A lobby group for Indian H-1B contract workers is trying to use the GOP’s planned 2025 reconciliation bill to get fast-track green cards for roughly 1.2 million Indian citizens living in the United States.
The lobbying effort is built on the hope that President Donald Trump’s West Coast business allies will defeat the rising skepticism of many voters and GOP legislators, many zig-zagging Democratic legislators, and President Donald Trump’s American-first mandate.
“There’s a blank slate at the moment,” immigration attorney Leon Fresco told many of the Indian migrants during a phone conference hosted by the Immigration Voice lobby group on Sunday night.
“We don’t know this could literally be the best of times, or this could literally be the worst of times,” said Fresco, who worked as an advisor for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as the “Gang of Eight” amnesty was being drafted in 2013.
“We believe that the time is now as the upcoming new administration takes over,” said Aman Kapoor, the president of Immigration Voice. “There is new energy, there is now a desire to make changes, and we want to be part of that change.”
There is a trickle of media reports about the emerging clash between West Coast investors and Trump’s pro-American populist deputies. But that coverage focuses on demands by a smaller number of Silicon Valley investors who want more imported elite software writers to accelerate their start-up companies toward buyouts on Wall Street.
Unfortunately for the Valley’s start-up investors, experienced American software experts want to be paid with equity shares from the Wall Street buyouts. Instead of that free-market bargain, many investors prefer to hoard their shares by hiring foreign experts who can be paid with government-provided green cards and citizenship.
The renewed Indian push for green cards emerges from a different source — the million-plus Indians who have been imported for routine jobs in technology, accounting, healthcare, recruitment, or management at Fortune 500 firms and their subcontractors.
Advocates in D.C. are hiding that elite vs routine distinction.
“If the US is to stay competitive, Elon must win this ideological fight [for migrants] over [Trump aide] Stephen Miller,” immigration lawyer Greg Siskind tweeted on December 13.
“In the same way that it took Nixon to go to China — because he was tough on China — President Trump may have an interesting opportunity” to get the GOP support for more white-collar migration, Vivek Chilukuri, a former Democratic staffer now at the Center for a New American Security think tank, told Politico on December 1.
Many Indian migrants are praying for intervention by Musk, who once had an H-1B visa as he migrated step-by-step from South Africa to the United States.
Musk, however, zig-zags between his economic goal of mass migration and his political goal of preserving Americans’ entrepreneurial and high-trust culture.
Critics, however, are confident that Congress will block the Indians’ demand for more green cards.
“If they attempt to do this once again in a reconciliation package, we’re going to beat them, and we’re going to beat them soundly,” Kevin Lynn, founder of the U.S. Techworkers advocacy group, told Breitbart News. His group opposes the white-collar migration that has shifted middle-class wealth to CEO and investors.
The Indian Workers
The Indians’ fight for more green cards is an uphill battle and is aided by few sincere allies.
The Indians have earned little sympathy in Congress because nearly all of them were imported by investors and their executives to take career-starting, mid-skill white-collar jobs that would otherwise have gone to young U.S. professionals.
The Indians are allowed to take desirable careers from Americans because many U.S. employers use the H-1B, L-1, J-1, TN, OPT, CPT, and H4EAD programs to hire low-wage foreign graduates, mostly for entry-level jobs. Indians get roughly 70 percent of these visas.
These programs are uncapped, do not require the jobs be offered to Americans, and do not require a skills test. Only the uncapped O-1 “genius visa” requires proof of prior accomplishment.
India’s government heavily promotes Indians for these multi-year visas. In 2023, roughly 69,000 low-skilled, mid-skilled, or high-skilled Indians got approved for H-1B visas, and another 210,000 got three-year extensions on their visas, according to Indian reports.
Those numbers suggest that at least 600,000 Indian H-1B workers now hold white-collar jobs needed by American graduates. More than 500,000 other Indians hold jobs via other visa programs.
Critically, some of these white-collar migration programs also allow executives to dangle the huge deferred bonus of green cards and citizenship for their visa workers and all of their descendants.
