DHS Chief Mayorkas Strips Border Protections from U.S. Graduates

Conservative News DailyFebruary 19, 2022

President Joe Biden and his deputies at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have dropped nearly all border protections for U.S. graduates, allowing a mass rush of Indian graduates to grab jobs from Fortune 500 companies, experts and foreign workers say.

“They’ve opened up everything,” said Jay Palmer, a civil rights, human trafficking, and immigration rights activist, who works with many of the foreign visa workers who are exploited by their U.S. employers. He continued:

The administration has basically taken down all the checks and balances, and they opened the entire immigration platform for any [foreign gradaute] that wants to come in. White-Collar American graduates are going to be filing bankruptcy on their student loans.

The flood of foreign workers — mostly Indians — across the 50-state union line is growing the nation’s already-huge foreign workforce.

That little-recognized workforce consists of roughly 1.5 million non-immigrant foreign workers in U.S. white-collar jobs. The foreign workers are willing to accept low wages in the hope of getting U.S. citizenship. The workforce is helping to push down Americans’ salaries and bid up their house prices while inflation shrinks the value of U.S. graduates’ salaries.

One contract worker, named Aabha, told Breitbart News that some Indian visa workers are:

taking four [contract] jobs each because everybody can take four jobs and outsource them to [foreign] people. … So they do one job and the three other jobs, they outsource; they give it to somebody with a H-4 [work visa]. They give it to somebody with OPT [Optional Practical Training work permit].

They are going to an extent of giving some jobs to people [who are illegally working] on business visas, B1/B2s.

They are calling people from India for six months because in those six months, they can make enough money. Then this person goes back, and then somebody else comes on a visitor’s [B1/B2] visa. He stays for six months, he does the job [illegally], and he goes back. … Because, of course, we are getting paid like $7,000 per month, there is no harm in giving $2,000 to the [visiting] person who is actually doing the job, right?

DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas and pro-migration deputies are encouraging the inrush of illegal white-collar labor. In 2021, they welcomed approximately 1.5 million Latino migrants across the southern border, thereby helping to reinflate the post-2000 cheap-labor bubble.

Mayorkas and DHS have announced they are opening more pipelines for foreign workers to take white-collar jobs in the United States, rolling back security checks against fraud and also shutting down enforcement actions in the United States.

For example, DHS is expanding the already-huge “Optional Practical Training” work-permit program for foreign graduates of U.S. universities. It has also announced it will work with the Department of State to help employers hire more foreign college graduates via the massive J-1 visa program.

Mayorkas’s DHS has also stopped deporting foreign workers who overstay their work visas, and foreigners who use fraudulent documents to get the white-collar jobs U.S. graduates need. Mayorkas is also dropping penalties against roughly 1,000 Indian and Chinese white-collar workers who used a fake university in 2016 to fraudulently extend their “Optional Practical Training” work permits.

The rising pressure from foreign workers is also spotlighted by the rush of foreign workers who apply for work visas via the H-1B program.

The administration is making it very easy for employers to register entries for the 2022 lottery that will hand out 85,000 H-1B work visas. These visas are extremely valuable because they allow foreigners to work in the United States and an opportunity to apply for citizenship. But the federal government is charging just $10 for each lottery application.

“I’m guessing a half a million registrations [this year], just my guess,” Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia, said on February 15. He is suing the government to change the easy process in which employers can enter the lottery for just $10 per registration. The first lottery runs from March 1 to March 18.

“You don’t want to scare people, but I think you’re right,” Greg Siskind, another immigration lawyer in Memphis, Tennessee, responded.

“There’s a lot of companies out there that are going to scam the system,” Kuck said in return. “It’s going to be bad. It’s going to be really bad”:

IMMPACT Litigation Update for February 15, 2022 https://t.co/zc3KUTrwR6

— Charles Kuck (@ckuck) February 15, 2022

The 2021 lottery for H-1B contract workers included so many fraudulent filings that Mayorkas said that many awards was duplicative. Mayorkas choose to rerun the lottery to make sure companies could import the maximum number of H-1B workers to the white-collar jobs U.S. graduates need.

In 2021, Mayorkas and his aides scrapped reforms President Donald Trump put in that awarded the H-1B visas to the highest bidders.

Kuck’s 500,000 prediction understates the number of Indians and Chinese who will enter the lottery, Palmer said. “That number is ridiculously small when you have basically opened up everything.”

The inflow of foreign workers is also rising because Biden’s Department of State has restarted the approval process for B1/B2 six-month tourist visas. Trump had shut them down during the coronavirus crash:

The U.S. Embassy and Consulates across India will resume B1/B2 interview waiver (Dropbox) processing in January 2022. Availability varies by location. Schedule an appointment now at: https://t.co/SbQkOpZKmY

— U.S. Embassy India (@USAndIndia) December 8, 2021

Federal officials have reduced the security checks and interviews at the embassies where the travel documents are approved, Aabha said.

Before Biden, she said, if the embassy visa official “did not find it satisfactory that this person is actually going on a certain visa for a certain purpose, they would just be sure to reject the visa. … The interview would last at least 30 to 35 minutes, as opposed to now lasting only from 5 to 10 minutes.”

She continued:

The embassy has become so easy, the people can just walk over them, and they will just issue the visa. It’s no big deal now. Sham marriages are no big deal. Tourist visas? People don’t even have to prove anything. They just go [answer] two questions for the sake of it. I follow [social media] groups …. where these people post their experiences from interviews, and every second interview experience [reported] that “this officer only asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ The officer only asked me, ‘Are you going on this visa?’ The people only asked me if you’re going to stay for long. ‘Okay, done. Here’s your visa.”

The pre-Biden embassy checks were adopted after officials gradually grasped the massive scale of fraud in India’s work culture.

