021 report by the Census Bureau showed that a large share of trained technology-trained American professionals is not working in tech jobs. “We have tech workers and software programmers who are delivering pizza — which is crazy,” said Jenks.

The easy access to migrant labor also minimizes the pressure on the government and corporations to train millions of younger Americans. A May 26 report in Politico noted “the U.S. spent just 0.03 percent of its GDP on worker training ... That’s less than a third of what OECD nations spent on average, or 0.10 percent.” Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s deputies are quietly expanding the unpopular federal pipeline of cheap and compliant visa workers. GOP and Democratic legislators know about this stealthy replacement of the American professional class, said Jenks: They’re aware and they think it is fine ..

They are not unhappy about it because [the damage] is not being pushed in their faces. What is being pushed in their faces is the demands of the employers — and if the demands of the employers are met, then there’s generally money following, and that’s really all that matters to our political class. “Some of the [legislators] definitely are malevolent,” she added: I think that there are far too many elites, wealthy elites, who have complete disdain for the rest of America, actual disdain ..

They think that Americans are worthless, so whatever happens to them, they deserve it ... I don’t think they actively plan it — I just think they couldn’t care less what happens to Americans. Republicans and Democrats “choose to turn a blind eye because the tech lobbyists, all the industries — whether they’re finance or health care — have become reliant on a pipeline of cheap and exploitable foreign labor,” said Lynn. But the lobbyists and investors also know their migration demands are deeply unpopular. “I think it’s very hard politically to imagine a standalone bill like this,” Zwetsloot told a meeting on June 1 organized by the American Action Forum. He added: Which is why I think people are trying to make it part of these bigger bills [which may be] politically more palatable to [legislators] who might privately say “I actually support these provision, I think they’re very important, but politically, it is very hard for me to support something like this ... but it was part of a broader package, I think I can.” The stealth tactic has long been used by investors who tell Congress that they need only a few “top tier” specialists, but then use the migration rules to import many ordinary foreign graduates for entry-level jobs through the Fortune 500 and their subcontractors. For example, ex-Google chief Eric Schmidt is pushing for the House legislation, which would allow easy immigration by foreign holders of master’s degrees. But in a June 2020 op-ed for Barron’s magazine, he argued that the “ability to attract and retain top-tier talent from around the world is the backbone of a trifecta where the best talent comes to the U.S., to work at the best institutions on the most cutting-edge intellectual property.” Other migration advocates are trying to raise the stakes. “It’s a debate between those who think our openness as a democratic society is an advantage in the struggle with autocracies or a disadvantage,” Malinowski told the Post. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine and rising cyberattacks have increased concerns over high-tech threats to U.S. national security, especially cybersecurity,” said a June 1 statement by the American Action Forum, a business-first advocacy D.C. group. The migration provision in the COMPETES Act “could provide [the Department of Defense] with enough highly-skilled [foreign] workers to support current STEM hiring rates for the next three years,” said the report, which was written by the group’s president, Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

The lobbyists’ national security message is also being trumpeted by Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post newspaper.

The House bill would “expand visas for applicants with advanced STEM degrees from any country [but] the Senate version has none of these provisions,” Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin reported on June 2. “Republicans’ excessive fear of immigration should not waste a strategic opportunity for the United States to strengthen itself and weaken its rivals at the same time.” The military needs foreigners in battlefield foxholes, said a May 25 op-ed in the Washington Post. by Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer and Democrat: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even if they wanted to join, 71 percent of young [Americans] cannot meet military requirements. One in four is overweight. Others either fail to meet the education requirements necessary to serve in a high-tech 21st-century military or have mental health challenges or a drug abuse or criminal record. She continued: Our lawmakers could boldly address the need for reforms across the U.S. immigration system, from the asylum process to refugee vetting to legalizing agricultural workers and dreamers, to make it easier for immigrants to get green cards.

The demographic challenges and declining number of eligible recruits is a national security threat from within our own borders at a time of global instability, a domestic labor shortage and multiple crises facing the usual pool of younger military recruits. Our leaders must act now with the urgency that this demographic threat demands. Immigration has made the United States into a superpower, Tim Kane, an economist at the Hoover Institution, told a February podcast. He added, “why don’t you allow [entry to foreign] electrical engineers with no criminal background that want to be American? There should not be a cap on that.” In May, President Joe Biden echoed that claim, arguing that “Each generation of immigrants has made our Nation stronger and reaffirmed that diversity is — and always has been — our greatest strength.” In reality, the period of greatest U.S. relative power came during the 41 years when immigration was minimized between 1924 and 1965. In 1990, one year after the U.S. won the Cold War, D.C. doubled immigration rates to deliver roughly one migrant for every four births. That rapid immigration has converted the bi-racial United States into a multi-ethnic society split by a proliferating variety of competing identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement ... we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted. .

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