[UPDATE: HOUSE BILL PASSES] – Trump’s DHS comes out AGAINST House and Senate immigration bills, but they still might PASS with plenty of Republican support

by The Right Scoop

UPDATE: House bill just passed with 365 votes. That’s a ton of Republican support…

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The House is hoping to pass a bill called “Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019”, which is said to be a giveaway of American jobs. The Senate has a nearly identical bill it is working on.

Neil Munro writes…

The bill would create a fast-track to green cards for 300,000 Indian contract-workers who have backlogged the green-card waiting lines. The bill would also aid their 300,000 family members in the United States.

The promise of extra green cards — and subsequent citizenship — for Indians will also encourage many other Indian graduates to take jobs from American graduates via the uncapped low-wage H-1B visa and the uncapped Optional Practical training program.

The Democrats’ giveaway bill is being opposed by NumbersUSA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, American for Legal Immigration PAC, Progressives for Immigration reform and a new wave of groups created by Americans who say their incomes have been slashed by companies’ use of the green card system to attract and pay cheap white-collar labor from India.

And now DHS has come out against the House bill as well as the Senate bill which it says is nearly identical, saying it does nothing to promote merit-based immigration:


So if these Republican groups are against it and the Trump administration is against it, you might be wondering why this matters?

Because according to Congress.gov, over 100 Republican House members are sponsoring this bill. And according to Munro…

The bill is expected to get a fast-track vote on the House floor on Wednesday. The fast-track process, however, requires 290 votes for passage of a bill, so the bill will fail unless it is also backed by roughly 60 GOP legislators.

With over 100 Republican co-sponsors, the bill is sure to pass the House. And I’m guessing if it can pass the House, it may be able to pass the Senate.

Mike Lee is the sponsor of the nearly identical bill in the Senate and it currently has 19 Republicans and 15 Democratic co-sponsors.

Here’s what FAIR says about the bill:

Employment-based immigrant visas are limited and currently subject to per-country caps. There is presently an enormous backlog for Indian and Chinese employment-based visas. In FY 2018, the State Department found that Chinese and Indian applicants accounted for 68 percent of the employment-based visa waiting list.

Because of the sheer number of total immigrant visa applicants (including chain migration visas) from both countries, nationals from both countries must wait many years before receiving an employment visa because of the 7 percent per-country cap. Indians applying for an EB-3 visa could face waiting periods of 20 years.

Under H.R. 1044, Indians and Chinese nationals applying for employment visas would not face caps. Before, nationals from other countries could receive employment visas because no country could fill more than 7 percent of any employment visa category. H.R. 1044 would erase that boundary, thereby allowing the hundreds of thousands of applicants from India and China to dominate the employment categories, shouldering out applicants from other countries.

This bill would profoundly change legal immigration to the United States for generations to come; and few, if any, individuals from countries other than India or China would be able to immigrate to the United States on an employment-based visa. Our immigration system is not designed to benefit only one or two countries.

Lastly, and perhaps most alarming, this bill rewards tech and foreign outsourcing companies that replaced American workers with hundreds of thousands of low cost, less skilled H-1B guest workers. That is a slap in the face to victims of flawed guest worker programs like H-1B — American mothers, fathers, and breadwinners who lost their livelihoods to cheaper foreign replacements and outsourcing.


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