Legislators and investor-backed advocates met in Congress last week to promote the self-serving claim more white collar migrants – such as foreign doctors – will cut the federal government’s ballooning deficit and debt.
The political deal between investors and politicians was openly negotiated during a March 18 hearing at the Joint Economic Committee, and it excluded any skeptics of mass migration who would mention migration’s growing damage to white-collar professionals.
Schweikert (R-AZ) acknowledged the political risk of his draft deficit deal with investors who want to import more salary-slicing foreign doctors, accountants, engineers, software experts, and other professionals. He asked the business advocates to sketch a PR pitch for his increasingly skeptical Arizona voters:
This is more for the communal discussion … give me what [option] maximizes benefit to [the] U.S. budget and then what adjustments do I make to maximize wage growth? I mean, where is my sweet spot … [because] I also need [to show] wage growth.
Often the [public] discussion — the fear of immigration, particularily talent-based immigration, is [about] wage suppression. But we know talent-based [immigration] – if properly done – actually does just the opposite: It actually raises productivity in general [and] wage growth. Where’s my sweet spot according to your models?
The witness, Daniel Di Martino from the Manhattan Institute, offered an evasive pitch for his Arizona voters: “[Imported] physicians don’t compete [for wages] with construction workers.”
But then he added the increasingly obvious: “they will compete with physicians in America — that’s absolutely true.”
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That government-created migrant competition has suppressed salaries and undermined professional clout for millions of American professionals during the last few decades.
Schweikert said he asked the “Sweet spot” question because white-collar migration into Americans’ jobs is needed for economic growth:
I care a lot about this subject. We’ve spent years and years and years in my office and also with our joint economic team, trying to build what we call the Unified Theory of trying to stabilize U.S. debt and economic growth and opportunity. And as we build that Unified Theory, the fact of the matter is … I can’t make the other numbers work without fixing this [immigration] module of it. It turns out, it’s the cornerstone of making all the other adoptions of technology, new processes, deregulation, work
Schweikert’s search for a “Sweet Spot” shows that he’s concerned about the growing voter opposition to white-collar migration, noted Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
What he’s asking for is political cover, a way to tell constituents worried about the impact of immigration that this isn’t just a big business subsidy, which is what it is … It is evdience of progress that politicians at least have to pretend to say that these anti-worker policies are benenficial.
“Hypocrisy is the price that vice pays to virtue,” Krikorian told Breitbart News.
U.S. professionals must get politically active to save their careers and prosperity, Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers, told Breitbart News, adding:
Trump isn’t going to save them … The only path forward is to fight back, and the only way they can fight back is to realize that they have an interest in getting rid of these employment visas …They should be calling their legislators, speaking with the legislative aides, regularly checking in with them.
White Collar Migration
Since 1990, the federal government has allowed employers to import millions of foreign graduates via many pathways, for supposedly temporary jobs. These visa workers use the H-1B, J-1, L-1, O-1, TN, H4, EB-2 NIW, B-1/B-2, OPT, CPT pathways. Roughly 70,000 white-collar workers win green cards each year, often after a decade of workplace abuse.
That huge inflow has boosted profits and Wall Street values, but it has slashed white-collar Americans’ salaries, workplace rights, education opportunities, hiring chances, career promotions, and family formation. The inflow has also damaged workplace competency, workday productivity, social inequality, business innovation, marketplace pressure for more trade exports, regulatory compliance, and national security.
The inflow has also supercharged the ability of Indian-born Fortune 500 managers and US-born CEOs to legally transfer huge numbers of U.S. professional jobs to India’s subordinated and cheaper workforce.
The programs have been defended by closed-door lobbying, even as they also invited and spread massive levels of C-Suite corruption through the Fortune 500. Much of that corruption exists because executives offer to pay their working migrants with free social goods — residency and citizenship — that are created by the ordinary Americans who need to be paid in cash. Much of the payroll savings is cycled through the stock market to provide U.S executives with bonuses.
Schweikert chaired the meeting of the committee, which included both Senators and Representatives. But the meeting excluded any experts who would have spoken up for the pocketbook interst of working Americans or for recognition that the United States is a coherent nation run by its citizens, not a workplace overseen by investors.
The other politicians who attended the hearing also embraced the claim that more imported white-collar workers would reduce the economic deficits that they vote for each year.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked the invited advocates:
Could you discuss how high-skilled immigrants have boosted innovation and job growth here in the United States for all Americans, and ways that this administration’s actions have threatened our ability to attract and retain highly skilled researchers?
“We’ve got to construct it in a way that people really see the value of it,” said Rep. Don Breyer (D-VA), an auto dealer who represents a Virginia district just south of Washington D.C.:
It’s been so disappointing to put up with the nativist, xenophobic stuff that we’ve gotten [from the Trump administration] … I’m very disappointed with the leadership that Stephen Miller has taken us down the last year …I look at the cumulative economic effects of the visa processing delays, the $100,000 H-1B fee, the blanket country bans, etc. All this is moving in the wrong direction …I was talking recently to the graduate admissions director at George Mason University, our local [university, about] computer science, and he said that they’ve had an 80 percent drop in the last year of overseas applicants for their graduate program in computer science, which I think is a great, great loss for our country.
“Business owners in my district consistently tell me they have trouble finding people to fill the spaces that they have available,” said Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa), adding:
I was a contractor for a long time, and that was always like the number one issue affecting whether we could grow or not … One thing I think about a lot here is obviously the fiscal trajectory on the debt. And one of the ways that we can begin to change the trajectory … having additional workers, maybe through immigration.
However, the pro-migration witnesses spotlighted several problems with any Schweikert strategy that seeks to grow the U.S. economy by extracting white-collar migrants from other countries.
The government’s budget deficit is driven by retirement and healthcare, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the influential director of the American Action Forum. The forum has close ties to the major business funders for the GOP.
There’s often this discussion which has the flavor of “Immigration is the problem with the entitlement programs” or “Immigration will be the solution of the entitlement programs.” [But] the entitlement funding problem we have came from a native-born fertility boom [in the 1950s]. It has nothing to do with immigration or native-born births. It’s the structure of the programs. We need to fix the programs and make them survivable over the long term. There’s no way around that.
Still, Holtz-Eakin wants more white-collar and more blue-collar migrants:
Let’s make sure we take care of native-born Americans and give them the skills to go into the labor market … That’s a very substantial part of the story. … Remember, we’re probably also going to want to allow some lower-skilled workers into the country as well. So my approach has always been too –don’t work. too much about the high-skilled [immigrant inflow] because both of these schemes are going to work.
Schweikert also admitted that the economy is growing because of technology-driven productivity gains, even after Trump blocked all illegal migration. “Maybe we actually do have more capacity than we’ve thought about in the past,” he said.
Schweikert, the legislators, and the advocates argued about how the federal government could actually identify promising migrants who would generate more tax wealth for the government. The task is difficult because the most productive migrants are difficult to characterize amid huge incentives for abuse, corruption, and arbitrage. “In Bangalore, we had fake resumes, fake degrees,” Schweikert admitted.
“About half of immigrants or more actually are net drains,” on the budget, because they use more welfare than they pay in taxes, Di Martino said. He argued for a politically risky shift in migration policy that would allow companies to choose roughly 700,000 migrants a year, which is a fivefold increase on the current inflow of roughly 140,000 employer-nominated migrants.
Expanding the annual number of citizen-enabling green cards “would be the easiest way to” import more promising workers, said Jeremy Neufeld, the director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress.
However, GOP legislators are united in their opposition to legalized migrants who might push them out of their own jobs in a future election.
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