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Founder's Corner

Dear All:

Earlier this week, pulling together a column for a Progressives for Immigration Reform newsletter, I was inspired to write on how strange it was that, for globalists, anytime is a good time to increase immigration. For instance, a year ago when unemployment was 3.3 percent, globalists were screaming for more foreign workers in all industries from semi-skilled to high skilled.

Well, this week they are doing it again! Only it is because unemployment levels are spiking. Yes, spiking! Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin fears we could see unemployment hit 20 percent in the midst of this pandemic. Yesterday, 629,899 unemployment claims were filed in just 15 states. Contrast that to last week when there were 281,000 claims filed in the entire country. Yet, we have organizations like the National Pork Producers Council calling on Congress not to close the border and interrupt the cheap labor pipeline of H-2A visas.

By the same token, globalists at the CATO Institute, a public policy research organization, wrote in USA Today this week that we can’t interrupt the flow of H-1B workers because they fill vital roles in our healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. “From 2010 to 2019, we found that the Department of Labor approved the companies developing treatments or vaccines for coronavirus to hire more than 11,000 immigrants and H-1B high skilled foreign workers,” according to CATO.

Hold on a minute, that is 11,000 H-1B workers in nine years. Doing the math that comes to 1,222 per year. But we bring in 85,000 H-1B visa holders a year! Moreover, we know that 74 percent of the H-1B applications completed each year are for skill levels 1 & 2 versus 3 & 4 which means the vast majority of these foreign workers possess ordinary skills and can hardly be considered high skilled. Moreover, which applications get approved is dependent on a lottery versus a thorough review of each candidate’s skills, qualifications and references.

My guess is the highly skilled immigrants working at places like Gilead, Moderna and the universities cited in the article didn’t come in on H-1Bs. Rather, they came on programs like the O visa for the exceptionally talented. The cited 11,000 H-1Bs more than likely displaced a competent U.S. citizen whom the company saw as too expensive, undeserving and expendable.

The coronavirus pandemic that has gripped this country and most of the world is horrendous. It has demonstrated in many areas we are unprepared and vulnerable. For instance, the lack of medical equipment as basic as N-95 face masks to the majority of our pharmaceuticals being manufactured overseas means we may not be able to meet the demands of this medical emergency. Of course this was predicted as far back as 1992. At that time, people like Ross Perot and Dr. Ravi Bahtra warned that offshoring of much our manufacturing base would one day place us in a dangerous situation.

Offshoring the country’s knowledge work is making our country equally vulnerable. What happens when all of our financial, insurance, healthcare and government data is managed in the cloud by foreign workers overseas and what is left here to manage in the U.S. is done by foreign workers? If you think we are vulnerable now, just wait.

The time has come for the citizens, the business community, the bureaucrats and elected officials to take a good hard look at the industries that we rely on. We need laws mandating that no vital data can be maintained offshore. Moreover, the hideous practice of displacing American knowledge workers with cheap foreigners here on employment visas must end.

I will leave you with a quote attributed to Valery Legasov in the Chernobyl miniseries:

“To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for the truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants, it doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?"


In Solidarity,

Kevin Lynn
Founder
U.S. Tech Workers

Attorney John Miano and Cary Snyder of Techs Unite joined Kevin Lynn of PFIR for a spirited discussion on the controversial IT Serve v USCIS ruling by a judge from the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia, and the inner workings of the H-1B visa program and body shops – the modern-day version of the cooly trade. ...More