Since 1990, that dangled bonus has pulled millions of Indian graduates into a wide variety of white-collar jobs where they work long hours at low wages to win the approval of their executives who have the remarkable power to nominate them for U.S. citizenship — or to send them home in disgrace.
This inflow is cheered on by executives who can convert every $1 in payroll savings into $20 of additional stock value.
But the rush of Indian migrants has also created a multi-year traffic jam for green cards.
The federal government offers 140,000 green cards each year to the employees of U.S. companies. The law sets a “country cap” so the cards are shared out to many diverse countries. This diversity rule helps CEOs deliver fast-track green cards to their diverse experts from China and many other countries — but it also ensures that the Indians have created a huge backlog of Indian green card applicants.
More than 1.2 million Indian workers and family members are now waiting in line for green cards.
Indians get roughly a quarter of the annual employers’ green cards — but compete furiously against each other to grab the annual prize. For example, many Indians hire experts to help them arbitrage the complex and vague rules for different categories of green cards.
The inflow is pushed by India’s governments and by ethnic networks of U.S.-based Indian managers, subcontractors, and recruiters who rent Americans’ jobs to their in-network Indians.
The networks exist because corporate boards prefer to hire Indian managers to deal with the cheap, disposable, and subordinate foreign workers, many of whom are delivered via staffing subcontractors. Because of migration, U.S. executives “see their American workforce as being expensive, undeserving and expendable,” said Lynn.
The discriminatory networks are replicated in other countries where Indians work, and are accepted by the U.S. government’s post-1990s pro-migration economic policy.
When they are walking across the southern border or flying into a U.S. airport, desperate migrants do desperate things. Many airport migrants submit duplicate applications against the rules and lie about their training, credentials, and ability to speak English. Naturally, many lose out to scammers and customs officers as they try to migrate to the US, UK, Sweden, or Canada.
The corporate exploitation of Indian visa workers, Indian recruiters, and Indian middle managers, however, degrades companies’ product quality, long-term investments, and innovation — and the nation’s prosperity. For example, no visa workers from India can act as professionals because they know their hiring managers can profitably replace them with another kickback-paying migrant.
“It’s like a return to the days of the early days of the Industrial Revolution,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. Until the New Deal, “you had business owners so far removed from their workers that they saw them as just a factor of production,” she told Breitbart News.
The investor-backed inflow of Indian visa workers since 1990 has exiled so many American college graduates that many Fortune 500 companies are dominated by Indian technology managers and CEOs.
The inflow also creates myriad security concerns as unidentifiable foreign workers from China, India, and many other countries are hired to develop, maintain, and operate the nation’s electronic infrastructure.
Politicians’ growing recognition of the damage helped to defeat the pro-outsourcing EAGLE Act in December 2022. The bill was backed by West Coast investors but Democratic leaders pulled it off the floor after a growing number of Democrats opposed the bill.
The GOP also united in opposition. The bill contains “an end-run around the annual green card limit,” Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) told the Committee on Rules, which sets the rules for each floor debate in the House.
To evade the growing opposition, the Indian lobby group has come up with a new claim: The swifter award of green cards to Indian migrants will help American professionals.
“If people don’t have green cards and if they live in the perpetual state of H-1B, or L-1 or any other visa status, that doesn’t work good for immigrants, that doesn’t work good for Americans,” said Kapoor.
“What we have tried to do is create this awareness [of the need] to create a level playing field in a manner such that the system that we advocate for works for workers across the board,” he said.
Faster green cards for Indians, Fresco claimed, will ensure “that everybody is treated equally so that there isn’t an incentive to hire foreign workers … because you don’t have [a visa worker] who’s backlogged for 100 years that you can mistreat.”
“That’s so ridiculous,” responded Lynn. “Their presence in this country’s labor market disadvantages Americans, and the quicker we can resolve that problem by sending them home or ending the programs, the better.”
