‘Silent Donation’: Corporate Emails Reveal Google Executives’ Efforts to Turn Out Latino Voters Who They Thought Would Vote for Clinton
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10 Sep 2018 Washington, D.C. 10,524
An email chain among senior Google executives from the day after the 2016 presidential election reveals the company tried to influence the 2016 United States presidential election on behalf of one candidate, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In the emails, a Google executive describes efforts to pay for free rides for a certain sect of the population to the polls–a get-out-the-vote for Hispanic voters operation–and how these efforts were because she thought it would help Hillary Clinton win the general election in 2016. She also used the term “silent donation” to describe Google’s contribution to the effort to elect Clinton president.
The main email, headlined, “Election results and the Latino vote,” was sent on Nov. 9, 2016—the day after Clinton’s loss to Trump in the 2016 presidential election—by Eliana Murillo, Google’s Multicultural Marketing department head.
The four page email begins with Murillo claiming she and others at Google were engaged in non-partisan activities not designed to help any one candidate or another—only to undercut her own commentary in later passages in the emails by openly admitting the entire effort to boost Latino turnout using Google products with official company resources was to elect Clinton over Trump.
The critical miscalculation, Murillo wrote in a stunning admission in the email, was that Latino voters backed Trump by higher margins than any experts had forecast in the lead-up to the election. Trump’s 29 percent among Hispanics nationally blew prognosticators away, and he hit even higher numbers—about 31 percent—in the key battleground state of Florida, Murillo admitted.
Murillo wrote at the outset of the lengthy message:
We worked very hard. Many people did. We pushed tp get out the Latino vote with our features, our partners, and our voices. We kept our Google efforts non-partisan and followed our company’s protocols for the elections strategy. We emphasized our mission to give Latinos access to information so that they can make an informed decision at the polls, and we feel very grateful for all the support to do this important work. Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, particularly with early votes. A large percentage of Latino voters in Florida were new voters who had become citizens just in time to vote. We saw high traffic for the search queries ‘votar,’ ‘como votar,’ and ‘donde voter,’ in key states like Florida and Nevada. We will be pulling in more info in the coming hours/days but so far we definitely know there was high traffic on search in Spanish. Without translating our tools the users wouldn’t have found the information they needed. Objectively speaking, our goal was met — we pushed and successfully launched the search features in Spanish, and we thank Lisa for her support in advocating
“Sundar” presumably refers to Google’s chief executive officer Sundar Pichai, who took the reins of the massive search giant in October 2015. “Lisa” presumably refers to Lisa Gevelber, the vice president of Global Marketing for Google—who forwarded Murillo’s entire four-page email to several other Google executives in another chain also obtained by Breitbart News in which Gevelber praises Murillo’s activities with official company resources as having made a “great difference.” “Philipp” presumably refers to Philipp Schindler, a senior vice president and Google’s chief business officer per his LinkedIn page.
The emails were first revealed on Fox News on Monday evening on Tucker Carlson Tonigh
Carlson, in his exclusive report on Fox News Monday night, compared the revelations in the Google emails to the probe of Russian interference in the U.S. election to Special Counsel Robert Mueller—raising the question about how much influence tech giants like Google and Facebook have on election outcomes in the United States.
Carlson cited Dr. Robert Epstein, a social scientist and an expert on Google, who has said, in Carlson’s words, “Google alone could determine the outcome of almost any election just by altering its search selections and we would never know it.”
Epstein has published research detailing how Google could influence the results of U.S. elections. Breitbart News has exclusively published including a recent one
In his report on Monday night, Carlson then described the emails he obtained, which Breitbart News also obtained. Carlson said:
This wasn’t a get-out-the-vote effort or whatever they say. It wasn’t aimed at all potential voters. It wasn’t even aimed at a balanced cross-section of subgroups. Google didn’t try to get out the vote among say Christian Arabs in Michigan or say Persian Jews in Los Angeles—they sometimes vote Republican. It was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic Party. Furthermore, this mobilization effort targeted not only the entire country but swing states vital to the Hillary campaign. This was not an exercise in civics, this was political consulting. It was in effect an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
Carlson noted that in communication with Google, the company “did not deny that the email was real or that it showed a clear political preference.”
“Their only defense was that the activities they described were either non-partisan or were not officially taken by the company,” Carlson said Monday night, describing Google’s official response to his requests for comment, before challenging the company’s response: “But of course they were both. Plenty of people in Google knew what was going on and we haven’t seen any evidence anyone at Google disapproved of it and tried to rein it in.”
The email from Murillo continues by explaining just how expansive the efforts the company undertook to achieve its objective were:
We had our partners help spread the word about our features on social media, including YouTubers and influencers like Dulce Candy, Jorge Narvaez, Jessie y Joy, Barbara Bermudo, and Pamela Silva of Univision, Jackie Cruz aka La Flaca from Orange is the New Black, and more. We promoted our partner the Latino Community Foundation’s non-partisan #YoVoyaVotaryTu (I’m going to vote, are you?) campaign and leveraged our social media influencer friends’ reach to hit over 11M impressions with that hashtag. We hosted an event with over 200 people and a hangout with social media influencers about the power of the Latino vote and the new research Nielsen published about the Latino electorate. This reached 4.4M social media impressions and signaled to many that Google and our partners value the Latino community and our role in this election. We brought the same research to the LATISM conference, where people were beyond thrilled to see Google’s support and acknowledgment of the Latino community.
If Murillo had ended her email there, this probably would not amount to the level of a national news story. But she did not: She went on for another several paragraphs on the first page and an extra three pages to admit the openly partisan intent of Google’s actions, including a remarkable in-writing confirmation that at least one of Google’s actions amounted to a “silent donation”—something that could raise Federal Election Commission (FEC) red flags if authorities decide to launch an official investigation into this matter, now that these emails have been publicly revealed.
It is in the next paragraph that Murillo openly admits that Google made a “silent donation,” in her words, paying for rides to polls via leftist organization Voto Latino. Murillo wrote in the next paragraph:
We also supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states (silent donation). We even helped them create ad campaigns to promote the rides (with support from HOLA folks who rallied and volunteered their time to help). We supported Voto Latino to help them land an interview with Senator Meza of Arizona (key state for us) to talk about the election and how to use Google search to find information about how to vote. They were a strong partner, among many in this effort.
The next paragraph is where Murillo begins to make her next major admission: that the effort was not just to increase voter turnout generally but to elect Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
“Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us,” Murillo wrote. “We never anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. We saw headlines like this about early voter turn out and thought that this was finally the year that the ‘sleeping giant’ had awoken.”
On the next page, the email continues with a headline from an article in The Atlantic
Under that was a tweet from Jon Ralston of Ralston Reports in Nevada saying, among other things, that “Trump is dead” because of Latino turnout in early voting in the state. Trump did not end up winning Nevada in the end, but he did beat Clinton in 30 and a half other states.
Here is the Ralston tweet contained in Murillo’s internal Google email, as well as in the Atlantic
At that point, after the Ralston tweet, Murillo openly admits the partisan motives of Google’s electioneering efforts.
“On personal note, we really thought we had shown up to demonstrate our political power against a candidate who had vehemently offended our community by calling us rapists and drug dealers,” Murillo wrote. “We read the headline and thought WOW, we did it!”
Murillo’s email continues by including another headline, this time from the New Yorker ’s
Then she begins writing again: “But then reality set in. Only 71% of Latinos voted for Hillary, and that wasn’t enough.”
The third page of the email begins with another headline and image of a Latina woman in a red Make America Great Again hat and “Latinos for Trump” sign. The story, from Ruben Navarette, Jr., published in the Daily Beast
From there, Murillo continues writing for another page and a half:
The voters we wanted to reach did end up having an influence in the end, most notably in Florida. Latino voters voted for Trump more in Florida than in other states (31%), and FL was critical by popular vote and the electoral college. We’ll keep an eye on any other results that can show us the influence that our efforts had on the election. We know we gave this our best and are now figuring out what comes next. Thanks again for all your help and support in this effort.
In the next paragraph, Murillo again openly admits she was not “objective” when it came to the election.
