Equal Access to Green Cards for Legal Employment Act of 2022

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, ironically, this bill doesn't even serve the interests of immigrants from around the world except for two countries, China and India.

By removing the per-country caps on employment-based visas, the practical effect of this bill is that, for the foreseeable future, the citizens of only two countries, China and India, will be admitted to work here. Workers from every other country will have to wait many years until that backlog clears.

Supporters contend that no one currently awaiting a green card will be adversely affected. That may be true as far as it goes. But what they leave out is that this bill will produce long delays for future applicants from every country except for China and India.

Even the liberal American Immigration Lawyers Association points out that ``many applicants will now face longer wait times.''

Now, supporters are fond of comparing the populations of various countries as an argument that uniform percentage caps are unfair. But what they forget is that when a country's allotment isn't reached, its vacant slots then spill over to higher-demand countries. India, for example, accounted for 35 percent of the green cards issued last year, five times their percentage cap. But that, apparently, isn't enough for the left.

The bill also threatens our national security. China has been stealing U.S. technology for years through programs like the H-1B visa.

According to The Washington Post, one such initiative resulted in ``the arrests of six Chinese researchers accused of lying on their visa applications about their ties to the People's Liberation Army'' and ``more than 1,000 researchers who had hidden their affiliation with the Chinese military'' fleeing the U.S. within months.

The supporters assure us that anyone with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party is not eligible, but that completely ignores the fact that the CCP exerts coercive control over all Chinese nationals, whether or not they are CCP members, so this assurance is meaningless.

As currently drafted, this bill would also result in the immediate exclusion from green cards special immigrant religious workers from around the world for the next few years. Those cards will, instead, go to special immigrant juvenile green cards for unaccompanied alien children from the Northern Triangle countries.

It is precisely this provision that has been exploited by the crime cartels in trafficking unaccompanied minors into this country, and this bill makes it worse.

But the most pernicious provision allows certain temporary visa holders to file an application for adjustment for status despite the fact that no green card is available to them. That is the reason you have the long delays that the gentlewoman mentioned.

The result is that many temporary visas will essentially become permanent because the alien visa holders will be able to live and work in the U.S. as if they had a green card.

That raises an important question: What is it that the Democrats have against American workers?

This bill is a direct attack on their job opportunities and livelihoods. So much for the advice to unemployed fossil fuel workers: Well, just learn to code.

All this becomes a theater of the absurd in light of the mass illegal migration that the Democrats have aided, abetted, and encouraged since they reversed the Trump border measures that had finally secured our borders.

It was no coincidence that as the flood of illegal migration slowed to a trickle, working-class families saw their biggest wage gains in decades, and the income gap between rich and poor began to narrow.

Now that the borders have been collapsed by the Democrats, those wage gains have been wiped out as millions of illegal aliens are deliberately allowed into the country to compete with those struggling American families. The Democrats remain silent on this continuing crisis.

The American people had trusted the Democrats to look out for their interests, and they are now discovering how tragically misplaced that trust has been. That is the crux of this bill, a big fat middle finger to America's working families, and I am afraid that won't change until the people responsible for these policies are turned out of office.

Mr. BISHOP of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, in the hearing on this bill in the markup in April before the Committee on the Judiciary, I raised an amendment or proposed an amendment that we protect the United States, if this bill were to pass, by providing that the Chinese Communist Party not be allowed to abuse it.

I submitted for the record evidence that Chinese technicians under H- 1B visas had been part of the censorship routine at Facebook, that H-1B visa holders were involved in the Confucius Institutes in colleges and universities across the country.

We ought to, at a minimum, provide that the Chinese Communist Party does not use our immigration tools as a means to impair American national security and favor inculcation of the Chinese Communist Party's influence in the United States.

In response to the amendment, the bill's sponsor argued that the Immigration and Naturalization Act already provided for defense against this threat. In fact, she gave a particular section of the code, section 212(a)(3)(D), which already fully took care of this problem. Except in further debate on the amendment, it became apparent after a while that, no, section 212(a)(3)(D) only addressed risks involving aliens, not immigrants. That was finally conceded, but the problem was not addressed in the markup.

Now, as the bill comes to the floor today, it comes with a manager's amendment, not vetted in the Committee on the Judiciary as it should have been that day, and it doesn't do the job. It is loaded with exceptions that raise subjective questions that may be circumvented by agents of the Chinese Communist Party to come into the United States exploiting this greater latitude for these visas.

I believe the bill sponsor spoke to it in her opening comments, that there is an exception. Yeah, okay, the Chinese Communist Party can't take advantage of this. But if somebody is an involuntary member in the Chinese Communist Party or they accept membership in the Chinese Communist Party for the purpose of obtaining employment, well, they are not going to be excluded.

