Second Republican Loses Primary After Backing Big Tech's Green Card Giveaway
A second incumbent Republican has lost his primary race after backing a plan that would have allowed India to monopolize the nation’s employment-based green card system while rewarding Big Tech for outsourcing American STEM jobs.
On Tuesday evening, conservative Lauren Boebert ousted five-term, President Trump-endorsed Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO) in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district.
Boebert, endorsed by former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), had campaigned against Tipton’s record of supporting the Farm Workforce Modernization Act that would have capped farmworker wages, provided business with an unlimited inflow of foreign H-2A visa workers, and given amnesty to up to 1.25 million illegal aliens.
In one ad, Boebert slammed Tipton for joining establishment Republicans and Democrats in support of the amnesty and expansion of the H-2A visa program:
Tipton had also joined 140 Republicans like Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Lee Zeldin (R-NY) last year in supporting Big Tech’s green card giveaway plan, allowing India to monopolize the nation’s employment-based green card system.
Known as H.R. 1044, the plan would have allowed outsourcing firms such as Cognizant, as well as giant tech corporations like Amazon, to secure a green card system where only temporary foreign workers on H-1B visas are able to obtain employment visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
This process would solidify that employment-based green cards only go to temporary foreign visa workers that have been imported to the U.S. by corporations to replace American workers — rewarding the outsourcers of U.S. STEM jobs.
Tipton is the second incumbent Republican to lose his primary race in the last month to a conservative challenger campaigning on an immigration reduction platform.
In Virginia’s 5th congressional district, Trump-endorsed Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) lost to challenger Bob Good, who ran a Dave Brat-style campaign, centered on the issue of reducing immigration to boost U.S. wages.
Riggleman, also a supporter of Big Tech’s green card giveaway, co-sponsored legislation that would have created the H-2C visa program — allowing a business to import at least 85,000 non-college-educated foreign workers to fill U.S. construction companies, hospitals, and hotel jobs.
Good wrote in a campaign memo to voters:
Altogether, Riggleman’s votes facilitate the importation of well over a half-million foreign workers per year — and millions more over the next decade — to directly compete with our own neighbors and families for good-paying jobs across a wide variety of employment sectors.
The primary upsets by conservative challengers to Trump-endorsed candidates is welcome news for Jeff Sessions’ senatorial campaign against Tommy Tuberville, whom the president has endorsed.
Sessions, a longtime advocate of an “America First” immigration and trade agenda, is running a similar campaign to Boebert and Good — most recently defending American workers at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) who are having their jobs outsourced to an overseas firm in the midst of the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
“I’ve been at this battle … for a number of years, as you know. I’ve been actively engaged in it. I believe immigration should serve the national interes. My opponent Tommy Tuberville really doesn’t get it,” Sessions said last week at a protest demanding the TVA stop offshoring U.S. jobs.
“You bring in more cotton to America, the price of cotton will fall. If you bring in more labor to this country, the price of labor will fall,” Sessions said. “You have to be careful on our immigration system that it serves the national interest.”
The insurgent campaigns are mostly a rebuke of the political establishment and donor class consensus that more legal immigration is vital to keep U.S. wages low, drive up the number of consumers that business can sell to, and keep real estate prices high for investors.
Republican voters, though, are overwhelmingly aligned against the donor class’s lobbying for more immigration. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that seven-in-ten Republican voters, and 67 percent of conservatives, say there is no need to import more foreign labor because there is no shortage of qualified American workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.