“I have tried to stay objective, but I ask that you please give us some time to pause and reflect,” Murillo wrote. “This is devastating for our Democratic Latino community. After all these efforts and what we thought was positive momentum toward change, the results are not what we expected at all. We are afraid for our families, and especially for the millions of immigrants who now don’t know what the future holds for them.”
After that, Murillo says she cannot communicate with key organizers of the effort by Google and its partners—a project known as HOLA—because she is afraid of secret pro-Trump spies on the listservs created. She also admits ongoing discussions among these people about meeting to give grieving Hillary Clinton supporters hugs after Trump crushed her on election day. She also says those involved in Google’s get-out-the-vote efforts were openly seeking consolation after Clinton lost, and that she and another person cried after Trump won – for the first time they have cried due to an election result. Murillo wrote:
What’s most difficult for us is we can’t even email the HOLA list to reach our community and discuss what this means for us because we know that apparently some may actually be Trump supporters. There is a thread right now among the core HOLA group where people are sharing how much they hurt, how much they need support right now, and that they are coordinating in different offices to meet up to just hold each other. One in a remote office said ‘If you guys do any sort of meetings, I’d love to join virtually. I think I’m currently the only Latinx in my office. It’s kinda hard.’ #understatement. Another said, ‘I’ve never cried after an election until last night.’ Same here.
She was not done there. In the next paragraph, Murillo wrote that this election result hurt her badly. She also admits the election result was a “loss,” another indication that Google’s efforts were clearly attempting to use company resources to elect Democrat Clinton over Republican Trump and influence the results of the election. She also says that the company—and herself in particular—will redouble efforts in the future to get a different and more desired result in future elections.
“I’m in shock and it hurts more than I could have ever imagined, but trying to stay optimistic and keep my head high,” Murillo wrote. “Loss is a part of life, and I do think frustrations challenge us to work smarter and get creative. My partners have sent notes and are saying the same thing — time to keep working harder.”
At the top of the fourth page of the email, Murillo asks her colleagues at Google to give out a “smile” to grieving leftist Latinos who work at the company.
“If you see a Latino Googler in the office (California/New York), please give them a smile,” Murillo wrote. “They are probably hurting right now. It’s tough to handle now that we know not all of us were against this, so we may be even more divided than ever. At least in CA/NY though, you can rest assured that the Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts and prayers, at least for them and their families.”
Then, she continues by stating she is going on a planned vacation she thought she was taking to “celebrate” a Clinton win, but after Trump won, she says, her vacation “will be time to reflect on how to continue to support my community through these difficult times.”
Murillo, in the next line, reveals that she thought she was sharing her viewpoints on these matters in a tight circle that would not leak.
“I’m not sharing my personal opinions very broadly, but wanted to share openly here in the circle of trust,” she wrote.
This email leaked to Fox News and Breitbart News and is now likely to become a centerpiece in the case that Google is throwing its weight around to interfere in elections in the United States in a partisan manner against the duly elected President of the United States.
This email from Murillo was not just from some rogue staffer inside Google. Her original email was forwarded on to other Google executives by the aforementioned Gevelber, according to another email obtained by Breitbart News.
“Thought you all would want to read this,” Gevelber wrote in her own message endorsing Murillo’s email in a message to other Google bigwigs. “It’s from Eliana Murillo who runs US Hispanic Marketing on my team and who helped found HOLA our Hispanic ERC.”
Gevelber continued by commending everyone she said, “worked so hard to ensure all the Get out the Vote were done in Spanish” that their efforts “made a giant difference” in the election “to Googlers and beyond.”
President Trump and Republicans have just begun scratching the surface of bias against them among Silicon Valley’s elite, including, perhaps foremost alongside Facebook, from Google. A source close to the White House who has reviewed these emails ahead of their public release told Breitbart News that in a just world this would amount to, at a minimum, a clear violation of campaign finance law governing in-kind contributions to campaigns and causes.
“How is this any different than Michael Cohen’s alleged conduct?” the source close to the White House told Breitbart News. “Did Google disclose their contribution? No, they didn’t. I guess Bob Mueller is too busy chasing extortionist porn star fairy tales to do anything about it.”
Technically, this would not fall into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s wheelhouse, but if authorities do end up investigating, it would more likely come from the Justice Department generally speaking or any number of federal agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or Federal Election Commission (FEC). It remains to be seen where this goes from here.
“The views expressed in this email are the employee’s personal political views and are not representative of any official stance from the company,” a Google spokesperson told Breitbart News. “Google’s elections efforts — both in 2016 and leading up to this year’s midterms — have been entirely nonpartisan. We will continue to use our products in an informative, nonpartisan way to engage voters leading up to November’s election.”
But it may not matter what the company’s official spokesperson says now about these damning emails, as at least one other Google executive flagged the original email for company executives, warning that Murillo’s email demonstrates just how “partisan” her work with official company resources was.
“Forwarding this not because of the original sender but rather how explicitly it references that her work was 100% partisan,” Google Search Product Marketing official Mackenzie Thomas wrote in another company email.
VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY?
“Free my anchor baby breeding unregistered Democrats!” La Raza Hillaria Clinton
ENDORSED BY MEXICO, HISPANDERING HILLARIA CLINTON VOWS THAT MEXICO WILL ELECT ALL FUTURE U.S. PRESIDENTS!
In 1994, Voz Fronteriza received $6,000 from UC student activity funds and many of its writers are members of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan , which refers to the American Southwest as “occupied Mexico.” California attorney general Xavier Becerra , a former congressman once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate, boasts of his involvement with the militant group.
(DO A SEARCH FOR THE CLINTON’S LONG HISTORY WITH THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” NOW CALLING ITSELF UNIDOSus.)
SWAMP EMPRESS HILLARY CLINTON
Leaked Julian Assange Message:
Hillary Is A ‘Well Connected, Sadistic Sociopath’
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
THE DIRTY DEALS of DIRTY HILLARY….. looting anything that moves!
Harvey Weinstein has been exposed in the media as the sexual predator he is, and Hillary Clinton has been exposed as the craven money-grubber she is; money over morality is the mantra she lives by. PATRICIA Mc CARTHY – AMERICAN THINKERcom
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
THE LIFE OF HILLARY CLINTON: AMORAL PSYCHOPATH and GLOBAL LOOTER OF THE POOR….. But she served Obama’s crony bank$ter$ well!
Harvey Weinstein has been exposed in the media as the sexual predator he is, and Hillary Clinton has been exposed as the craven money-grubber she is; money over morality is the mantra she lives by. PATRICIA Mc CARTHY – AMERICAN THINKERcom
Revolving Door: Dozens of
Clinton Staffers Hired by
Google — and Vice-Versa
Dozens of people who used to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and a number of Clinton initiatives went on to work at Google, and vice-versa.
At least twelve employees from the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative went on to work for Google, while at least fifteen Google employees went on to work for Hillary For America. The list was originally developed by Adam Townsend on Twitter.
Here is the list of employees:
Peter Albers , former Finance and Operations Director at the Clinton Foundation, before moving to Google Fiber as Head of Partnerships and Market Development in 2015. In 2017, he became Google’s Global Head of Business Development and Head of Americas Retail Partnerships for Google Play Retail.
Shannon Jones Newberry , former Deputy Director of Communications at the Clinton Global Initiative, before becoming Communications and Public Affairs Manager at Google in 2012.
Jeff Lawi , a former analyst at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, before joining Google in 2013 where he has held a number of positions, including Product Support Manager, Senior Product Support Manager, and Principal, Strategy, and Business Operations.
Nathan Allen , a former consultant at the Clinton Foundation, before becoming a Senior Creative Producer and Launch Manager at Google in 2015. Allen is currently an Executive Producer at Google.
Puiyan Leung , a former consultant for the Clinton Foundation through Stern Consulting Corps. Leung had been an intern at Google before serving as a consultant for the Clinton Foundation, and he returned to Google in 2013 as a financial analyst, before becoming a program manager in 2015. Leung left Google to work for Facebook in 2016.
Felicia Yep Salinas , former Employment and Labor Commitment Maker at the Clinton Global Initiative before joining Google in 2015 as a Talent Hacker. She then became a Technical Sourcer in 2016, before moving to Facebook months later.
John Lyman , according to the website for GV where he now works, “helped launch the Clinton Global Initiative,” worked as Deputy Chairperson, and focused on “progressive policy and advocacy,” before joining Google for “a decade” where he served as Head of Partnerships and Marketing for Google for Entrepreneurs.
