Big Tech’s S386 Cheap Labor Bill Dies in Congress

  |  
Dec 21, 2020

Immigration hawks scored a solid win on December 21, 2020.

Reports from immigration restriction watchdog U.S. Tech Workers indicated that HR1044/S386 ended up dying in Congress.

The group tweeted, “Proud to announce Big Tech’s cheap labor immigration bill, HR1044/S386 ‘Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act’, is DEAD!”

U.S. Tech Workers has positioned itself as one of the leading protectors of American workers and a firm voice against the abusive H-1B visa programs that Congress routinely tries to sneak through in order to appease pro-business donors.

HR1044/S386 originally passed the Senate via unanimous consent on December 2, 2020. After the law to eliminate per-country caps passed the Senate, its supporters hoped to pack it into the end-of-year spending megabill that includes the must-pass coronavirus stimulus; however, a final draft of the spending legislation emerged Monday without including a repeal of per-country visa caps.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, HR1044/S386 would “dramatically change our employment green card distribution system by eliminating a safeguard that prevents green card numbers from being monopolized by citizens of one or two countries.”

CIS continued explaining how this bill would affect migration policy:

Known as the “per country cap,” this provision ensures that the employment-based visas are available to a truly global pool of talent in a wide variety of occupational sectors.  It should not be scrapped; eliminating it would benefit one industry (Big Tech) and two groups of applicants (Indian tech workers and Chinese investors) and squeeze out all others.

It’s possible the law’s Republican patron, Utah Senator Mike Lee, will continue to press for the immigration giveaway to Big Tech in the New Year. However, it could be more difficult to advance immigration giveaways in a Republican Senate during a tentative Joe Biden presidency.

Such bills represent an interesting dynamic in the GOP: Talk a big game about illegal immigration, but blindly accept massive amounts of legal immigration.

The latter enables massive low-skilled to upper-middle class labor displacement, which is a slap in the face to the many Americans who indebted themselves after pursuing a college degree. This makes state government efforts to fund higher education useless given how all the money allocated to educate Americans ends up going to waste after they lose their jobs to migrant labor.

Not to mention, legal migration provides an easier pipeline to citizenship, which comes with all sorts of long-term political ramifications. The cheap labor, cheap votes, strategy the D.C uniparty has been embarking on will eventually come with a massive price tag, both financially and in terms of the loss of liberties.

The Republican Party needs to wake up.

Our Latest Articles