Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.): Importing Foreign Workers Should Not Hurt American Wages

In a recent interview with Punchbowl News, Indiana Senator Todd Young stated that the Federal government should steer clear of immigration policies that threaten Americans’ jobs and wages. If Congress seeks to import workers, “we need to do it smartly, in order to once again ensure that those new workers aren’t competing with our existing workers for jobs, competing for wages and salaries,” said the Senator.

The Senator’s January 25th comments came after the disappointing news of House Democrats’ surprise addition of sweeping immigration measures to the COMPETES Act; a bill originally intended to help U.S. businesses compete with communist China’s state-run industries.

Senator Young was integral to passing the Senate’s version of the bill, which would help boost American companies’ competition against China’s communist labor machine. His bill, the “United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021,” surpassed the 60 vote threshold of the Senate in July of 2021, denoting bipartisan support.

However, on February 4th, the House passed a dramatically different bill which they say will meet the same competitive ends as the Senate bill. Despite those promises, the House bill seems to be another funding wishlist of Democrat causes. With over 600 amendments proposed, the House’s COMPETES Act appears to be more of a concession to the ChiCom regime – including more funding for the United Nations, and more egregiously – a massive increase in uncontrolled mass immigration into the United States.

This massive green card giveaway would undoubtedly reduce wages and the availability of jobs for Americans, including those in Senator Young’s home state of Indiana – and those across the entire nation.

The House’s COMPETES Act, in short, would allow U.S. businesses to import an endless stream of foreign workers to replace American graduates and professionals in middle America. Additionally, the bill also provides coastal investors with an increased flow of foreign workers to fill more job sites closer to the affluent coastal regions of the country.

House GOP leader Representative Kevin McCarthy stated on the COMPETES Act:

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 crises. 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 the Democrats’ Concede Act has a provision that helps China but hurts America.

Representative Jim Banks, also from Senator Young’s state of Indiana, added the that House bill:

Creates a new visa cap carveout program that would be even less secure than the existing visa programs that are already riddled with fraud. Shockingly, an unlimited number of members of the Chinese Communist Party are eligible to take advantage of the new visa program to carry out their malign activity here in the States (page 1689)

The COMPETES Act was not just disparaged by Representatives who care for their constituents’ wages and job security but also received harsh words from Senators with the same issue in mind. Joining the condemnation issued by Senator Young, Senator John Cornyn of Texas stated:

The partisan bill from the House has also added provisions related to immigration, from creating new types of visas to removing green card caps. The Senate bill needs to be the template for what is ultimately done by the conference committee and what is ultimately passed by the United States Congress.

After the passage of the disastrous COMPETES Act by the House, Senator Young, an original cosponsor of the Senate version, stated:

As we head to a conference process, my hope is that the final legislation will reflect the Senate bill and give House Republicans a much better option to support. The Senate-passed bill focuses on directly confronting China and getting legislation like USICA across the finish line will ensure the United States leads the world into the future.

The Senate version of the bill received 18 Republican votes; however, “Many Republicans voted against the measure because it does not protect against aggressive Chinese spying and technology theft, say Senate critics, including Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL),” reports Breitbart News.

House advocates of the green card giveaway, like Rep. Zoe Lofgren, whose district includes parts of Silicon Valley (where investors, and political donors, actively use imported foreign workers to suppress wages and “minimize geographically-inconvenient investments” in middle American states – like Indiana), used the rather bromidic argument that the bill would allow the “best and brightest” foreign graduates access to green cards if they completed STEM degrees.

However, one would have to investigate no further than the bill’s actual text to realize that the COMPETES Act would grant green cards to a slew of ordinary foreign graduates. More egregiously, the bill’s language sets no limits on the number of foreign workers who can receive green cards, nor does it set any minimum standards for the skills those unlimited foreign workers must have.

The COMPETES Act was unsurprisingly backed by major investors and corporations throughout the west coast, like Mark Zukerberg’s FWD.us. According to Zuckerberg’s advocacy group for west coast corporations and investors: “100,000 international student graduates of U.S. colleges and universities each year would like to stay and work permanently in the U.S.” That number represents about one-eighth of all Americans who graduate each year with four-year college degrees in the STEM fields, who would otherwise be able to join the labor force and hold those positions.

Breitbart News accurately reports, “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 job-creating investment towards the coasts, such as Silicon Valley and New York.”

However, uncontrolled mass immigration does not only provide these unscrupulous employers with cheap and compliant labor; it provides them and their allies with an unlimited supply of consumers and renters as well. In short, this represents a booming, eternal, and domestically damaging business model for the founders of FWD.us, comprised of Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Matt Cohler at Benchmark, and Breyer Capital CEO Jim Breyer.

Concluding his interview with Punchbowl News, Senator Young stated that while he sees immigration as having “an essential role to play” in any labor force/economic reforms, “realistically as a matter of politics and I think a matter of good policy, any immigration reform proposals are going to have to be paired with border security measures to get it done.”

The Indiana Senator added when it comes to an endless supply of foreign replacement workers:

If we can harness the talent of rank and file Americans, I really believe we can outgrow and out-innovate other countries. And that, of course, has very important national security implications, especially as you think about our strategic competition with China.

American workers throughout the nation should applaud Senator Young’s apparent pro-American entreaty that immigration policy in the United States should never be used – purposefully or incidentally – to damage Americans’ wages, job security, or quality of life.

His comments are all the more important when so many of his colleagues – even within the GOP – pander to corporate donors regarding immigration policy by focusing solely on Biden’s chaotic border crisis and crimes committed by illegal aliens. The negative impact of uncontrolled legal immigration should not and must not be overlooked.

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