Scot Frank , a former mentor at the Clinton Global Initiative, joined Google as a product manager in 2014.
Theodore Przybyla , former Working Group Manager at the Clinton Global Initiative, joined Google as an engagement manager in 2015, before leaving for the Brookings Institution in September 2017.
Justin Pang , former Deputy Chief Operating Officer at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, joined Google in 2012. Having served as Strategic Partner Lead of Global Partnerships and Team Lead of Global Partnerships, he is currently the Head of Partnerships.
Maria Wang-Faulkner , former Country Support Manager at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, joined Google as a Strategic Partner Manager in 2016, and currently serves as Strategic Partner Development Manager for Google Assistant.
Paul Lee , a former consultant for the Clinton Foundation, joined Google in 2007 as a Senior Product Manager, before leaving in 2015.
Stephanie Hannon , former Group Product Manager at Google, left the company in 2011 before becoming a Product Manager at Facebook in 2012. Hannon then moved back to Google in 2013 as a Director of Product Management for just over two years, before she became the Chief Technology Officer for Hillary For America in April 2015.
Osi Imeokparia , former Product Management Director at Google, left the company in 2015 to become Chief Product Officer at Hillary For America. Imeokparia currently works at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is owned by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
Derek Parham , former Technical Lead of Google Apps, joined Hillary For America in 2016 as Deputy Chief Technology Officer.
Jason Rosenbaum has worked in a number of Democrat Party-affiliated positions, including as Deputy Director of Online Communications for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee between April 2007 and March 2009, and Digital Director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee between March 2009 and June 2013. Rosenbaum then became Director of Elections and Advocacy at Google in July 2013, before leaving to become Director of Digital Advertising at Hillary For America in July 2015.
Nathaniel Welch , a former Site Reliability Engineer at Google, joined Hillary For America as Staff Site Reliability Engineer in January 2016.
Henry Bridge , former Product Manager at Google, left to join Facebook in June 2011, before becoming Director of Product at Hillary For America in January 2016.
Fred Wulff , a former software engineer at Google, joined Hillary For America in March 2016 as a software engineer and manager.
Divina Videna Chung , former Operations Point of Contact at Google Express, joined Hillary For America in February 2016 as California Phone Bank Captain and Nevada Precinct Captain. She also worked at Uber, before moving to Facebook as an Oculus VR Brand Ambassador.
Danny Bowman , a former Product Specialist at Google, joined Hillary For America in July 2016 as a software engineer.
James Plummer , a former User Experience Designer at Google, joined Hillary For America in January 2016 as Lead Product Designer and Manager.
Andrea Frome , a former software engineer at Google, joined Hillary For America in May 2016 as a senior software engineer.
Maxwell Nunes , a former Political Advertising Fellow at Google, joined Hillary For America’s digital team in June 2015. Nunes currently works in digital policy at Airbnb.
Remy DeCausemaker , a former mentor at Google Summer of Code, joined Hillary For America in June 2016 as Open Source Community Manager, before becoming Open Source Program Manager at Twitter in June 2017.
Dina Lamdany , a former software engineering intern at Google, joined Hillary For America in June 2015 as a data analyst, before moving back to Google as an Associate Product Manager.
Corey Bertram , a former software engineering intern at Google, worked with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and claimed to be “responsible for building backend platform and infra for Hillary Clinton 2016.”
This year, Breitbart Tech also discovered that dozens of former Clinton and Obama staffers were now working at Facebook.
In 2016, WikiLeaks claimed Google was “directly engaged” with and working for the Clinton presidential campaign, while leaked emails showed that former Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wanted to be the “Head Outside Advisor” to the Clinton Campaign.
Schmidt was also “instrumental” in creating the “The Groundwork,” a company that sought to put Clinton into the White House, and Google worked to hide negative search results of Clinton during the presidential campaign.
In a leaked video released by Breitbart Tech of an internal meeting at Google shortly after Clinton’s presidential campaign defeat in 2016, Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, and Vice Presidents Kent Walker and Eileen Naughton expressed strong and negative reactions to the results.
Brin announced that the meeting is “probably not the most joyous we’ve had” and claimed to find the election results “deeply offensive,” claiming it “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values.”
After an employee asked if Google would “invest in grassroots, hyper-local efforts to bring tools and services and understanding of Google products and knowledge” so Americans can “make informed decisions that are best for themselves,” Pichai claimed the company would ensure that “educational products” reach “segments of the population [they] are not [currently] fully reaching,” and expressed that “investments in machine learning and AI” could stop “misinformation” shared by “low-information voters.”
The executives also applauded an employee who made a remark about needing to recognize “white privilege” following the election.
Leaked Video: Google Executives Admit to Importing 10K Foreign Workers to Take U.S. Jobs
Silicon Valley giant Google employs nearly 10,000 foreign workers, importing them to the United States on visas, a newly leaked video obtained by Breitbart News reveals.
The video is a full recording of Google’s first all-hands meeting following the 2016 presidential election in which President Trump historically beat out Democrat Hillary Clinton. These Google meetings occur on a weekly basis and are known inside the company as “TGIF” meetings, short for “Thank God It’s Friday.”
In the Google meeting, Vice President of People Operations Eileen Naughton reveals the extent to which the tech conglomerate has imported and currently employs close to 10,000 foreign workers with plans to expand their foreign workforce population.
Naughton tells the room full of Google employees, who are called “Googlers” by the company:
First and foremost is immigration. We have nearly 10,000 Googlers in the U.S. on visas . Very understandably, those of you who are working here and have families here or are in the process of renewing or getting visas are probably very concerned.
Naughton then explains how President Obama’s administration readily allowed and invited Google and other tech corporations to import foreign workers instead of hiring American citizens.
“So here’s what we know, there is, for the time being, an absent any policy recommendation from the Obama administration, right, there’s no change,” Naughton says. “Googlers should not expect to be hassled, entering the border, there should be no change in your status.”
Google intends on importing to the U.S. and employing even more foreign workers, Naughton discloses:
We also know that the nature of the U.S. immigration system is such that it makes — and there are legal limitations — it makes immediate changes after January’s inauguration of the new administration highly unlikely. But we of course will keep a close watch on this. Our policy office in D.C. is all over it. And we will keep you informed, but we will keep Googlers’ interests at heart and we will of course fight to retain all the visas and then some, because we keep adding to this . [Emphasis added]
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on H-1B visas and are allowed to stay for up to six years. That number has ballooned to potentially hundreds of thousands each year, as universities and non-profits are exempt from the cap. With more foreign workers entering the U.S. through the visa system, Americans are often replaced and forced to train their foreign replacements. In the last decade, more than 2.6 million H-1B foreign workers were approved to take high-paying U.S. jobs.
The Trump administration has sought to clamp down on corporations outsourcing U.S. to cheaper, foreign workers through the H-1B visa. The pro-American reforms to the H-1B visa are expected to open up about 80,000 high-paying , white collar jobs for Americans over the next two years.
Naughton and Senior Vice President for Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker also promoted the corporation’s use of the H-1B visa to import and employ foreign workers, rather than Americans.
“I would believe, being pro-business as a Republican, [Trump] would understand the need of certain sectors to have H-1B visas, etc,” Naughton said.
Walker noted the monolithic, corporate open borders viewpoint among the Republican and Democratic political establishments on the H-1B visa and national immigration policy.
“The other thing to add to that, ever since we’ve been debating immigration reform, there’s been strong bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress that H-1B visas are a great thing for the United States, as well as for the people that use it,” Walker said. “So I don’t see those majorities changing, in Congress changing.”
This year, alone, Google tried to import more than 5,200 foreign workers to take coveted, high-paying tech jobs in Silicon Valley. This would have added to the already nearly 10,000 foreign workers who are currently employed at Google, as revealed in the leaked video.
Google, along with other tech corporations like Cisco, Microsoft, and Facebook have been exposed for using Indian outsourcing firms like Tata Consulting Services and Infosys to hide the number of H-1B foreign workers they import annually.
Last year, Eric Schmidt — the top executive of Google’s parent company, Alphabet before leaving in January 2018 — said corporations should be allowed to import as many foreign workers as they want, without regard for whether Americans are replaced and displaced in the process.
