America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Saturday, June 6, 2020
TRUMP'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA'S STUDENTS
The Trump Administration’s Deceitful Ploy to Put More Students in More Debt
Americans currently owe $1.5 trillion in student loans. More than a million borrowers default every year. Under past administrations, the federal government tried to make student loans easier to access, to both understand and pay off. In 2008, the Higher Education Act was updated to move the loan system to 100 percent direct lending through the Department of Education. The move had several benefits, according to the Center for American Progress:
“This completely federalized system has resulted in many benefits: less on-the-ground industry influence in lending; repayment programs that are unavailable in the private market; and, though it may seem ironic given the current dissatisfaction with the repayment system, stronger consumer protections. Perhaps most importantly, the transition to direct lending saves the federal government roughly $6 billion per year—funds that have resulted in an infusion of $36 billion of mandatory funding into the Pell Grant program over the past 10 years.”
But, even though the federal government does all the lending, it doesn’t do nearly all the servicing. Much of the servicing is outsourced to private businesses that own and manage the accounts. The Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid is charged with oversight of these private loan managers. Too often, these private managers intentionally try to keep borrowers in debt. The most common tactic is to not inform—or even deliberately hide information from—borrowers of all their repayment options, which could substantially reduce their burden.
The FSA is failing at its mission. The Department of Education’s Inspector General released a report last month after examining FSA oversight of nine loan servicers over an 18-month period:
“FSA had not established policies and procedures that provided reasonable assurance that the risk of servicer noncompliance with requirements for servicing federally held student loans was mitigated … FSA management rarely used available contract accountability provisions to hold servicers accountable for instances of noncompliance … FSA did not provide servicers with an incentive to take actions to mitigate the risk of continued servicer noncompliance that could harm students.”
In the face of federal inadequacies, several state governments have been launching initiatives to protect student loan borrowers. Rhode Island is pushing for a “student loan bill of rights” that would establish oversight of loan servicers operating in Rhode Island, reports WPRO News. Other states are trying to do the same. “A Maine lawmaker is currently making a push to create a state system to oversee student loan services operating there. Oregon’s attorney general wants to regulate student loan services and force them to be licensed under the state. Connecticut’s student loan bill of rights has been picked up by other statehouses nationwide.”
The Trump administration has joined the battle—but on the side of the private servicers. The Education Department has stopped sharing student loan information with state governments since the start of Trump’s presidency. On Thursday, 21 state attorneys general sent a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos requesting the agency start sharing that information again. “Student loan information is vital to our efforts to protect consumers from illegal, unfair, abusive or deceptive practices by actors in the higher education industry,” the letter read. This is a follow-up to a July 2018 request that was ignored, the attorneys general say. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh told the Washington Post that the “private companies contracted by the Department to service student loans are subject to state consumer protection laws. The established practice of sharing certain student loan information helps states ensure these companies are complying with the law and borrowers are being treated fairly.”
Ironically, DeVos’s agency argues that, since the Department of Education services all the loans – a policy DeVos herself has signaled she wishes to rescind and replace with a decentralized, privately-run loan system—that makes them “federal assets and therefore must be controlled and regulated [exclusively] by the federal government.”
There’s an obvious lesson here: The Trump administration is a government of, for, and by rent-seeking profiteers. But this story contains a challenge to progressive reformers who too often base their hopes and ideas on a stronger, more centralized system. No doubt, student borrowers now wish state governments could wrest more power from the federal government. A powerful, more centralized system has its benefits, but it also creates a rod for an administration like the current one to use on students’ backs.Joshua Alvarez
Joshua Alvarez is a contributor to the Washington Monthly's Political Animal. He edits syndicated opinion columns at the Washington Post, and can be reached at joshuaalvarezmail@gmail.com.
Why Are Student Loan Borrowers Being Kept Out of the Coronavirus Recovery?
The student debt crisis is about to get a whole lot worse. Republicans are refusing to help.
