Thread by @Banned_Bill

1995: CBS’s Dan Rather warns that Americans are being “replaced by foreigners.”

I found an entire one-hour episode of CBS’s 48 Hours about the harms of both legal and illegal immigration, titled “Slamming the door.”

Let’s go through the whole thing in detail.

🧵

This special is a giant commercial against mass immigration.

It covers:

— Cheap labor replacing Americans.
— Preventable crimes by illegal aliens.
— The need for a robust enforcement agency.
— Schools crowded beyond capacity.
— Americans subsidizing illegals' healthcare.

When’s the last time you heard Dan Rather talk like this?

“In the next 48 hours, an estimated 6,000 immigrants, both legal and illegal, will arrive in this country, straining our ability to handle this flood of newcomers.
“And now, this nation of immigrants faces a painful question: should immigration be slowed, or even stopped?
“It’s a question more Americans are asking, as they view these new arrivals with concern, and even in some quarters, outrage.”

It’s hard to believe, but back before Democrats decided to start importing voters, broadcast journalists sometimes covered immigration from the perspective of Americans.

Did you know American companies have been replacing employees with cheap H-1B workers from India for over 30 years?

That’s what the first segment of CBS’s “Slamming The Door,” titled “Denying the Dream,” is all about.

PHIL JONES (CBS NEWS): “AIG, American International Group, an insurance company, fired Lou and 250 other workers from three states, and allowed the Americans to be replaced by foreigners. Most of them are from India, and most of them working for a lot less money. And guess what? It’s all legal!
“… The employees, like Gloria, had to train their replacements for 60 days.”

CBS breaks down how companies get away with paying Visa workers significantly less. Note the form which reads “H-1B” at the top.

PHIL JONES (CBS NEWS): “Many of AIG’s foreign workers are here on temporary work Visas, and by law, should be on the same salary scale as the Americans they replace. Employees say this ranges from 40 to 80 thousand dollars. According to documents filed with the Department of Labor, many of the foreigners are making half that amount.
“How is it done? There’s a loophole. AIG is technically not the employer. It hired a consulting firm, Syntel, who employs the foreign replacements at a lower wage.”

We also hear from from then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich (of all people!):

ROBERT REICH (SECRETARY, DOL): “This practice should not be permitted. It is outrageous... The law should be changed. And employers, even if the law isn’t changed, should not use this loophole in the law.”

PHIL JONES (CBS NEWS): “Nobody knows how many Americans have been displaced. What we do know is that 42,000 of these temporary work Visas were issued last year.”

The H-1B bait-and-switch was less common back in 1995 — enough so that Syntel, the company that brought in the replacement workers at AIG, blamed the whole thing on “an administrative error.”

BARACK DESAI (PRESIDENT, SYNTEL): They said that we’ve done this on purpose. That’s absolutely incorrect. It was an administrative error. As soon as we discovered the error, we started taking steps to correct it.”

He then adds: “America is not generating enough numbers of the highly-skilled people that we need.”

Sound familiar?

The segment ends with laid-off AIG programmer Lou Citarella:

“It hurts very, very much. Everything that my parents ever instilled in me about this country, everything my grandparents believed in — it’s not that way. The America that they thought they knew does not exist.”

All of this was just the first segment of six.

I’ll continue with another thread tomorrow examining the second segment of CBS’s “Slamming the Door,” which they titled “Importing Crime.” I’m in the middle of transcribing it, and it’s pretty nuts.