“The stupidest policy in the entire American political system was the limit on H-1B visas,” Schmidt said at the time.
Analysis conducted last year revealed that despite the growing number of American STEM graduates every year, Americans are vastly outnumbered in Silicon Valley’s tech industry. About 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
In 2017, the Trump administration set up an H-1B visa abuse hotline for American workers to email if they or their coworkers were being replaced by foreign workers. Last year, a total of more than 5,000 cases of H-1B visa abuse was reported.
Four million Americans turn 18 years old every year and begin looking for good jobs in the American economy, or enter higher education with the same goal. For decades, the federal government has inflated the supply of new labor by annually admitting more than 1.5 million new legal immigrants, providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by not effectively enforcing national immigration laws to block the employment of about 8 million illegal aliens.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Rep. Yoder’s India Lobby
Offers $$$ to Jump Line for
Green Cards
AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi, File
A group of Indian visa-workers is offering to pay the federal government $1,500 per family to jump the line for green cards, according to a friendly report by the McClatchy news bureau.
The proposed trade would send just $1,500 from each Indian family to the federal treasury in exchange for a fast-track to the hugely valuable prize of citizenship for at least 100,000 outsourcing-workers and their family members.
That small payment would save the Indians from paying lawyers’ fees, allow them to compete directly against American professionals for jobs, and allow them to quickly begin the chain-migration process for their many parents and siblings. The money could be used to fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency, say the advocates, who are also hoping their proposal will be supported by their ally, Kansas GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder.
“It goes from insulting to preposterous to propose such a thing,” countered Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. She continued:
It is insulting for them to think they should get to jump in line ahead of others for paying a ridiculously low sum of money, and it is preposterous [for them] to think they somehow are preferred immigrants over millions of others who have been sponsored and are waiting their turn in line.
Immigration lobbyists are pitching a plan to pay for disaster relief by charging high-skilled workers from India and China a fee to obtain green cards.
And they’re leaning hard on Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kansas, to help …
under this proposal green card applicants from certain countries could pay an additional fee to bypass the green card backlog. The money would be would be earmarked for disaster relief, which [the group’s lawyer also] said would increase the chances of passing green card policy reforms.
An additional $1,500 green card fee for all employment-based Chinese and Indian immigrants would raise $1.5 billion over 10 years, according to an analysis by Immigration Voice. A fee of $2,500 would raise another $1 billion …
In January, the group said their funds could be used to pay for a border wall, said McClatchy:
Mexico refuses to pay for President Donald Trump’s wall, but advocates representing another group of foreign workers legally in the U.S. say they would eagerly raise billions for the barrier if it’d help them get green cards faster.
Who? Under the proposal, Indian and Chinese tech workers would step up and kick in $2,500 each or more in fees if it meant they could get their green cards after five or six years instead of waiting decades as some do now.
“The Indian high-skilled workers will gladly, enthusiastically and happily pay for the wall if given an opportunity to do so in order to get fair treatment on green card waiting times,” said Leon Fresco, an attorney for Immigration Voice, an advocacy group working with members of Congress on the measure.
The Immigration Voice group says it represents up to 300,000 Indian outsourcing workers, plus up to 300,000 family members, who are waiting for green-cards that have been sponsored by their employers. The group is already working closely with Yoder to pass a fast-track green-card bill in the 2019 appropriations bills.
Indian advocates say some Indians visa-workers face a waiting line of up to 150 years to get a green card. The problem, they say, is the so-called “country caps” on the distribution of the 140,000 employer-based visas awarded each year. Those caps theoretically limit nationals of each country to just 7 percent of the annual 140,000 visas, chiefly to ensure a wide distribution of the visas to diverse countries.
But most of the Indians get through the green-card line in several years, partly because the complex visa rules allow roughly 23,000 Indian workers and families get green cards every year. That actual inflow is far higher than the notional 9,800-per-year limit set by the 7 percent country cap.
There are roughly 300,000 Indians in the green-card line because brand-name U.S. companies, hospitals, banks, and universities have outsourced millions of U.S. jobs to Indian subcontractors, such as Infosys, Cognizant or Wipro. Most of the 300,000 Indians in the line were imported for temporary U.S. jobs via the L-1 and H-1B visa-worker programs and were later rewarded when their employers sponsored them for the huge prize of green cards.
Nationwide, the U.S. government helps companies keep a population of roughly 1.5 million visa-workers in American white-collar jobs. The various visa programs — H-1B , L-1 , J-1, H4 EAD , OPT , TN — allow employers to hire cheap foreign doctors , therapists , programmers, engineers, accountants, designers , architects, managers, recruitment specialists, P.R. experts, and many other professionals. These huge labor programs boost the stock market by lowering salaries for many American college graduates and also push many Americans into lower-tech, lower-wage careers, such as journalism.
For example, Northwestern University is using the H-1B program to hire roughly 170 foreign graduates each year to fill science and teaching jobs for just $65,000 a year, according to government data provided by MyVisaJobs.com . U.S. science grads — whether young or old, male or female, Asian, Latino, African-American, or European-American — were not offered those university jobs.
The university is paying its H-1Bs workers just above Chicago’s “living wage” of $59,215, as estimated by CNBC .
In July, Yoder worked with the Indian group to win initial approval for a bill that would abolish the country caps.
If the country caps are removed by Yoder’s bill late this year, U.S. Fortune 500 companies and Indian outsourcing firms will be able to offer fast-track green cards to roughly five times more Indian hires each year. That giveaway will help investors greatly accelerate the organized outsourcing of middle-class healthcare and technology jobs to lower-wage Indian employees, so boosting the investors’ stock values.
The new green-cards-for-cash plan is being offered to Yoder because he chairs the House homeland defense appropriations committee, which oversees immigration and emergency management. Immigration Voice’s political advisor, Leon Fresco, told McClatchy:
“At the end of the day, Yoder has a massive hand here because he needs to write the FEMA legislation,” said Leon Fresco, the strategist and general counsel for Immigration Voice. “One way or another there’s no way this doesn’t go through Yoder.”
Fresco notes that Yoder plan to eliminate the country caps will not raise the annual distribution of green cards to H-1B workers.
But Yoder’s plan will allow U.S. and Indian companies to recruit and import more workers via the L-1 visa program. The program has no cap and it allows visa-workers to be paid minimum wages, even for white-collar jobs.
The State Department is already issuing almost 80,000 multi-year L-1 visas each year, creating a resident population of perhaps 400,000 L-1 workers. Some L-1 visa-workers are used to set up new businesses in the United States, but many are used for outsourcing work, alongside H-1B visa-workers.
Yoder’s dive into the middle-class outsourcing controversy comes as he faces a difficult election campaign in a district that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. His district already includes employers who have outsourced white-collar jobs to 1,400 H-1B workers , according to H-1BFacts.com.
Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants ” push-polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.
Yoder’s office did not dismiss the cash-for-green-cards plan. According to McClatchy:
“We are still in the early stages of looking into this specific proposal, but we remain committed to ensuring that (a green card bill) gets across the finish line and becomes law,” Yoder’s spokesman C.J. Grover said in an email.
Yoder is expected to push his country-caps plan in the must-pass homeland defense budget, during the lame-duck session after the voters have cast their votes and as retiring legislators look for lobbying jobs with business.
Many reports show high levels of corruption in the H-1B program, reflecting the high levels of corruption in the home countries. For example, corruption in India is ranked as the 81st most corrupt country , partly because of caste vs. caste hostility, according to Transparency International. The corruption debilitates the country’s economic growth, say critics.
The home-country corruption has ensured numerous arrests of Indian executives in the United States, plus a series of lawsuits against large Indian outsourcing companies. The lawsuits charge the Indian companies with discriminating against Americans to ensure the placement of more Indian workers in U.S. jobs.
“The most objectionable result of lifting the country caps would be to reward the [American] companies that have used the [temporary] guest-workers to replace Americans,” said Vaughan. “It completes the process for them … it institutionalizes this in a way that will cause permanent harm to Americans who aspire to white-collar jobs.”
Moreover, the “guest-worker visas are not meant to be a stepping stone for green cards,” she added. But for Indian visa-workers, “that was their expectation, and it was wrong, and now they are demanding their expectations be filled … They think adding a little money to the discussion might be enough to grease the way, but that is not the way Americans see their immigration system,” she added.
