White House, Media Hide 'Largest Update to Our Immigration System in 30 Years'

Neil MunroNovember 5, 2021

Democrats and business allies are hiding two huge changes to legal immigration law under their media-magnified demands for the amnesty of illegal migrants.

But the rising GOP opposition is forcing the advocates to defend their power-grab as the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” spending bill faces a vote on Friday, November 5: “These provisions would be largest update to our immigration system in 30 years,” tweeted the Niskanen Center, which supports the expansion of legal immigration.

The rising GOP opposition includes an op-ed from Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN):

Buried in the “Build Back Better” legislation … are several jaw-dropping immigration provisions that would sell out American workers for the benefit of the largest and most influential corporate interests.

“It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the sheep is in a hula skirt so you focus on the skirt and not the wolf underneath,” said a Hill source who opposes the immigration expansions.

The bill offers fast-track green cards for just $5,000 to at least one million foreign temporary contract workers already in the United States. Those green cards would let them permanently work in the United States and also become U.S. voters in five years.

The green card giveaway would drain wealth and political power from the 800,000 Americans who graduate each year with technology-intensive degrees in healthcare, business, math, science, engineering, and science.

Those green cards also would not count against the nation’s roughly one million annual cap on legal immigrants.

Immigrants receive assistance with their U.S. citizenship applications at a Citizenship Now! event in New York City. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Once the existing workers get their green cards, they will be quickly augmented by the next wave of low-wage, mid-skill foreign graduates who are recruited by the Fortune 500’s dangled promises of more fast-track green cards.

This migration process would allow many CEOs to do what they prefer: Subordinate a generation of outspoken U.S. graduates under a vast supply of clever and subordinate foreigners who will rationally work as lower-wage, compliant, indentured employees to get their life-changing green cards.

The green-cards-for-cash law will establish structural discrimination against millions of Americans graduates, said Rob Law, at the Center for Immigration Studies. It will be “inherently impossible [for U.S. graduates] to compete [for jobs because] the foreign workers will always accept less pay because they also get the incredibly lucrative benefit of permanency in the United States,” he said.

This green-card-for-cash rule would also allow millions of other poor chain migrants to buy their way into Americans’ society, housing markets, jobs, and schools, at a price of just $2,500 per family. The bill exempts these chain migrants from the annual caps, despite the huge economic impact on Americans and legal immigrants.

This flood of poor migrants would deliver millions of wage-cutting workers to minimum-wage employers. It would also provide millions of government-aided consumers to real estate companies, retailers, groceries, and government agencies — and so drive up housing prices for nearly all Americans and their children.

Up to now, much of Washington D.C. has been trying to not mention the legislation that the Niskanen Center described as “the largest update to our immigration system in 30 years.”

The White House’s two-page “Statement of Administration Policy” hides the ball with a one-sentence reference: “The bill also includes important reforms to our legal immigration system, which will help reduce visa processing backlogs.”

House Democrats bury the giveaways in complex language on page 869 of the 2,135-page document, in a section titled “SEC. 60003. ADJUSTMENT OF STATUS.”

Democratic legislators and lobbyists are hiding the giveaway behind a television-magnified, brass band of ethnic advocates and elite-funded groups. These groups are keeping the media focused on illegal migrants by loudly urging an amnesty for millions of illegal migrants, via the much-publicized amnesty Plan A, the amnesty-by-registry Plan B, and amnesty-by-parole Plan C.

“They’re trying to keep everyone focused on whether or not they’re getting amnesty to illegal aliens,” said one Hill source. “In the meantime, they are rewriting our entire immigration system to create a permanent underclass of Americans that can’t compete for jobs and will have no upward mobility.”

Reporters hide the ball, often unwillingly. The New York Times only said the plan would “allow green card applicants to pay higher fees to expedite their processing. The Washington Post only said the bill would “eliminate certain penalties that would allow people who applied legally to the United States for citizenship to receive their naturalization faster.” A tweet from Roll Call just said, “the green card recapture/application fees provisions that have been in the previous two House texts remain in the bill.”

D.C. journalists are not following the money, the legislation, or the power plays, said a Hill source. “All the theater majors out there are so happy to write and retweet these stories that have nothing to do with what’s in the bill, but which show someone’s story of struggle that the Democrats are going to save,” the source said.

House Republicans are not looking for the green-cards-for-cash plan, but instead prefer to chatter about the rush of migrants at the border.

Migrants board a bus to be taken to a border patrol processing facility after crossing the Rio Grande into the U.S. on June 21, 2021 in La Joya, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

This eyes-shut policy exists even though the GOP-led heartland states will lose investment, jobs, wealth, respect, and political power because the many new migrants settle in the coastal states. Once settled in California or along the East Coast, they will absorb job-creating investment and taxpayer spending that would otherwise go to Americans in heartland states, such as Sen. Joe Manchin’s West Virginia.

“In the House, they never do anything but chase the latest squirrel,” scoffed a Hill source.

Yet the growing pushback from three outspoken GOP Senators — plus the shock of the GOP’s Virginia win — is helping to force the green-cards-for-cash giveaway into the open.

“Democrats have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize the existing U.S. immigration system,” said a November 2 letter to four Democratic Senators, ostensibly from a broad series of ethnic lobby groups, such as the Asian American Advocacy Fund or Sakhi for South Asian Women. The letter continued:

Presently, there are over 4 million [people] in the family-based backlog and over 1 million individuals currently stuck in the employment-based backlog … Provisions in the House reconciliation bill would provide an exemption from annual and per-country limitations upon the payment of a supplemental fee …

A close read shows that the letter is not signed by some of the major groups for migrants, such as United We Dream or Casa. Not is it signed many of the groups in the progressive-funded WeAreHome.us campaign.

Instead, the letter is signed by proxies for many billionaires — Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group of West Coast investors, Mike Bloomberg’s New American Economy, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Immigration Hub, and Silicon Valley‘s TechNet.

These Fortune 500 employers, investors, and real-estate companies will likely gain many billions in stock-market wealth if the bill becomes law. It provides them with a huge inflow of lower-wage, mid-skill, foreign college-graduate employees plus millions of taxpayer-aided, blue-collar chain-migration consumers.

The signers also include numerous groups that are funded or boosted by these billionaires. For example, Zuckerberg’s FWD.us investor-advocacy group helped create the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, and has funded the Niskanen Center.

The letter is also signed by groups that stand to make money via more migration, including the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the National Immigration Law Center, and the trade association for corporate hiring managers, the Society for Human Resource Management.

This lobbying push is being led by Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors who stand to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters. The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.

“This is it,” said a November 3 tweet from Todd Schulte, the president of Zuckerberg’s FWD.us investor group. “No excuses. Time for Democrats to get this done and pass it tomorrow.”

Hagerty and Banks offered a pointed rebuke to the investors’ power-grab:

At a time when we are actively encouraging students in our home states to work hard, seek STEM skills and aspire to the high-tech jobs of tomorrow, this legislation would create an unending, permanent pipeline of foreign labor for Silicon Valley giants to use in place of aspiring American youth. And American workers currently employed by these companies will be far less likely to see wage gains because they can be replaced at less cost with workers imported from overseas.

This increased leverage over employees is one of the reasons multi-billionaires of Big Tech love to utilize foreign labor. Just two weeks ago, Facebook settled a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice regarding its hiring discrimination against American workers in favor of workers from overseas.

Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents. Migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.