The novel coronavirus outbreak has overwhelmed the country’s health care system, caused widespread unemployment and furloughs, and shut down major parts of the economy, leaving federal and state lawmakers scrambling to support millions of Americans and small businesses.
Even from the outset of the pandemic, it was clear that the ensuing tumult would exacerbate the nation’s pre-existing economic woes and inequities. Low-income workers in the hospitality, retail, and restaurant industries were more likely to lose their jobs. African American and Latino communities have been more susceptible to infection.
Democrats in Congress quickly recognized that this new reality would also impact the millions of student loan borrowers. Already, more than 45 million Americans are still paying off their student loans—accumulating a total of more than $1.6 trillion of outstanding debt. That’s largely due to the rapidly increasing price of higher education. Over the last 20 years, college costs have grown at three times the rate of inflation. The average borrower owes more than $37,000 by the time they graduate.
Meanwhile, there’s been a growing mismatch between the skills employers are looking for and the ones newly minted college graduates have cultivated, making it harder for them to get jobs with which they can pay off their debt.
A global pandemic that has shattered the economy will make that task even more challenging.
That’s why Democrats in March put forward a series of proposals to forgive large portions of student debt as part of the first coronavirus recovery package. House Democrats wanted to forgive $30,000 per borrower (which was never realistic) while Senate Democrats presented a plan to forgive $10,000 across the board. The House plan applied only to public loans, while the Senate proposal authorized the Department of Education to make payments on behalf of borrowers with all loan types.
But the ideas were quickly shot down by Republicans. Instead, the $2.2 billion aid package, known as the CARES Act, suspended interest, payments, and involuntary collection for all federal loan borrowers until September 30. That doesn’t cover every borrower, though; it excludes those with Federal Family Education Loans and Perkins Loans, meaning eight million borrowers still owe monthly payments on their federal student loans.
“I’m sure everybody could use more money,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said on Fox News, when asked about the student debt forgiveness proposals. “But I don’t want to give money to people who have a paycheck. I want to give money to people who have lost their jobs. What the hell has that got to do with the virus?”
Turns out, quite a bit.
The trillions of dollars in student loan debt has widespread effects on borrowers and the economy in normal circumstances. Those with outstanding debt struggle financially while putting off savings, retirement, and major life decisions, like buying a home.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who proposed loan forgiveness even before the pandemic, have said that erasing some of the burden will reduce the wealth gap in America and enable young people to start families and purchase houses. Moody’s has further said that such a move would boost household consumption and investment; improve business formation; and increase home ownership in the long run.
“Student debt cancellation would actually be a boost to the economy,” said Cody Hounanian, the policy director for the advocacy group Student Debt Crisis. In effect, it would free up millions of Americans to stop funneling huge chunks of their earnings into paying off their loans and instead spend that money on buying things and starting businesses and families. “We’re hoping that student debt cancellation will help mitigate what looks like could likely be a pandemic induced recession in the very near future,” Hounanian added.
In other words, the COVID-19 crisis is likely to leave millions of Americans struggling to pay off student loan debt even deeper in the hole. A national forbearance on payments and interest doesn’t solve that issue, it only prolongs it.
“If you’re just suspending payments and waiving interest, then you’re not actually doing anything about the core of the problem,” said Ashley Harrington, the federal advocacy director of the Center for Responsibly Lending (CRL). “Even if you’re not making a monthly payment [you still feel] the effects of student debt on your access to credit, on your mental health, or your job prospects. Student loan borrowers are going to come out of this crisis worse off.”
Americans agree. According to a May 12 Chesapeake Beach Consulting poll commissioned by CRL, more than 60 percent of Americans support permanently reducing student loan debt by $20,000 during the coronavirus crisis. Roughly 78 percent of Democrats support such loan relief, as do roughly 49 percent of Republicans.
That may be a positive sign. The coronavirus outbreak has already gotten Republicans to recognize the importance of a number of social programs and liberal ideas, such as free testing, stimulus checks, and other benefits allotted to Americans in need. Increasingly, GOP voters may start to recognize the hindrance student loan debt has been to letting young people start their lives, especially if it begins to affect them personally.