“Americans value fairness in our immigration system,” along with the need for some diversity, minimal corruption and a first-come-first-served policy, she said.
Also, the Indians’ offer to pay for approval by Yoder and other legislators to jump the line “shows the disdain they have for other categories” of would-be immigrants, said Vaughan. “To suggest for a mere $1,500 they should be allowed to jump in line, that they are somehow more worthy … in the way you would try to buy off a police officer for not writing a ticket — it smacks of the same kind of mentality,” said Vaughan.
The $1,500 payment is also trivial, she said, because the acceleration of green cards would be extremely valuable, she said. It would allow the visa-workers to quit their low-wage outsourcing jobs sooner, and also accelerate the arrival of their elderly parents via chain-migration rules, she said. Parents “are one of the most expensive demographic groups [for taxpayers] because of their likely need for health care benefits, and the fact that they have not contributed over a lifetime to Social Security or any other social welfare program through taxes,” she said.
The promised payment of $1.5 billion is enough to keep the federal government operating for four hours. In 2017, the federal government’s budget was $3,664 billion.
But the Indian lobby has managed to win sponsorship from more than 80 percent of the House for Yoder’s H.R. 392 bill to remove the country caps. Their lobbying campaign relies on frequent group visits to member’s district offices, plus the persuasive power of the Indian doctors from local hospitals and the wives of visa-workers, Fresco told Breitbart News.
Yoder’s bill might get passed this Fall, Vaughan said. “I don’t think most members of Congress understand the implications [of the country cap removal] and they are attracted [to the argument] that it is somehow more fair to do away with the per-country caps,” she said.
“Per-country caps ensure a diverse flow of immigrants from many countries,” said RJ Hauman, government relations director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He continued:
Without those caps in place, India will consume the lion’s share of the permanent skilled visas, creating a discriminatory system that favors a single foreign nation. H.R. 392 shreds any pretense that programs like the H-1B and L visa [programs] are anything but a track for intending immigrants – not a short-term foreign labor program. No one promised [these Indian] temporary guest workers that they would ever have the chance to immigrate permanently.
“Allowing temporary guest workers the opportunity to pay for green cards – no matter where the money goes – completely undermines the integrity of our immigration system,” said Hauman, adding:
The last thing we need is another pay-for-play route to citizenship like the fraud-ridden EB-5 program.
Immigration Economics
Four million young Americans will join the workforce this year, but the federal government will also import 1.1 million legal immigrants, and allow an army of at least 2 million visa-workers to work U.S. jobs, alongside asylum-claiming migrants and illegal aliens.
HERITAGE FOUNDATION:
AMNESTY WOULD DOUBLE U.S. POPULATION, POVERTY, HOUSING AND HOMELESS CRISIS
"Critics argue that giving amnesty to 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. would have an immediate negative impact on America’s working and middle class — specifically black Americans and the white working class — who would be in direct competition for blue-collar jobs with the largely low-skilled illegal alien population." JOHN BINDER
"Additionally, under current legal immigration laws, if given amnesty, the illegal alien population would be allowed to bring an unlimited number of their foreign relatives to the U.S. This population could boost already high legal immigration levels to an unprecedented high. An amnesty for illegal aliens would also likely triple the number of border-crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border." JOHN BINDER
“At the current rate of invasion (mostly through Mexico, but also through Canada) the United States will be completely over run with illegal aliens by the year 2025. I’m not talking about legal immigrants who follow US law to become citizens. In less than 20 years, if we do not stop the invasion, ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the United States”…. Tom Barrett
U.S. Immigrant Numbers Hit 44.5 Million, Near 108-Year Record
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
The immigrant percentage of the U.S. population has hit 13.7 percent, near the 1910 record of 14.7 percent, according to the latest release by the Census Bureau.
In 2017, 13.7 percent of people (one in 7.3 people) in the United States were immigrants, up from 13.5 percent in 2016, and up from 5 percent (one in 20 people) in 1970, according to the bureau’s data .
The rising share means 44.5 million people in a population of 325.7 million people were born abroad. That 44.5 million includes roughly 22 million naturalized citizens, 11 million other residents, including more than 1.5 million foreign temporary visa-workers, plus roughly 11 million illegal immigrants, according to the bureau:
The millions of migrants are concentrated in the coastal metropolises, such as Los Angeles and New York, but many are migrating into interior states. According to the New York Times
New York and California, states with large immigrant populations, both had increases of less than six percent since 2010. But foreign-born populations rose by 20 percent in Tennessee, 13 percent in Ohio, 12 percent in South Carolina and 20 percent in Kentucky over the same period.
The recent inflow includes a rising percentage of Asians from China, Vietnam, India, said the New York Times .
Brookings Institution analysis of that data shows that 41 percent of the people who said they arrived since 2010 came from Asia. Just 39 percent were from Latin America. About 45 percent were college educated, the analysis found, compared with about 30 percent of those who came between 2000 and 2009.
The Asian inflow include includes many college graduates because many of them are immigrating via the various business-backed programs for college-graduate visa-workers.
The Census Bureau may have undercounted the number of illegal immigrants, ensuring the immigrant population now exceeds the 1910 percentage, NBC News reported :
Illegal immigrants can be more difficult for surveyors to locate due to informal living arrangements, and some may avoid being included in surveys for fear of being reported to the government, researchers say.
Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at Pew Research Center, has estimated that the actual immigrant population is likely 3 percent to 5 percent higher than the number in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
A chart by the Washington Post suggests that this huge wave of migrants has changed politics by giving Democrats’ identity-politics ideology an electoral lock in counties where immigrants comprise more than 20 percent of the population:
The New York Times report, however, demurely ignored the political and economic impact of this huge wage of workers, consumers, and renters.
Some economic impacts are obvious, for example, immigrants expand the economy by working, consuming and renting real-estate. Some also raise the productivity of Americans by inventing new products, importing new goods, or develop novel services that allow Americans to produce more wealth or enjoyment per hour.
But many less-skilled migrants play their largest role by simply shifting small slices of wealth from person to person, for example, by competing up rents in their neighborhood or by competing down wages in their workplace. The crudest examples can be seen in agriculture.
European farms tend to buy labor-saving machines from well-paid European manufacturing workers because their farmworkers’ wages are high, but many U.S. farm companies simply use cheap legal and illegal immigrant labor while sharing the savings from not buying machines between profit-seeking investors and penny-counting consumers.
VIDEO
Of course, that cheap-labor business practice leaves Americans taxpayers to carry the off-work costs of immigrants, such as welfare programs, civic turmoil, Diversity , education costs for migrants’ children, and the occasional murder of an Iowa jogger, a massacre in a Florida nightclub, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2011.
But the immigration is not happening in a vacuum — it is happening as a vast wave of technology allows companies and investors to move products and assets (such as cheap migrant labor) around the world, at very low cost. This technological change has liberated societies to vastly enrich themselves — see China for example — even as it also seems to centralize power and wealth.
There is plenty of data to suggest that this combination of technological change and Congress’ passage of the 1965 immigration law have together since shifted a huge volume of wealth from younger, working Americans towards the older Americans who own real-estate, stocks, or companies.
That wage-pressure process began first among the interchangeable, blue-collar, unskilled Americans — such as farm workers — but it is shifting up the economic ladder to hit interchangeable, college-educated Americans. In President Donald Trump’s economy, blue-collar Americans are gaining amid modest restrictions on immigration while middle-class Americans are seeing slower gains as companies import more cheap college-graduates and also export their jobs to expanding foreign populations of clever, hardworking college-graduates.
This economic shift is reflected in another important economic change — the declining importance of Americans’ wages and salaries compared to other Americans’ dividends and stock prices. As the New York Times
Data from the Federal Reserve show that over the last decade and a half, the proportion of family income from wages has dropped from nearly 70 percent to just under 61 percent. It’s an extraordinary shift, driven largely by the investment profits of the very wealthy. In short, the people who possess tradable assets, especially stocks, have enjoyed a recovery that Americans dependent on savings or income from their weekly paycheck have yet to see. Ten years after the financial crisis, getting ahead by going to work every day seems quaint, akin to using the phone book to find a number or renting a video at Blockbuster” …
In 2016, net worth among white middle-income families was 19 percent below 2007 levels, adjusted for inflation. But among blacks, it was down 40 percent, and Hispanics saw a drop of 46 percent. For many, old-fashioned hard work has simply not been a viable path out of this hole. After unemployment peaked in the fall of 2009, it took years for joblessness to return to pre-recession levels. Slack in the labor market left the employed and unemployed alike with little leverage to demand raises, even as corporate profits surged.
