Kevin McCarthy Slams College-Career Giveaway in Democrats’ China Bill

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 24: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) talks to reporters
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Neil Munro

The Republican leader in the House is slamming the Democrats’ decision to open up millions of U.S. white-collar jobs to Chinese, Indian, and other college-graduate migrants.

“House Democrats’ CONCEDES Act provides a new unlimited green card program for the Chinese Communist Party to exploit,” Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted February 1.

“This is America LAST,” he added.

Democrats are trying to rush the bill through the House on Wednesday. But the green-card giveaway likely faces opposition from some GOP Senators who have already approved a bill with massive spending on research centers.

Breitbart News reported February 1 on the Democrats’ willingness to allow myriad Chinese, Indian, and other foreign graduates to get green cards — and then U.S. careers and citizenship — by paying tuition at U.S. and foreign universities:

The draft “America COMPETES Act of 2022” would allow foreigners to win an uncapped number of green cards by studying to become ordinary chemists, doctors, engineers, and statisticians — or accountants, tax experts, computer security experts, statisticians, ecologists, and many other types of professionals.

“It’s insanity — the idea that you would create a bill that supposedly improves America’s competitiveness [against China] by outsourcing all of the [skilled] labor is just nuts,” said Rosemary Jenks, government relations director for NumbersUSA. “It’s dystopian.”

The bill emerged from the House shortly after the Senate blocked the Build Back Better bill, which tried to create new pipelines for foreign graduates to get U.S white-collar jobs.

Roughly 1.5 million non-immigrant foreign graduates — most of whom are mid-skill graduates from lower-tier foreign universities — have been hired by U.S. executives for a wide variety of white-collar jobs. Before 2000, those jobs allowed many American graduates to begin building their professional careers.

Breitbart News reported on January 27 how the giveaway would shove many regular American graduates out of mainstream careers in universities and the Fortune 500:

The Democrats’ bill also allows some foreign universities to put their graduates on a fast track to U.S. citizenship and U.S. science careers. Forty-nine of the world’s top 100 universities are located outside the United States, including three universities in China, according to one rating system.

…

The U.S. already has an O-1 “genius visa” for accomplished foreign professionals, [Kevin] Lynn [at US Tech Workers] said. But the large new programs in the House bill would gradually import an “overclass” of credentialled foreign scientists and managers, Lynn added:

“We would be importing a class of people that will ultimately be the managerial class who will oversee Americans, because that’s what higher education does in America, that’s what skills do in America. This is dangerous … it will actually make America less competitive because it’s hollowing out the citizens who are part of the social fabric of this country.”

Roughly half of the skilled workers in U.S. laboratories are foreign “postdocs,” often on OPT or J-1 work permits. They are favored over many Americans because laboratory directors can work them harder than U.S. citizens and pay them with hopes of government-provided green cards. The huge number of foreign postdocs ensures that are many young Americans are denied places in university research.

The legislation would also accelerate the diversion of investment, jobs, and wealth away from businesses and workers in the GOP states and districts. This diversion happens because the federal delivery of migrant workers allows coastal investors to open workplaces that are conveniently close to their homes, such as California and New York.

McCarthy’s emphasis on the green cards is significant — despite its narrow focus on China’s communist party — because GOP leaders have long been afraid to challenge their business donors’ relentless demands for additional cheap and compliant foreign workers.

For example, other GOP legislators are avoiding the threat to ordinary American graduates in their tweeted criticism of the Democrats’ China bill:

Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.

That extraction-migration strategy has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary white-collar and blue-collar Americans. It cuts their career opportunities and wages while raising their housing costs.

The strategy also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ urban and coastal districts and the Republicans’ heartland states.

The economic policy radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, widespread, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

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