Horowitz: Republicans ready to join Dems in allowing China, India, and Big Tech to monopolize green cards

Big Tech has worked with China and India for decades to demographically gerrymander Americans out of entire industries within the United States by flooding the country with worker visas from these countries. Now, as we see all of the labor and ideological problems with selling out the American worker to these odious forces, Republicans, rather than stepping on the brakes, want to accelerate the problem by granting them permanent residency under the Eagle Act (H.R. 3648). In other words, after selling us out on marriage and gun control, they want to complete the trifecta by betraying their base on immigration in the same year and during the lame-duck session.

Next week, the House plans to use the lame-duck session to push the greatest transformation of our immigration system in three decades. The bill, cosponsored by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and John Curtis (R-Utah), would phase out per-country caps for employment-based green cards and lift annual caps on family-based green cards. Because evidently 1.1 million new green cards issued per year for decades is not enough, and evidently we don’t have enough Indian and Chinese workers.

Everyone knows what our immigration system should look like. It should only be high-skilled – real high-skilled – based on a merit points system, not just for education, but also for patriotic assimilation. Then, once they are here, they should be free to work anywhere. Instead, we have a system that is mainly unskilled chain migration with the “skilled” portion of it being monopolized by visa pork to specific corporations for workers who aren’t even that high-skilled, mainly entry-level IT jobs for tech companies. The bill will exacerbate rather than enhance the current system.

The bill essentially allows Big Tech to sponsor an endless number of H-1B workers from India (or EB visa holders from China) and after two years adjust their status to a green card. At a time when we need to transform our system to give green cards only to the most highly skilled people throughout the world (while eliminating almost all other immigration), this bill steps on the gas pedal to shunt through the existing lower-skilled people from one particular country to gobble up all the green cards. In turn, this will allow the same Silicon Valley companies to then refill the existing pipeline of H-1B, L-1, OPT, and other similar categories, many of them uncapped, with the same people from the same countries going to the same corporations.

In other words, the same way our family-based visa system is broken because it allows immigrants to choose who is brought in based on family ties rather than Americans choosing the best fit, the employment-based system allows a handful of the most powerful liberal companies tied to China and India to bring in the people they want for their jobs with no regard for the rest of the country.

Under current immigration law, no country’s nationals can compose more than 7% of any visa category. By lifting the per-country cap, it will allow the country with the existing visa mill pipeline funneled through U.S. tech companies to monopolize the visas to the detriment of the American worker, a broad immigration system that works for the American people, and other more talented people around the world.

Additionally, because this provision would result in boxing out any non-Indian not just from employment-based green cards, but from all green cards, another provision of the bill doubles the existing family-preference per-country visa cap from 7% to 15% per country. This will result in a massive expansion of chain migration. Thus, legislators managed to make both the employment- and family-based immigration worse at the worst possible time in our history and for the worst industry around that is a nemesis to conservatives.

Yet Republicans support this bill at least as much as Democrats. Just 57 House Republicans opposed a similar bill in 2019. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), the new incoming House majority whip, who did such a “fabulous” job as chairman of the House campaigns, is a co-sponsor of the current version. Sen. Kevin Kramer is the big GOP champion of the bill in the Senate, but numerous other Republicans have voiced support for the general framework in the past. If this bill fails this year, it will simply be because the Senate is too busy screwing us on other issues and doesn’t have enough work days left to pass it – not because Republicans oppose it. They love feeding the industries that seek their destruction.

Top H-1B lobbying and dependent companies like Amazon and Meta are now implementing massive layoffs of thousands of people. On what planet do these congressmen reside who think now is the time to restructure our entire immigration system so they can bring in even more foreign workers?

The Indian contract companies like Infosys, HCL, Wipro, Cognizant, and Tata have already successfully used the vast pipeline of H-1B, L-1, F-1,and an administratively created quasi-legal status called “Optional Practical Training” to own Silicon Valley and the American tech companies with a supply of cheap labor, boxing out Americans and treating the Indian recruits as indentured servants.

Expanding this visa mill is particularly problematic without first abolishing the OPT program and decreasing the hundreds of thousands of foreign students from China. Given that the OPT program is completely lawless without statutory backing, the lobbyists who pushed for its creation benefit from their crime. OPT workers, who are largely foreign students remaining here indefinitely (illegally, according to statute) to work are hired without payroll taxes. So why would any company hire an American fresh out of college when they can hire a foreign student OPT counterpart and save 16% on payroll?

Remember, some of these same greedy tech corporations were just given billions in corporate welfare under the “CHIPS and Science” bill and will now use the corporate welfare to hire foreign workers they know will work for lower wages.

In addition to the labor market concerns, is now really the time to have even more immigration from China than our already high levels at a time when China is using the immigration system as a trojan horse for its trade theft and espionage agenda?