The Washington Post has finally produced an article about Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 green-card giveaway to India’s visa workers — but it excludes the voices of the many American graduates who are losing salaries and careers to the imported population of roughly 1.5 million foreign visa workers.
The editors and the author, quoted two of the Indian visa workers in the United States, an India-born advocate for the visa workers, two lobbyists for employers, three immigration lawyers, the Koch-funded CATO advocacy group, and the author of the giveaway bill, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
But the article simply ignored the many diverse American employees who have protested, lobbied, organized, and called legislators to block Lee’s bill, which would reward at least 300,000 Indian foreign nationals workers for taking jobs from college-graduate Americans of all stripes. The Post’s article ignored the statistical evidence of harm to Americans, the reality of massive fraud, the many critics of the many white-collar visa-worker programs (H-1B, L-1, J-1, OPT, CPT, L-1, E-2, TN, B-1, H4 EAD, etc.), and also ignored the stories of many Americans who keep silent — or stay anonymous — because they are still bound by contracts with the employers who imported their India-born replacements.
The Post‘s see-no-dollars skew was unsurprising, partly because Hauslohner covers the concerns of migrants — not business trends, nor labor-supply questions, immigration economics, labor and workplace issues, or even career options for the many white-collar university graduates who fill her social circle.
But the Washington Post‘s role is also questionable because Hauslohner and her editors are employed by Jeff Bezos. His Amazon company is lobbying for Lee’s outsourcing bill, and his ambition to expand into the Indian market can be held hostage by the Indian government, which is also lobbying for passage of the Lee bill.
Hauslohner’s focus on immigrants skews the entire article away from the concerns shared by millions of American graduates and their parents.
She builds the article on the personal stories of four Indian migrants:
the backlog [for green cards] among this group is so acute that an Indian national who applies for a green card now can expect to wait up to 50 years to get one.
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Yogi Chhabra, an IT professional in Louisville, says the backlog crisis has put his family in danger of being torn apart. Chhabra, 55, has lived in the United States for 21 years and has been in the backlog for nine. His oldest son, now 23, is a U.S.-educated mechanical engineer who has lived in Kentucky since he was 3, but because he aged out of eligibility two years ago, his son now faces the prospect of being deported to a country he has never known. “If he cannot find a job in eight months, he’ll have to leave,” Chhabra said. “It was just yesterday that he came home crying. We don’t know what to say to him.”
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In October, the widow of an aviation systems engineer whose family lost its spot on the waitlist when he was killed in a 2017 hate crime published a commentary in the Kansas City Star, comparing Durbin to the man who killed her husband. The attacker shouted “get out of my country,” as he shot and killed Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian tech worker.
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Indians need a solution now, [Aman] Kapoor said. “Every day, you see someone in the backlog is dying. Or kids are aging out,” Kapoor said. “People are very stressed out because of the backlog.”
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Anand Vemuri, 46, an IT professional in New Jersey, is losing hope. His sons, now 16 and 13, came to the United States as toddlers. The family has been in the backlog for seven years, and he said he thinks he won’t get through by the time his older son ages out of eligibility.
She blames Congress for not handing out more green cards to the rising population of Indian workers, as if Americans’ laws must be redesigned to suit the Indian workers who choose to take Americans’ jobs in exchange for their employers’ promise of green cards. She also excuses the executives and investors for their deliberate policy of packing their job sites with Indians who choose to work for many years until they get their green-card payoff:
The wait is largely the result of an annual quota unchanged since 1990, and per-country limits enacted decades before the tech boom made India the top source of employment-based green card-seekers.
Hauslohner ignored her fellow Americans as she allows immigration lawyers to fret about the loss of jobs by foreign graduates — and the loss of fee-paying clients by immigration lawyers:
Because most of the backlogged Indians work in the tech industry, the shift would mean that high-skilled workers in other areas “like health care and medical research … will be shut out of residency for well over a decade,” [immigation lawyer Ira] Kurzban wrote. “Potential new Americans in basic science, engineering, chemistry, physics, artificial intelligence, climate change and many other fields who are not Indian nationals will be discouraged from ever coming to the U.S.”
Business groups are portrayed as the problem-solvers — even though they created the problem as they spiked their stock values by importing a cheap army of indentured workers who cannot quit until they eventually get green cards many years later:
Among those pushing for a quick resolution are business leaders, who worry that a congressional stalemate — doing nothing at all — could push Indian workers out of the United States and cause others to seek easier paths to citizenship in other countries.