Maybe it was inevitable that when half the population watches its wages stagnate while the other half gets rich in the market, the result is President Donald Trump and Brexit.
Unsurprisingly, many legislators are under severe pressure from donors to preserve the current national economic strategy of growth-by-immigration. In February 2018, for example, a loose alliance of business-first Republicans, pro-migration Democrats, and progressive media blocked President Donald Trump’s “Four Pillars” immigration reforms which would shift the United States back towards a low-immigration/high-wage economy.
Economists, investors, talking heads and political advocates in the Democratic and Republican parties are deeply reluctant to draw any connection between the immigration inflow of consumers, workers, and renters, and the economic shift from wages to stocks.
But the linkage is often hinted at. For example, Noah Smith, a pro-immigration, pro-diversity writer for Bloomberg News empire, wrote a column in July 2018 saying that the 1924 immigration cutbacks helped create the 1929 crash:
The housing crash of the mid-1920s might well have been a direct result of the curtailment of immigration. And if the Great Depression and/or the stock crash of 1929 was caused or exacerbated by that housing crash, there’s a clear and direct link between immigration restriction and the U.S.’s worst economic crisis of the 20th century. The reduction in agglomeration effects reported by Ager and Hansen probably also contributed to lower corporate earnings and sapped vitality in American cities.
Yet Smith is silent about the flip-side of immigration cuts — the impact of the 1965 immigration expansion law, which has added up to 44.5 million consumers, workers and renters to the United States’ marketplace.
Immigration Economics
Four million young Americans will join the workforce this year, but the federal government will also import 1.1 million legal immigrants, and allow an army of at least 2 million visa-workers to work U.S. jobs, alongside asylum-claiming migrants and illegal aliens.
Census: Population to 420 million in 2060, 2/3rds immigrants, 79 million
An immigrant woman from Honduras carries her baby inside the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley on Saturday, June 23, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. Families, who have been processed and released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, wait inside the facility before continuing their journey to cities across the United States.
The U.S.-born baby is, of course, a U.S. citizen, whose illegal alien parents are eligible to receive, on the baby’s behalf, food stamps, nutrition from the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, and numerous tax benefits, including the EITC.
Most importantly, the newborn is deportation insurance for its parents. Illegal aliens facing deportation can argue that to deport one or more parents would create an “extreme hardship” for the new baby. If an immigration officer agrees, we’ve added a new adult to the nation’s population. At age 21 the former birthright citizen baby can formally apply for green cards for parents and siblings, and they, in turn, can start their own immigration chains.
Rep. Yoder’s India Lobby Offers $$$ to Jump Line for Green Cards
AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi, File
A group of Indian visa-workers is offering to pay the federal government $1,500 per family to jump the line for green cards, according to a friendly report by the McClatchy news bureau.
The proposed trade would send just $1,500 from each Indian family to the federal treasury in exchange for a fast-track to the hugely valuable prize of citizenship for at least 100,000 outsourcing-workers and their family members.
That small payment would save the Indians from paying lawyers’ fees, allow them to compete directly against American professionals for jobs, and allow them to quickly begin the chain-migration process for their many parents and siblings. The money could be used to fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency, say the advocates, who are also hoping their proposal will be supported by their ally, Kansas GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder.
“It goes from insulting to preposterous to propose such a thing,” countered Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. She continued:
It is insulting for them to think they should get to jump in line ahead of others for paying a ridiculously low sum of money, and it is preposterous [for them] to think they somehow are preferred immigrants over millions of others who have been sponsored and are waiting their turn in line.
Immigration lobbyists are pitching a plan to pay for disaster relief by charging high-skilled workers from India and China a fee to obtain green cards.
And they’re leaning hard on Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kansas, to help …
under this proposal green card applicants from certain countries could pay an additional fee to bypass the green card backlog. The money would be would be earmarked for disaster relief, which [the group’s lawyer also] said would increase the chances of passing green card policy reforms.
An additional $1,500 green card fee for all employment-based Chinese and Indian immigrants would raise $1.5 billion over 10 years, according to an analysis by Immigration Voice. A fee of $2,500 would raise another $1 billion …
In January, the group said their funds could be used to pay for a border wall, said McClatchy:
Mexico refuses to pay for President Donald Trump’s wall, but advocates representing another group of foreign workers legally in the U.S. say they would eagerly raise billions for the barrier if it’d help them get green cards faster.
Who? Under the proposal, Indian and Chinese tech workers would step up and kick in $2,500 each or more in fees if it meant they could get their green cards after five or six years instead of waiting decades as some do now.
“The Indian high-skilled workers will gladly, enthusiastically and happily pay for the wall if given an opportunity to do so in order to get fair treatment on green card waiting times,” said Leon Fresco, an attorney for Immigration Voice, an advocacy group working with members of Congress on the measure.
The Immigration Voice group says it represents up to 300,000 Indian outsourcing workers, plus up to 300,000 family members, who are waiting for green-cards that have been sponsored by their employers. The group is already working closely with Yoder to pass a fast-track green-card bill in the 2019 appropriations bills.
Indian advocates say some Indians visa-workers face a waiting line of up to 150 years to get a green card. The problem, they say, is the so-called “country caps” on the distribution of the 140,000 employer-based visas awarded each year. Those caps theoretically limit nationals of each country to just 7 percent of the annual 140,000 visas, chiefly to ensure a wide distribution of the visas to diverse countries.
But most of the Indians get through the green-card line in several years, partly because the complex visa rules allow roughly 23,000 Indian workers and families get green cards every year. That actual inflow is far higher than the notional 9,800-per-year limit set by the 7 percent country cap.
There are roughly 300,000 Indians in the green-card line because brand-name U.S. companies, hospitals, banks, and universities have outsourced millions of U.S. jobs to Indian subcontractors, such as Infosys, Cognizant or Wipro. Most of the 300,000 Indians in the line were imported for temporary U.S. jobs via the L-1 and H-1B visa-worker programs and were later rewarded when their employers sponsored them for the huge prize of green cards.
Nationwide, the U.S. government helps companies keep a population of roughly 1.5 million visa-workers in American white-collar jobs. The various visa programs — H-1B , L-1 , J-1, H4 EAD , OPT , TN — allow employers to hire cheap foreign doctors , therapists , programmers, engineers, accountants, designers , architects, managers, recruitment specialists, P.R. experts, and many other professionals. These huge labor programs boost the stock market by lowering salaries for many American college graduates and also push many Americans into lower-tech, lower-wage careers, such as journalism.
For example, Northwestern University is using the H-1B program to hire roughly 170 foreign graduates each year to fill science and teaching jobs for just $65,000 a year, according to government data provided by MyVisaJobs.com . U.S. science grads — whether young or old, male or female, Asian, Latino, African-American, or European-American — were not offered those university jobs.
The university is paying its H-1Bs workers just above Chicago’s “living wage” of $59,215, as estimated by CNBC .
In July, Yoder worked with the Indian group to win initial approval for a bill that would abolish the country caps.
If the country caps are removed by Yoder’s bill late this year, U.S. Fortune 500 companies and Indian outsourcing firms will be able to offer fast-track green cards to roughly five times more Indian hires each year. That giveaway will help investors greatly accelerate the organized outsourcing of middle-class healthcare and technology jobs to lower-wage Indian employees, so boosting the investors’ stock values.
The new green-cards-for-cash plan is being offered to Yoder because he chairs the House homeland defense appropriations committee, which oversees immigration and emergency management. Immigration Voice’s political advisor, Leon Fresco, told McClatchy:
“At the end of the day, Yoder has a massive hand here because he needs to write the FEMA legislation,” said Leon Fresco, the strategist and general counsel for Immigration Voice. “One way or another there’s no way this doesn’t go through Yoder.”