That, in turn, could result in those voters putting more pressure on their elected representatives. In fact, it already has: In late April, Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York put forward a bill that would extend CARES Act protections to the borrowers left out of the original bill. Still, the GOP is far from where it needs to be. The party remains adamantly resistant to any form of loan relief.
After two failed pandemic-related attempts to address debt relief in Congress—first in the CARES Act, then in the second stimulus package, the HEROES Act—House Democrats are trying again.
On May 12, they proposed a measure to include $10,000 in student loan relief for borrowers who were “economically distressed” before the pandemic hit, meaning they made less than they owed before President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, and extend the suspension of payments to September 2021. Originally, the lawmakers wanted all borrowers to get the $10,000 debt forgiveness, but they balked after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that would have cost $250-300 billion, more than Democrats initially expected.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, however, recently said he supports $10,000 in loan relief across the board and proposed a $750 billion student loan plan focused on income-driven repayment if he’s elected. He also called for full debt relief for borrowers who graduate from a public college or university and whose family earns less than $125,000 per year.
Even $10,000 in universal relief would make a significant impact. Approximately 40 percent of U.S. borrowers would have all their loans canceled, according to a CRL analysis. Of all the borrowers who are currently delinquent or in default, 78 percent would then have less than $40,000 in debt left.
The bill, which passed the House on May 15 and is now awaiting a Senate vote, is expected to meet sharp resistance from Senate Republicans and the White House. But if Trump and the GOP are serious about wanting to restart the economy, a significant step would be to remove the single biggest barrier keeping millions of Americans from engaging in economic activity.
“Student debt cancellation is connected to an increase in GDP,” Hounanian said. “It’s also connected to an increase in jobs, something that’s so important right now when we see unemployment rates skyrocketing.”
Forgiving student loan debt may be expensive. It will surely cost the government in the short term, but it may also save our economy in the long term. That’s a price worth paying.
Kristina Karisch is an editorial intern at the Washington Monthly
"Millions of furloughed workers — who, finding themselves involuntarily out of a paying job, are supposed to be classified as unemployed — appear to have mistakenly assigned themselves to the “employed but absent” bucket." ERIC LEVITZ
BLOG EDITOR: PEREZ IS OBAMA'S FORMER SEC. OF ILLEGAL LABOR AND AN ADVOCATE FOR A BORDERLESS AMERICA WITH NARCOMEX.
DNC Chair Perez: Trump Trying to ‘Spike the Football’ on Unemployment When We Are in a Crisis
Friday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez accused President Donald Trump of attempting to “spike the football” because the U.S. added 2.5 million jobs in May, and unemployment dropped to 13.3%.
Mitchell asked, “Let’s talk about the jobs report, better than expected, the president is touting it, and he seems to be trying to reboot his campaign as he was in the Rose Garden speaking for 40 minutes nonstop about this jobs report as the greatest ever. What is your approach to the jobs report today? Are we back on a better trajectory?”
Perez said, “The greatest ever, talk about an inaccurate statement. You know, over the last three months, Andrea, we have seen 19.6 million jobs lost over the last three months. To give you a perspective, Andrea, in the worst three-month of the Obama administration, the worst three-month period, we had 3.2 million jobs loss. Every president since FDR has seen net job growth in their presidency until now with Donald Trump.”
Mitchell pressed, “Excuse me, in fairness, there was a pandemic, let me just say in fairness, there was a pandemic, which caused a complete shutdown of the economy. The most jobs ever, but the fact is it’s coming back from a flatline.”
Perez said, “But the reality, Andrea, is it didn’t have to be this way. What we know is that last December, last January, last February, this president was asleep at the switch. When he should have been asking, when he should have been listening to his experts, he instead was negotiating a trade deal with China. He wants to get that trade deal. It was a crappy trade deal he got. So here we are now. It has exacerbated the extent of the job loss.”
He added, “We are in a crisis, a real crisis. This is like— this jobs report, I want people to get their jobs back. This is like saying, we were 42 points behind in the football game. Now we’re 35 points behind, and he wants to spike the football for being 35 points behind. We’re in a crisis, Andrea.”