Establishment media outlets ignore the pocketbook impact of white-collar migrants on American graduates. But the media is quietly admitting that U.S. graduates are losing ground. The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2024:
Tech giants that were expanding aggressively just a few years ago now have less need for entry-level hires—or are shedding jobs. They are also, increasingly, turning their focus to artificial intelligence, a technology many fear could reduce the need for coders. Postings on jobs website Indeed for software-development roles, a proxy for computer science, have dropped 30% from prepandemic levels.
At the same time, companies have a burgeoning supply of new grads to choose from. The number of students in the U.S. majoring in computer and information science has jumped 40% in five years, to more than 600,000 as of 2023. The number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in those majors topped 100,000 in 2021, according to the Department of Education, a 140% rise from 10 years earlier.
“If you get a job, even if you don’t like it, you need to take it because you don’t know if you’re going to get anything else,” Alex Giang, a computer science major at Cornell told the reporter.
The Lobbying Plan
Fresco laid out the plan to have the Indians lobby American politicians in Congress and in their districts:
There’s going to be a reconciliation process, which is a special way to do legislation that’s going to be beginning in the first few months coming up in the Congress, and that’s going to talk about immigration now. M ostly it will focus on the border issues. But there is no reason that bill couldn’t include this kind of fix to change the future of the [Indian visa workers] who would otherwise never be able to get a green card for the rest of their lives.
He said:
There [is] going to be a package moving forward that only requires 50 votes in the Senate and only requires a majority in the House. We could be part of that package, and … our little part of this package, can do a lot of things.
Fresco urged the foreign migrants listening to the phone call to lobby American politicians for green cards:
What is it going to require? It’s going to require educating every member of Congress what your problem is. They don’t even know that your problem exists.
[You need to explain] What it is that you do in their district, how do you make the lives of the people in their districts better, why you make the lives of the people in their state better … We need as many women [Indian] members as possible, because we want to show this isn’t just a group for men.
Fresco also urged the Indians — including many corporate managers — to get Americans to lobby for the Indians:
We really need … is also if you can mobilize American workers in … your community, in your field, in your workforce, to say, “Hey, you know that I have this problem [and] if only you got involved, it would actually help,” because people would see it’s not just the [Indian] people asking — who are the foreign nationals — but actually US citizens are asking.
“The only thing that we’re asking for is to treat [foreigners and Americans] equally,” Fresco said. “Everybody now needs to put their money where their mouth is and vote for non-discrimination.”
Kapoor claimed the group has arranged many lobbying meetings:
We’ve done thousands of meetings on in both the House and the Senate, to the staff. Oftentimes even our [supporters] on the Hill, they refer to us and they use us as a bouncing board for [proposals] on this subject … We are delighted to provide unbiased, impartial feedback.
The Indians’ bill is backed by Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga), Fresco said.
One of the group’s more effective tactics is face-to-face lobbying by a group of Indian doctors. Those groups target U.S. doctors to appeal for collegial support.
The plan is backed by Indian-born legislators in Congress, said Fresco, who named Rep. Pramilla Jayapal (D-WA), and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL).
But the green card plan is politically risky for Republicans and Democrats, in large part, because Americans are growing more hostile to labor migration that sucks wealth from their families and friends.
“The parents of kids who have graduated from prestigious universities with computer science degrees but are not getting job offers, are still at home — they know the reason,” said Lynn.
In 2018. Rep Kevin Yoder (R-KS) lost his seat after championing the green card giveaway.
In 2014, Democrats lost five Senate seats after they passed — and Republicans opposed — the “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap labor bill.
In 2016, Democrats lost the presidency to a NY real-estate developer, largely because of Donald Trump’s loud opposition to their amnesty bill.
In 2020, Utah’s governor and other leaders used Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to pass the S.386 bill that would have let Indians take a far larger share of the annual green cards.
In 2024, Democrats lost the White House and four Senate seats — allegedly to a felon — after the GOP opposed Demorats’ policy of accelerated migration.
In 2024, Trump won just 38 percent of women with college degrees — but also won 48 percent of the college-graduate men.
Read the full article here
