by Xeno Heresy
www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/…e-america/
Quote:Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee will ask the Senate on Thursday to approve his Indian outsourcing bill via “Unanimous Consent.” If no Senator objects, the radical bill will be considered to have passed the Senate.
A similar bill has already passed the House, numbered HR.1044, with the aid of 140 GOP votes.
Both bills are backed by India’s government that wishes to grow its economy by exporting more workers into jobs in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. The Lee/Harris bill would encourage this outsourcing by rewarding at least 100,000 Indian workers and spouses with green cards each year, up from the current “country cap” award of 20,000 green cards to Indians.
GOP Majority Sen. Mitch McConnell has the power to block the unanimous consent vote, as does any single Democratic or GOP Senator.
Officials working for President Donald Trump have not said if he will support or block the outsourcing bill.
The bill is being pushed by Lee and by Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris, who is now running for the Democrats’ presidential nomination.
Both sides are backing this. They want it pushed through.
Quote:But the lobbyists do not mention the little-known backdoor that is already being used by 200,000 Indian graduates to help get the hugely valuable prize of green cards.
The backdoor is the uncapped and huge “Optional Practical Training” program.
In 2017, 530,000 foreign graduates held one-year work permits via the OPT and the affiliated “CPT” programs. Almost 90,000 of those workers also held a 24-month extension because they won technology-intensive degrees at American colleges. Many of the foreigners register at low-status colleges so they can get a second or even a third OPT work permit.
There is no cap on the OPT program, so any and every foreign third-level student or graduate can get a work permit via the OPT program.
Many OPT jobs are poorly paid — but they serve as the critical on-ramp for the H-1B program, where the foreigners can work in exchange for the promise of a green card in five to ten years.
The H-1B program includes roughly 800,000 workers, most of whom are Indian.
The H-1B program is also uncapped because there are no caps for H-1B hiring by non-profits, such as university hospitals and research centers. Those non-profits now employ an army of roughly 100,000 H-1Bs, but business groups hope to dramatically increase that number by outsourcing many jobs in the healthcare sector.
President Barack Obama expanded the H-1B program in 2015. He provided “H4EAD” work permits to 100,000 spouses of roughly 300,000 H-1Bs who are working U.S. jobs while they wait to get green cards via their American employers. Trump’s deputies have postponed plans to end the H4EAD work permits.
Indian’s government is lobbying Congress to expand this lucrative OPT-to-H-1B-to-green card pipeline.
“Indian students are an important part of the, let’s say, engagement,” Indian ambassador Harsh Shringla told a D.C. meeting of lobbyists and advocates in July.
There are over 200,000 Indian students studying in the United States … If you are able to use the expertise of some of these people, highly trained and educated in the United States, for short-term employment, I think you would have a very useful source of professionals to maintain the competitiveness of U.S. high-tech industries … at very, very, very competitive … rates.
Shringla also praised the House for passing its green-card bill.
“I must compliment the U.S. House of Representatives for adopting the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants bill which removes country caps on the H1B visas,” Shringla told the meeting at the Wilson Center. “I think this is an important initiative. We have worked with congressmen across the board, and we’re happy this is a bipartisan initiative in Congress, and we’re hopeful the Senate would follow course and also adopt the bill.”
This year, the Indian workforce in the United States is roughly equal to the annual output of roughly 800,000 American graduates with skilled college degrees.
The 800,000 number includes all U.S. graduates from healthcare, business, engineering, computers, science, math, or architecture courses at four-year universities.
This is a very lucrative arrangement for India. They’ve been on the receiving end of USA outsourcing for decades. Who hasn’t had a hard time speaking with Indian tech support who can barely understand English and are in no way helpful or caring about your problems?
They cart students to the USA in mass to take advantage of US academia, and when they graduate they take USA jobs from our citizens.
I have to ask, how much of their education was subsidized? Are the taxpayers paying for the educations of the people that take our jobs away?
Not only should this bill be shot down, but we pass a law that bans non-citizens from attending colleges located inside the USA. The H1-B program should be terminated. The outsourcing must be stopped. The exploitation of our workers must end.