She even makes a favorable reference to the high-immigration, low-wage policies urged by the Cato Institute’s advocates for investors:
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, declared [Sen. Dick] Durbin’s [RELIEF] bill “the best legal immigration reforms overall” and found that it would “virtually double” the total number of legal immigrants receiving permanent residence during the next decade while reducing wait times for everyone to less than a year.
Hauslohner dismisses any role in the debate for the entire economic class of American college graduates, despite her myriad college-graduate colleagues and their spouses, peers, friends, siblings, and children:
The backlog has led to competing bills in Congress and has pitted immigrants against immigrants, setting off accusations of racism and greed and exposing a deep cynicism about the prospects for any kind of immigration reform in a polarized nation.
Hauslohner also allows a business advocate to suggest — unchallenged — that Americans’ opposition to Lee’s cheap-labor bill is evidence of bigotry and racism:
The top priority should be removing the country quotas that are “fundamentally bigoted” — because they automatically “discriminate” against people with Indian citizenship, rather than judging them for their skill set — [lobbyist Scott Corley] said.
Sen. Mike Lee & Dick Durbin tout their new @S386 bill.
The visa-to-voter bill gives many migrants a new status – “Early Adjustment” – to help them bridge the wide gap b/w ‘visa-worker’ and ‘legal immigrant voter.’
Bad for citizens, great for investors. https://t.co/mWifCKq1eh— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) December 19, 2019
Unsurprisingly, the Washington Post writer and editors also pretended that Breitbart’s extensive and groundbreaking coverage of the issue since July 2018 remains unnoticed by anyone of consequence:
The crisis of employment-based green cards burst into the open in October [2019] after a narrow bill to address the issue nearly passed the Senate in a unanimous consent motion, after sailing easily through the House. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) stepped in and blocked it.
In fact, the Washington Post and other establishment outlets remained silent while Breitbart covered the news, such as the downward adventures of GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder, whose push for passage of the outsourcing bill contributed to his defeat in 2018.
Hauslohner, however, is cut from the same cloth as nearly all other reporters at establishment media sites.
Few American journalists follow the dollars through the immigration debate, few comfort the afflicted American workers, and few afflict comfortable investors. Instead, the vast majority of journalists relax with progressive activists and business executives as they observe the college-graduate version of cannery row play out below them.
But Americans’ stories deserve to be published.
One victim of the H-1B outsourcing trend was Donna B. She is now retired to a small town in Arizona and earns so little money that she is not required to pay off the $50,000 in student loans she still owes from her software education in 1989.
Divorced and with five children, “I was 36 years old when I started [in 1989],” she told Breitbart News. After her first job in Connecticut, she moved to Arizona by 1993, where she met her first Indian H-1B workers. “They did not mix with any of us and could not speak English,” she said.
In 2002, “I had my first layoff, and I could not find a job anywhere for four years,” she said. She applied for a job in Boston to repeat the same work she had done in Arizona, but “I could never get an interview, I was being stalled, and nothing happened.” She eventually landed a job at Caremark but was laid off in 2010 after the company merged with CVS. “The next year, they brought in Indians to do exactly what I had been doing,” she said.
“I never found a job after that … I applied for tons of jobs, tons … I never got a response except ‘Thank you for applying.’”
“Many of the job interviews were conducted [by phone] with Indians from the outsourcing companies, each of whom had a personal economic incentive to fill jobs with cheap Indian H-1Bs, not with Americans, she said. “I’ve gotten calls, and I’ve gotten emails from Indians [when applying for jobs]. … It just goes nowhere,” she said.
“Last year, I retired, so my retirement is peanuts,” said the former Connecticut resident. “I live in a tiny town called Arizona City, which doesn’t have mail service.”
Maybe covering Americans’ stories about immigration economics is a job only Breitbart journalists want to do.
NYT’s Tom Edsall says Trump’s immigration-reform voters are ‘snakes and vermin.’
Edsall usually tries to understand ordinary Americans’ concerns. But he & his elite peers live in a bubble & just don’t see immigration’s huge economic damage to Americans.https://t.co/jj6CNuos0r— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) December 16, 2019
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com
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