Kevin McCarthy: Democrats’ Visa Giveaway, China Bill ‘Helps China … Hurts America’

The Democrats’ bill to help the U.S. compete against China’s fast-growing manufacturing and technology sectors actually allows China to compete against America, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday.

McCarthy used his floor speech during the debate to spotlight visa provisions in the bill that would encourage U.S. companies and universities to hire and train Chinese graduates instead of American graduates:

They call it the American Competes Act. But make no mistake. It’s a bill that concedes to China. The American Concedes Act is Democrats desperate answer to their string of self-created crisis. While it contains some provisions supported by Republicans. Speaker Pelosi is holding these good ideas hostage by using this 3,000 page bill as a vehicle for the party’s far left agenda.  Almost every page of Democrats concede Act has a provision that helps China but hurts America.

Now here are just a few excerpts. On page 1,689, it provides a new unlimited green card program for the Chinese Communist Party to exploit.

The green card language was touted by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Ca), whose district includes part of Silicon Vallery.

Advocates say it allows the “best and brightest” foreign graduates to get green cards, jobs, and then citizenship if they work to get a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) PhD. in American or foreign universities. But the fine print of the bill shows it would give green cards to a wide variety of ordinary foreign graduates, including chemists, doctors, engineers, statisticians, accountants, tax experts, software developers, and computer security experts.

Lofgren said:

We must build our domestic STEM workforce and encourage startup companies to establish roots here. While increasing STEM scholarships for U.S. students, the act simultaneously draws the world’s best and brightest STEM doctoral recipients and company founders to the U.S. It ensures that individuals who earn STEM doctoral degrees from top research universities will be eligible for permanent residence. Unlike Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, our laws don’t provide a visa option for company founders to start a new venture and create jobs in the United States. This Act would fix this.

I want to thank Priscilla Kim [Harvard, 2015] on my staff for the hard work she put into this.

The bill’s language sets no limits on the number of foreign migrants who can get green cards and then U.S. jobs and careers, nor does it set any minimum standards for the skills of those migrants.

Roughly 1.5 million non-immigrant, foreign contract workers — such as H-1B workers — have been imported and hired by CEOs to fill white-collar careers that would otherwise be held by U.S. graduates. The mass inflow of cheap and compliant foreign workers distorts the nation’s professional sector by empowering CEOs, suppressing U.S. salaries, undermining professionalism, slowing innovation, and diverting investment towards the coasts, such as Silicon Valley and New York.

The China bill is strongly backed by business groups, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group for West Coast investors: “According to FWD.us estimates, 100,000 international student graduates of U.S. colleges and universities each year would like to stay and work permanently in the U.S.,” the group said in a new report.

That 100,000 number is roughly one-eighth of all Americans who graduate each year from four-year colleges with degrees in healthcare, business, science, biology, software, math, or engineering.

Zuckerberg’s investor allies at FWD.us are leading the 2022 push for more migration and amnesty. The investor group is not just looking for extra workers — it wants more migrants because they also serve as consumers and renters.

The  American Action Forum, which is tied to investors and GOP donors, also endorsed the China bill’s green card giveaway: “These are desirable changes. Greater immigration raises the growth rate of the employed population, leading to more [-economic] output and income.”

Most of the Democrats who spoke during the Wednesday floor debate downplayed the distinction between the Americans and the imported workers in the nation’s workforce.

“It is an investment in our people,” said Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich). “I will always bet on the American workforce. My job in Congress is to connect people to the tools that unlock our future. And those tools are in this bill.

“China now surpasses the United States in the global share of research papers and consistently files more [artificial intelligence] patents than any other country,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Ca). “We need to invest in talent,” she added, without citing Americans.

“Our future prosperity depends on what we do now to nurture STEM talent in our country,” said Rep. Deborah Ross D-NC), who also filed an amendment that would allow the children of Indian contract workers to get green cards.

“We need to be making goods in America with American workers,” said Majority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), before adding that the bill:

…maximizes the American talent pool fruit by strengthening and diversifying our nation’s STEM workforce. This is very important because we want many more people, women, people of color, other previously underrepresented communities, to be part of this.”

The bill “also invests in a STEM workforce for the future to ensure we have the talents to bring all these semiconductor climate manufacturing jobs back home where they belong,” said Rep. Sean Kasten (D-Il). He continued:

If I could share a personal story. About 13 years ago, I was building a tree house in my backyard. And as I was starting, the six-year-old neighborhood kid shows up behind me with a cute little hardhat and a tool belt and said “I’m here to help.” And my 2009 summer intern, as it were, is now a sophomore at the University of Illinois studying nuclear engineering.

The visa provisions in the bill allow an unlimited inflow of Chinese, Indian and other foreigners into U.S. nuclear engineering careers.

A few GOP legislators spoke against or filed amendments to block, the visa giveaways.

“We’ve got this new W visa [program] that is language in the bill, said Michael Burgess, R-Texas. “No language about protecting American jobs, but we’re going to give jobs to other people.”

His amendment says: “Strikes Sections 80301 and 80302 that create a new classification of ‘W’ visas for start-ups.”

“Amazingly, the Democrats blocked consideration of all my common sense amendments which would have prevented known Chinese spies from entering our nation,” said Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Il). “Stop [Chinese Communist Party] officials from taking advantage of our higher education system!”

Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Tx) filed an amendment that “Prohibits a new visa class from being created to maintain the numerical limitations on immigrant visas.”

GOP Rep. Troy Balderson (R-)h) filed an amendment that “stipulates that doctoral STEM graduates from institutions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, or any designated State Sponsor of Terror are not eligible for cap-exempt STEM doctoral visas.”

But Democrats filed amendments to further expand labor migration into U.S. graduates middle-class jobs.

Democrats Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC), Scott Peters (D-CA), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), and Ross added an amendment to expose American graduates to unending competion from the world’s graduates: “Adds graduates with advanced degrees in STEM who work in a critical industry to the exemption from numerical visa limitations for doctoral STEM graduates.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va) opened a door for Korean graduates: “Creates an E-4 treaty trader visa category for up to 15,000 nationals of South Korea each fiscal year who are coming to the United States solely to perform specialty occupation services, subject to various requirements.”

Reps Ayana Pressley (D-Mass) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) posted an amendment to expand white-collar migration, which “allows dual intent for STEM doctoral students, allowing them to transition to a green card as provided under this bill without first needing to leave the country.”

Eleven legislators filed an amendment to further expand the inflow of H-2B seasonal laborers for the landscaping, restaurant, and resort businesses in their districts.

McCarthy was unsparing in his extensive criticism of the Democrats’ bill, which excluded GOP negotiators but added many unrelated provisions backed by Democrats. He said:

These policies would make our nation more vulnerable to Chinese espionage … there’s nothing in there that actually makes us stronger against China, only weaker. The actions of the [Democratic] majority tell you all you need to know about who they truly want to help: Themselves, their corporate allies [and] tee Chinese Communist Party.

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 economic strategy has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs.

The strategy also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states 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 do 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, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.