A 2009 U.S. government cable released via Wikileaks said that:

H-1B fraud is one of the top two visa categories for fraud throughout Mission India. All posts regularly encounter inflated or fabricated educational and employment qualifications. The vast majority of these documents come from Hyderabad. In the 18 months prior to the start-up of consular operations in Hyderabad, FPU Chennai investigated 150 companies in Hyderabad, 77 percent of which turned out to be fraudulent or highly suspect (ref F). Most of those cases slated for site visits were to verify the experience letters for H-1B applicants who did not meet minimum educational qualifications.

Widespread fraud in the R-1 religious visa dropped once officials set up a process to verify claims:

During the last two years, most R-1 fraud was detected amongst Tibetan refugees, Sikh raagis, and Hindu priests. Mission R-1 fraud includes both fraudulent beneficiaries and fictitious inviting parties. Since DHS began requiring petitions for R-1 applicants in November, R-1 fraud referrals have almost completely dried up. Since DHS requires 100 percent on-site verification of petitioners, however, many potential R-1 applicants now apply for B1/B2 visas in an attempt to avoid closer scrutiny.

The cable continued:

B1/B2 visa fraud is the most commonplace. Regionally-based fraud rings throughout the country, but especially in Hyderabad, continue to produce fraudulent documents for visa application and travel purposes. Some visa “consultants” and travel agents specialize in fraudulent experience letters and fake document packages, which include passport copies of false relatives, bogus financial documents, and affidavits of support.

Mayorkas’s deputies at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency are also rolling back barriers to white-collar migration, even though the Department of Justice and DHS have documented extensive fraud in the visa worker programs.

“We’ve updated our policies so that spouses of E and L visa holders no longer have to apply for an employment authorization document in order to work while spouses of certain H-1B visa holders have a 180-day auto-extension of their work permits,” USCIS director Ur Jaddou said on February 2.

“We took action by updating our guidance to better support the people and organizations who need to request expedited processing,” Amanda Baran Jaddou’s deputy said. “This new guidance should be particularly helpful to [foreign] healthcare workers whose work is so critical to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Jaddou’s USCIS is also rejecting fewer H-1B applications — just 4 percent in 2021 versus 24 percent in 2018.

Many companies that hire visa workers also violate domestic workplace and anti-discrimination laws, shifting workplace power from U.S. professionals to C-suite executives, sometimes with calamitous consequences.

Visa fraud by Chinese, Indians, and other nationalities is routine, rational, rarely publicized, and rarely punished — and is rarely acknowledged by U.S. legislators or media outlets.

The visa fraud is rational because U.S. visas allow Indians — especially Indians who are subordinated by India’s ancient caste system — to earn far higher wages in the United States. The visas also may allow them to get the biggest prize: U.S. green cards and citizenship for themselves and all of their descendants.

Most of the green card workforce serves in a largely invisible labor pyramid of favored subcontractors and sub-subcontractors under each of the major Fortune 500 companies.

These workers are shifted from one contract to another, are often moved around the country, and usually have to pay kickbacks to the managers who hire them for short-term contracts. The Indians accept the maltreatment because those conditions are normal in India because a bad job in America is much better than a decent job in India and because they want green cards and citizenship.

The Fortune 500 companies prefer the labor pyramids to the older process of hiring and training American professionals for corporate careers. They also ignore the accompanying risks to privacy and security, largely because the Indian workers dare not complain, and federal investigators dare not look.

Now, the 2022 influx is even reducing wages for the Indian workers, Aabha said.

One of her Indian-born but naturalized American friends “is working in Wells Fargo as a full-stack developer,” she told Breitbart. “They told him to reduce his hourly rate or they’ll hire somebody else, and the somebody else, is, of course, Indian.”

Biden’s massive inflow of visa workers also includes farmworkers, H-2B laborers for landscapers and seasonal resorts, as well as J-1 “Summer Work Travel” workers. The SWT workers were excluded by Trump’s travel bans in 2020 and 2021, allowing hundreds of thousands of American youths to get good jobs. But Cleveland.com reported on February 15:

Cedar Point, which made national headlines last year when it increased employee pay to $20 per hour, is planning to reduce starting wages to $15 an hour this year.

In a news release Tuesday morning, the park said it hoped to hire 6,500 seasonal associates in 2022, with a starting pay of $15 per hour. Among the positions available: ride operators, food and beverage, hotel operations, custodial, guest services and more.

…

One factor that may be influencing Cedar Point’s decision: The park will likely see the return of an increasing number of international workers, through the State Department’s Summer Work Travel initiative, part of the J-1 Visa program. The program, shut down during the first year of the pandemic and not fully operational in 2021, is expected to scale up this year. In a normal year, the park hires more than 1,000 workers from overseas.

The DHS and the State Department operate many visa programs. This DHS chart shows a sample of the DHS programs:

Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization (USCIS.gov)

The policy of extracting more foreign workers and consumers from poor countries is just part of the White House’s economic strategy.

The economic strategy was outlined on January 21 by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a speech to the “Virtual Davos Agenda,” which was organized by the globalist World Economic Forum. The “modern supply side approach” seeks to boost economic growth with additional workers, productivity gains, and tax reforms, she said:

Labor supply has been a concern in the United States even before the pandemic, in part due to an aging population and in part due to a labor force participation rate that has trended downward over the past 20 years. Now COVID and declining immigration have further reduced the workforce …

But for business leaders and investors, “it’s all about money,” Palmer told Breitbart News.

“Cheap labor makes billionaires, but average wages only make a comfortable living for millionaires, and they all want to be billionaires.”

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.

Extraction migration 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 strategy also kills many migrants, separates families, and damages the economies of the home countries.

An economy built on extraction migration also 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 media-ignored 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 one another.