Well, who won't say that is what happened? And who is to decide now who was an involuntary member or one who was eager to participate? There are exceptions for close family members and exceptions for past membership.

We will offer a motion to recommit that will eliminate those exceptions. The motion to recommit would prevent the Department of Homeland Security from issuing an H-1B visa to anyone who is or was a member of a communist party or totalitarian party. It is just that simple.

Why, if this is harmless and helpful, is the Democratic Party so reluctant to provide for the most elemental of protections for the American people, that it not be exploited by the Chinese Communist Party, the most notorious adversary of the United States in the world, and to be done simply and completely so that, above all, we protect America in the course of doing this?

Mr. Speaker, if we adopt the motion to recommit, we will instruct the Committee on the Judiciary to consider my amendment to H.R. 3648 to provide real safeguards against Chinese Communist Party influence and espionage.

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Mr. McCLINTOCK.

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I think it is important to note why we have those per-country caps. Ours is a Nation of immigrants. Except for those descended from Native Americans, every one of us is an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant.

The American people are drawn from every country on this Earth; and from these disparate and diverse populations, we have created one great Nation, the American Nation. Here there is only one race, the American race.

This remarkable achievement is made possible by a single word-- assimilation. Our immigration laws were written specifically to accommodate that process. They were written to assure that as immigrants come to our country they bring with them a sincere desire to become Americans, to raise their children as Americans, to acquire a common language, a common culture, and a common appreciation of American principles. That is the only possible way to blend so many discordant, disparate, and diverse populations into a common people devoted to the same principles that have produced the happiest, most just, most prosperous, most free, most advanced, and most envied civilization in the history of mankind.

But assimilation is hard. As Winston Churchill said from that very rostrum: ``We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies because we are made of sugar candy.''

Becoming an American requires learning a new language, accepting and adopting new customs, adapting to a new culture, and accepting new beliefs. Assimilation breaks down if the concentration of immigrants from any single country reaches a level where assimilation is no longer necessary for that population. Instead of e pluribus unum, from many nations one great nation, from many people one great people, we instead see e unum pluribus: from one nation, many isolated, insular, and segregated communities that become foreign enclaves rather than an integral part of our national identity.

We have all heard the heartbreaking tales of American workers not only being displaced by foreign workers but being forced to train their replacements as a condition of severance pay. This bill assures a never-ending supply of foreign labor for American corporations.

Under this bill, any alien on an employment-based green card waiting list for more than 2 years could apply for adjustment of that status. Once an alien has filed an adjustment of status application, he or she is eligible for a work permit. However, unlike an employment-based green card, which generally requires a showing that the wages and conditions of Americans are not adversely affected, this work permit is considered an open-market employment authorization document, meaning the alien can take any job at any wage, and there are no protections for American workers.

So this bill essentially converts temporary visa holders to permanent status at the expense of American tech workers. This rewards the very same companies who for years have fired their American workers only to replace them with cheaper foreign labor.

American workers, particularly Black and Hispanic Americans, are going to be particularly hard hit. Pew Research estimates that each group only accounts for about 9 percent of the STEM workforce, and this measure assures that competition for those positions will become much greater and the wages much lower.

The per-country caps exist to assure that the population of no single nation can come to dominate the overall immigrant population coming to these shores. Thus, under current law immigrants from one nation cannot claim more than 7 percent of the visas, but under this bill, the employment-based limit is eliminated.

If this is allowed to happen, assimilation breaks down and the entire foundation of a nation of immigrants is shattered. As I said earlier, the practical effect of this bill is that the population of only two countries, China and India, will almost exclusively dominate the receipt of employment-based green cards for the foreseeable future at the expense of the people of virtually every other country in the world. Instead of an equitable distribution of green cards across all countries, they will in effect be limited to two.

In one employment-based green card category, EB-5, all the green cards will go to Chinese nationals for several years. In another category, EB-4, religious workers will be precluded from getting green cards. Instead, these will go to the alien juveniles from Northern Triangle countries who crossed our border illegally. This imbalance would undermine the fundamental mechanism of assimilation, and I fear that is the point.

Assimilation has become a dirty word to the left. They seek not unity, not one united people but, rather, a people divided into warring, racial, and ethnic factions, divided by language, culture, ethnicity, and ultimately grievances. No nation can survive very long tearing itself apart this way.

The collapse of our southern border and refusal of the Democrats to defend the sovereignty of our Nation from the unprecedented illegal mass migration that they have unleashed will spell the end of this Nation if it is allowed to continue much longer. This bill is a small part of that policy, and it is destructive in its effect if not its intent.

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