Fresco notes that Yoder plan to eliminate the country caps will not raise the annual distribution of green cards to H-1B workers.
But Yoder’s plan will allow U.S. and Indian companies to recruit and import more workers via the L-1 visa program. The program has no cap and it allows visa-workers to be paid minimum wages, even for white-collar jobs.
The State Department is already issuing almost 80,000 multi-year L-1 visas each year, creating a resident population of perhaps 400,000 L-1 workers. Some L-1 visa-workers are used to set up new businesses in the United States, but many are used for outsourcing work, alongside H-1B visa-workers.
Yoder’s dive into the middle-class outsourcing controversy comes as he faces a difficult election campaign in a district that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. His district already includes employers who have outsourced white-collar jobs to 1,400 H-1B workers , according to H-1BFacts.com.
Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants ” push-polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.
Yoder’s office did not dismiss the cash-for-green-cards plan. According to McClatchy:
“We are still in the early stages of looking into this specific proposal, but we remain committed to ensuring that (a green card bill) gets across the finish line and becomes law,” Yoder’s spokesman C.J. Grover said in an email.
Yoder is expected to push his country-caps plan in the must-pass homeland defense budget, during the lame-duck session after the voters have cast their votes and as retiring legislators look for lobbying jobs with business.
Many reports show high levels of corruption in the H-1B program, reflecting the high levels of corruption in the home countries. For example, corruption in India is ranked as the 81st most corrupt country , partly because of caste vs. caste hostility, according to Transparency International. The corruption debilitates the country’s economic growth, say critics.
The home-country corruption has ensured numerous arrests of Indian executives in the United States, plus a series of lawsuits against large Indian outsourcing companies. The lawsuits charge the Indian companies with discriminating against Americans to ensure the placement of more Indian workers in U.S. jobs.
“The most objectionable result of lifting the country caps would be to reward the [American] companies that have used the [temporary] guest-workers to replace Americans,” said Vaughan. “It completes the process for them … it institutionalizes this in a way that will cause permanent harm to Americans who aspire to white-collar jobs.”
Moreover, the “guest-worker visas are not meant to be a stepping stone for green cards,” she added. But for Indian visa-workers, “that was their expectation, and it was wrong, and now they are demanding their expectations be filled … They think adding a little money to the discussion might be enough to grease the way, but that is not the way Americans see their immigration system,” she added.
“Americans value fairness in our immigration system,” along with the need for some diversity, minimal corruption and a first-come-first-served policy, she said.
Also, the Indians’ offer to pay for approval by Yoder and other legislators to jump the line “shows the disdain they have for other categories” of would-be immigrants, said Vaughan. “To suggest for a mere $1,500 they should be allowed to jump in line, that they are somehow more worthy … in the way you would try to buy off a police officer for not writing a ticket — it smacks of the same kind of mentality,” said Vaughan.
The $1,500 payment is also trivial, she said, because the acceleration of green cards would be extremely valuable, she said. It would allow the visa-workers to quit their low-wage outsourcing jobs sooner, and also accelerate the arrival of their elderly parents via chain-migration rules, she said. Parents “are one of the most expensive demographic groups [for taxpayers] because of their likely need for health care benefits, and the fact that they have not contributed over a lifetime to Social Security or any other social welfare program through taxes,” she said.
The promised payment of $1.5 billion is enough to keep the federal government operating for four hours. In 2017, the federal government’s budget was $3,664 billion.
But the Indian lobby has managed to win sponsorship from more than 80 percent of the House for Yoder’s H.R. 392 bill to remove the country caps. Their lobbying campaign relies on frequent group visits to member’s district offices, plus the persuasive power of the Indian doctors from local hospitals and the wives of visa-workers, Fresco told Breitbart News.
Yoder’s bill might get passed this Fall, Vaughan said. “I don’t think most members of Congress understand the implications [of the country cap removal] and they are attracted [to the argument] that it is somehow more fair to do away with the per-country caps,” she said.
“Per-country caps ensure a diverse flow of immigrants from many countries,” said RJ Hauman, government relations director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He continued:
Without those caps in place, India will consume the lion’s share of the permanent skilled visas, creating a discriminatory system that favors a single foreign nation. H.R. 392 shreds any pretense that programs like the H-1B and L visa [programs] are anything but a track for intending immigrants – not a short-term foreign labor program. No one promised [these Indian] temporary guest workers that they would ever have the chance to immigrate permanently.
“Allowing temporary guest workers the opportunity to pay for green cards – no matter where the money goes – completely undermines the integrity of our immigration system,” said Hauman, adding:
The last thing we need is another pay-for-play route to citizenship like the fraud-ridden EB-5 program.
Immigration Economics
Four million young Americans will join the workforce this year, but the federal government will also import 1.1 million legal immigrants, and allow an army of at least 2 million visa-workers to work U.S. jobs, alongside asylum-claiming migrants and illegal aliens.
A Border Patrol agent takes down information of a man and his son who crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States in Hidalgo County, Texas, on May 26, 2017. (Benjamin Chasteen/The Epoch Times)
US Sees 38 Percent Jump in Families Apprehended at Southwest Border
Immigration loopholes spur rush for the border, immigration officials suggest
September 13, 2018 Updated: September 13, 2018
WASHINGTON—Cross the border into the United States with a child, claim asylum, and you’re home-free.
That’s the message smugglers and migrants are hearing, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“Smugglers and traffickers understand our broken immigration laws better than most and know that if a family unit illegally enters the U.S., they are likely to be released into the interior,” DHS spokesman Daniel Hetledge said in a Sept. 12 statement . “Specifically, DHS is required to release families entering the country illegally within 20 days of apprehension.”
The number of family units crossing the southwest border illegally and claiming asylum jumped 38 percent in August over the previous month, according to the latest numbers published by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
More than 12,700 individuals who were part of a family unit (at least one adult and one child) were apprehended by Border Patrol after crossing the border in August. That’s 3,500 more than in July.
“It’s really telling that the numbers have increased so much in a one-month period, during the time when this was in the news so much,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The court-imposed catch-and-release policy is a major enticement for people to come here.”
A Border Patrol agent by the U.S.-Mexico border west of Nogales, Ariz., on May 23, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
CBP said the increase in family units is “a clear indicator that the migration flows are responding to gaps in our nation’s legal framework.”
“We know that the vast majority of family units who have been released—despite having no right to remain in any legal status—fail to ever depart or be removed,” Hetledge said.
He said that through the third quarter of fiscal 2018, only 1.4 percent of family units have been repatriated to their home country from non-contiguous countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Individuals from those three countries make up almost 98 percent of family units apprehended.
Catch-and-Release
At issue is a court judgment dating back to 1997—called the Flores Settlement Agreement—that mandates immigration authorities to release family units from custody after 20 days. On top of that is a 2015 Obama-era amendment that says children can’t be detained in adult facilities—forcing either separation or release.
That means the administration can’t prosecute illegal border crossers without separating the adults and children—which is what started happening in April when a “zero tolerance” policy was reinvigorated.
An outcry ensued when around 2,500 children were temporarily separated from adults who were in custody pending their cases.
Trump issued an executive order on June 20 to stop the separations, and a court injunction gave the government less than a month to reunite the families.
The 2,500 children represented about one-quarter of the number of family units that entered each month in the last several months. Most have since been reunited; however 14 of the adults were discovered to not have a familial relationship with the child or were convicted criminals, for crimes including rape, child abuse, and kidnapping.
Without the ability to separate adults for prosecution, authorities have no choice but to release them without consequence.
“This is exactly what even the Obama administration lawyers predicted when the judge ruled back in 2015 that they could not detain kids with their parents,” said Vaughan.
She said the continuation of catch-and-release is a “major motivation” for illegal entry.
“The family-separation uproar was not really representative of all cases, and it certainly didn’t seem to have deterred many people from coming,” Vaughan said.
Hondurans Fidel Arcangel Gonsalez Meza, 26, and his 5-year-old son, at the Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas, after corssing the border, on May 30, 2017. (Benjamin Chasteen/The Epoch Times)
Amendment Denied
Trump’s executive order also resulted in Attorney General Jeff Sessions requesting amendments to the Flores agreement. One would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain families together in ICE family residential facilities, and the second would allow ICE to detain families longer than 20 days.
