by Lee Fang at Lee Fang Substack
In April 2018, John Engler, the former GOP Governor of Michigan, proudly released the findings of a blue-ribbon commission at the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential think tank, about the challenges faced by the American workforce.
The report, oddly enough, included a demand that then-President Donald Trump avoid reforms to visa programs used by corporations to import foreign workers. The Trump administration had pushed for rule changes designed to curb visa abuses, such as using foreign workers to lower wages. In the past, H-1B foreign workers have been tapped to replace laid-off American workers — in some cases, workers only received severance payments if they trained their foreign replacements.
The report called for the administration to “open doors to more highly educated immigrants” and to “reconsider measures that have created new obstacles for many foreign students and foreign workers on temporary work visas such as H-1B.”
The report did not disclose Engler’s other position. A few months before the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations report, Engler had been hired as a paid lobbyist to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), an industry group founded in Delhi that advocates on behalf of India’s largest IT outsourcing firms.
The Times of India reported on a hiring spree by NASSCOM at the time,…
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