Tillis Boasts of Green Card Giveaway to Foreign Workers in India

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator Thom Tillis (RINO-NC) has been saturating the airwaves across North Carolina lately touting his hawkish approach to immigration and bear hugging President Donald Trump. Of course, the campaign ads belie years of crossing the aisle to help carry Democrats’ water, particularly when it comes to immigration policy, and more recently making a big deal out of opposing the president on immigration issues before flipping at the last minute to save himself.

Well, even in as he steps up the hawkish campaign talking points, Tillis couldn’t help himself. He’s out ‘touting’ his support for enabling more outsourcing by issuing more green cards to foreign workers from India.

From Breitbart:

“[…] GOP Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is championing legislation to reward Indian workers who take jobs sought by American college graduates.

Tillis’s support for outsourcing jobs to India comes just three months after Walmart said it would use foreign workers to replace 569 Americans in his home state city of Charlotte, NC. […]

Under that law, the roughly 800,000 Indian workers in the United States can get about 10,000 green cards each year. The disparity means that roughly 300,000 of India’s contract workers are working while waiting for green cards. The cards were promised as a reward by their employers in exchange for the workers accepting low wages to take Americans’ jobs. […]”

The bill Tillis is supporting raises the number of Indian workers getting green cards and citizenship each year to 50,000.

There’s ample debate about how to best maximize companies’ and small-business owners freedom to make free market labor decisions, while not undercutting American wages and economies. Importing cheaper foreign labor does more than displace a similar amount of American employment, it imports wage deflation and thereby puts downward pressure on how much even tangentially related American workers make. From the other side, it allows business owners to mitigate labor costs, offer lower prices, and eventually leave more change in consumers’ pockets.

Yet it could be worse in terms of raw numbers of imported workers; there is a competing bill sponsored by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) that would balloons the number of green card/citizenship giveaways to 100,000. Refreshingly, Tillis is actually speaking out against that bill, which is surprising in a sense considering his past hand-holding Dick Durbin on immigration bills. He’s usually inclined to join Durbin to hand out citizenship like candy, but perhaps the proximity to the election is keeping his inner dove in check. That’s one, albeit transitory, benefit of elections pressure; politicians pretend to behave as they campaigned for a while.

Unfortunately for Tillis, his list of negatives may be longer than the line of foreign workers he wants to cue up to get green cards.

Read more here.