The amendments would enable an immigration case to be adjudicated while the aliens are in custody, which takes a median of 40 days, rather than years if they’re released into the country.
It also means that those who don’t qualify for asylum (usually around 80 percent), or some other immigration benefit, can be readily repatriated.
On July 9, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, which issued the Flores order, declined to amend the 20-day provision.
Meanwhile, on June 28, the Defense Department said it had been asked by DHS to help house and care for “an alien family population of up to 12,000 people,” a Defense spokesman said.
The total number of family units apprehended by Border Patrol so far in fiscal 2018 is almost 90,000.
5 Techniques Google Will Use to Ensure MAGA Is a ‘Hiccup in History’s Arc’
In a recently leaked video of a Google all-hands “TGIF” meeting following the election of President Trump, the tech giant’s leadership discussed plans to thwart President Trump’s agenda — here are some of tools and techniques the Masters of the Universe plan to utilize.
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recently leaked video from a Google TGIF meeting shortly after the election of President Trump showed Google executives and employees dismayed at the victory of Trump and discussing plans to thwart Trump’s agenda and the larger populist movement worldwide. Here are just some of the ways that Google could attempt to make sure, to use the words of Google VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker, that “this election and others around the world” are just a “hiccup in history’s arc towards progress.”
1: Google Jigsaw
During the leaked TGIF meeting, one of the projects discussed was Jigsaw. Jigsaw is Alphabet’s think tank department or “social incubator.” Initially branded Google Ideas in 2010, the project was renamed Jigsaw in 2016 with then Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt explaining that the new name “reflects our belief that collaborative problem-solving yields the best solutions” and that the team’s mission “is to use technology to tackle the toughest geopolitical challenges, from countering violent extremism to thwarting online censorship to mitigating the threats associated with digital attacks.”
However, so far most of what Jigsaw has produced has been new ways to censor information online, such as their “Perspective” A.I. product which attempts to crack down on “abusive” comments online. Perspective is used to filter and compile comments on websites for human review. To learn what exactly counts as a “toxic” comment, the program studied hundreds of thousands of user comments that had been deemed unacceptable by reviewers on websites like the New York Times and Wikipedia. “All of us are familiar with increased toxicity around comments in online conversations,” said Jigsaw president Jared Cohen. “People are leaving conversations because of this, and we want to empower publications to get those people back.”
Even those on the left appeared uneasy about the idea of censoring comments online based on an arbitrary number score assigned to “toxic” words. Feminist author Sady Doyle told Wired in 2016: “People need to be able to talk in whatever register they talk… imagine what the Internet would be like if you couldn’t say ‘Donald Trump is a moron,’” a phrase that registered a 99/100 on the AI’s personal attack scale.
2: Filter bubbles
A filter bubble is described by
Technopedia as: “
the intellectual isolation that can occur when websites make use of algorithms to selectively assume the information a user would want to see, and then give information to the user according to this assumption… A filter bubble, therefore, can cause users to get significantly less contact with contradicting viewpoints, causing the user to become intellectually isolated… Personalized search results from Google and personalized news stream from Facebook are two perfect examples of this phenomenon.”
This essentially means that Google only returns certain results based on a user’s browsing habits, which means that users may only be suggested content from the sources that reinforce their preconceived ideas. Given the nature of the Google algorithm, this means that users can be manipulated based upon what content the search function returns to them.
This phenomenon becomes particularly worrying around elections, when people are most likely to Google information about prospective candidates. Filter bubbles can mean that a user only receives positive results about a candidate they like and negative results about a candidate they dislike. This type of manipulation is a prime concern of big tech whistleblower Dr. Robert Epstein.
3: “Fake news”
Another way that Google could affect the content that users see is through the marking of certain websites or articles as “fake news.” Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology,
discussed this at the Breitbart Masters of the Universe Town Hall stating:
“If Breitbart published a nice sarcastic, satire, satirical piece, brilliantly written, wouldn’t that look like a fake news story? On the surface, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it get automatically censored because the algorithms, and for that matter the people who are making these decisions, they would look at something that he just said,” point to Marlow, “as some that’s false, invalid, unreasonable, right? And it would get censored.”
“Now, this kind of power should not be in the hands of a handful of executives in Silicon Valley who are not accountable to us the general public, they’re accountable only to their shareholders.”
Christian satire website The Babylon Bee
faced the exact issue that Epstein discussed when Facebook threatened to censor the site for spreading “fake news.” The supposed “fake news” was a satirical article which claimed that CNN had purchased an “industrial-size washing machine to spin news before publication.” Yet, partisan “fact-checking” service Snopes felt the need to
publish a correction of the article that clarified that CNN had not “made a significant investment in heavy machinery.” After Snopes published the article Adam Ford, who runs the Babylon Bee, received a notification from Facebook which warned him that if he continued to publish “fake news” corrected by Snopes on Facebook, he could have his page demonetized and his page reach severely reduced.
Similar tactics could easily be employed by Google to permanently blacklist certain websites or articles to influence voters.
4: Autocomplete suggestions
Further research from Dr. Epstein showed that Google appeared to favor positive autocomplete search results relating to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, even when search terms critical of Clinton were actually more popular at the time. Epstein’s
report revealed that Google
manipulated search results related to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election that had the potential to “shift as many as 3 million votes” according to Epstein.
Epstein along with his colleagues at the American Institute for Behavioral Research (AIBRT) became interested in a
video published by Matt Lieberman of Sourcefed which claimed that Google searches suppressed negative information about Hillary Clinton while other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo showed accurate results.
Epstein and AIBRT tested hundreds of different search terms related to the 2016 election, using Yahoo and Bing search as a control. Epstein’s report stated:
It is somewhat difficult to get the Google search bar to suggest negative searches related to Mrs. Clinton or to make any Clinton-related suggestions when one types a negative search term. Bing and Yahoo, on the other hand, often show a number of negative suggestions in response to the same search terms. Bing and Yahoo seem to be showing us what people are actually searching for; Google is showing us something else — but what, and for what purpose?
As for Google Trends, as Lieberman reported, Google indeed withholds negative search terms for Mrs. Clinton even when such terms show high popularity in Trends. We have also found that Google often suggests positive search terms for Mrs. Clinton even when such terms are nearly invisible in Trends. The widely held belief, reinforced by Google’s own documentation, that Google’s search suggestions are based on “what other people are searching for” seems to be untrue in many instances.
Google tries to explain away such findings by saying its search bar is programmed to avoid suggesting searches that portray people in a negative light. As far as we can tell, this claim is false; Google suppresses negative suggestions selectively, not across the board. It is easy to get autocomplete to suggest negative searches related to prominent people, one of whom happens to be Mrs. Clinton’s opponent.
Epstein then hypothesized that Google directly altered search results in an attempt to influence the 2016 election:
Without whistleblowers or warrants, no one can prove Google executives are using digital shenanigans to influence elections, but I don’t see how we can rule out that possibility. There is nothing illegal about manipulating people using search suggestions and search rankings — quite the contrary, in fact — and it makes good financial sense for a company to use every legal means at its disposal to support its preferred candidates.
5: Cutting off ad revenue to sites Google disagree with ideologically
Google could also curtail free speech by cutting off ad revenue to sites with which they disagree on an ideological level. In February of 2018, current and former Google employees
confirmed to Breitbart that leftists at the company were actively working to damage Breitbart’s advertising revenue. In leaked screenshots obtained by Breitbart News, Google ad account manager Aidan Wilks can be seen advising a client of Google’s that advertising on Breitbart may impact their “brand safety.”
Wilkes then linked the client to
Sleeping Giants , a far-left organization which has repeatedly targeted Breitbart News and other conservative websites with false claims of racism and bigotry. In the same screenshots, another Google employee named Matthew Rivard can be seen telling the client that Wilkes email was a “nice template” for those who wished to “call out” the issue to other clients.
This list includes just some of the tools and techniques Google could use to influence the political opinions of their users. The only thing that can be done to guard against these sort of attacks is to constantly be on the lookout for manipulation by the Masters of the Universe and bring it to the attention of the public. As government scrutiny of Google continues to increase despite the companies claims that it is not ideologically biased, it will require a combined effort to counter the search giant’s plans to make populist governments a “hiccup” in history.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
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