If you open it, jobs will come. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics offered a troubled nation a bit of shockingly good news: The unemployment rate is now 13.3 percent. That’s a higher rate of involuntary joblessness than America ever saw between the end of the Great Depression and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s also a significant decline from the 14.7 percent rate recorded in April, and far lower than almost all observers had expected.
Private-sector economists had projected that the U.S. economy would bleed 7.5 million jobs in May; instead it added 2.5 million, according to Friday’s BLS report. What makes these gains especially surprising is that this monthly jobs report was derived largely from surveys taken during the reference week of May 12, before many state-level reopenings kicked into gear.
All this said, the report isn’t as rosy as its headline findings would suggest — and if Congress misinterprets those findings, a pleasant surprise in May could yield devastation in August.
For one thing, in the BLS’s own view, its unemployment number comes with a massive asterisk. The bureau’s jobs survey was not written to deliver clear results in a context where many millions of workers have been sidelined by lockdowns. And this fact has produced a systematic misclassification of workers. The BLS survey offers respondents the option of saying that they are “employed but absent from work” due to “other reasons.” Millions of furloughed workers — who, finding themselves involuntarily out of a paying job, are supposed to be classified as unemployed — appear to have mistakenly assigned themselves to the “employed but absent” bucket. As a result, the bureau believes the overall rate is actually closer to 16.3 percent. This error was present in both the May and April surveys. So, even when properly interpreted, the May report suggests the labor market is moving in the right direction. But the hole we’re digging out of is significantly deeper than official statistics suggest, according to the official statisticians themselves.
The second major caveat is that job growth was wholly attributable to temporarily sidelined workers returning to their old jobs. The number of Americans on “temporary layoff” fell by 2.7 million in May to 15.3 million. But the number of Americans who were outright fired last month — as opposed to being furloughed — is actually 295,000 higher than in April, with 2.3 million workers suffering permanent job losses.
The surprisingly rapid rehiring of the furloughed is a positive sign. It suggests that Congress’s Paycheck Protection Program — which subsidizes small businesses that rehire their workers or avoid layoffs, and which kicked into high gear in late April — is doing its job. At the same time, the fact that government subsidies are responsible for much of the rehiring means that many of these recovered jobs remain at risk. American restaurants brought 1.4 million workers back on staff in May. But consumer demand for dining out remains far below its pre-pandemic level. If Congress allows PPP funds to phase out this summer, while demand remains depressed, then many workers could ultimately find themselves being furloughed then rehired then permanently fired.
Similarly, stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits have helped to promote job recovery by keeping sidelined workers solvent. Last month, personal income in the U.S. actually rose by a record high of 10.5 percent, thanks entirely to massive government transfers. But enhanced unemployment benefits are set to expire in July. Reports this week suggested that congressional Republicans were softening their opposition to extending at least a portion of those benefits, as rising jobless claims appeared to indicate that unemployment was headed above 20 percent. Now that the president is holding celebratory press conferences about the economy’s strength, however, it is possible that the administration’s supply-siders will gain the upper hand, and opposition to further relief measures will harden. If that happens, today’s cause for hope could become tomorrow’s source of despair.
Paul Krugman Says, Without Evidence, That Great May Jobs Numbers Might Be Cooked
Paul Krugman said Friday, without evidence, that is was possible the much better than expected jobs numbers might be wrong or cooked.
After an enormous backlash from fellow economists and market-watchers, Krugman partially back off the unsubstantiated claims and said he “starting to believe that the modest job gains may well have been real.”
The claim that the gains were modest is extraordinary in light of the fact that May saw the largest ever monthly gain in jobs.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added 2.5 million jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent, upending expectations for around 9 million jobs lost and an unemployment rate of close to 20 percent.
While some forecasters expected the economy to begin adding jobs this summer, few saw a comeback of this scale in May.
Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times and one of the nation’s most prominent economists, immediately raised unfounded doubts about the BLS figures. Other Trump critics also joined in. They did not offer any evidence to substantiate their claims. As CNBC’s Eamon Javers said, this amounts to a claim that the BLS numbers were “cooked.”
Well, the BLS reports a GAIN in jobs and a FALL in unemployment, which almost nobody saw coming. Maybe it's true, and the BLS is definitely doing its best, but you do have to wonder what's going on. 1/
I've been through a number of episodes over the years in which official numbers tell a story at odds with what more informal evidence suggests; often it turns out that there was something quirky (NOT fraudulent) about the official numbers. 2/
This being the Trump era, you can't completely discount the possibility that they've gotten to the BLS, but it's much more likely that the models used to produce these numbers — they aren't really raw data — have gone haywire in a time of pandemic 3/
Prominent economists and others responded by pointing out that this was entirely unwarranted.
Jason Furman, an economist and professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who chaired Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said there was no chance the numbers were cooked.
CNBC’s Eamon Javers said on air that “high profile commenters, sort of a BLS truther crowd” had expressed skepticism but “there is no evidence there is anything wrong with this number here.”
On Twitter, Javers pointed out that the Trump critics were engaging in tactics they formerly deplored when Trump himself or critics of Obama used them.
I’m seeing a LOT of Trump critics on Twitter saying that these unexpected jobs numbers must have been “cooked” to help the president. Remember, candidate Trump made the same allegation against Obama in 2016. There was no evidence for it then and there’s no evidence for it now.
When I asked Sean Spicer about President Trump saying the jobs reports were phony under Obama but taking credit for jobs reports once he got elected, Spicer said: “they may have been phony in the past, but they’re very real now.” https://youtu.be/XTZvppjqrX8
It is hard to communicate just how embarrassing this is.
It would be bad enough coming from any Pundit, but that it comes from Dr Krugman, who positions himself as being the rational, sane, & voice of elite reason, is shaking my head sad.
Getting a lot of outraged pushback over even allowing the possibility of something amiss at BLS. I was just covering myself, because so many weird things have happened lately. But I apologize for any suggestion that a highly professional agency might have been corrupted. 1/
And as I look at the data, I'm starting to believe that the modest job gains may well have been real, not an artifact of the models. I was already on record saying that predictions of a huge job loss didn't look right 2/ https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1268175461579882496 …
It has been 44 days since President Donald Trump promised more immigration changes to help Americans regain some of the many jobs held by imported visa workers.
The promise was made in an Executive Order he issued on April 22
Within 30 days of the effective date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall review nonimmigrant programs and shall recommend to me other measures appropriate to stimulate the United States economy and ensure the prioritization, hiring, and employment of United States workers.
But the reforms have not appeared — and his agencies continue to welcome the inflow of many thousands of foreign workers.
Here are seven ways his agencies help U.S. companies keep a huge workforce of at least 1.3 million contract workers in white collar jobs throughout the coronavirus crash:
1. The Department of State is allowing India to return absent H-1B workers to jobs in the United States, despite regulations which say that their work permits expire if their pay or job description are changed. This policy comes amid strenuous lobbying of Trump by India’s government, which blocked flights on March 16, 81 days ago.
2. The Department of Labor has done nothing visible to eject visa workers who violate their terms of employment, dubbed the “Labor Condition Application.” Foreign workers must leave the country with 60 days after their employers violate the hour, wage, or workplace terms in their LCAs. But, even as many U.S. professionals — Americans and visa-workers — are losing their jobs in the coronavirus crash, only a few thousand Indians are leaving the United States, according to flight plans released by India’s government.
3. The Department of Justice is defending the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program in a lawsuit that points out that the jobs giveaway program was never authorized by Congress, despite the loss of opportunities for American graduates. The OPT and its sister program provide work permits to roughly 500,000 foreigners each year, so helping many enter the Fortune 500 jobs also sought by U.S. graduates.
4. There is no sign the justice department is filing discrimination lawsuits against the companies, CEOs, and hiring managers who hire blocs of homogenous Indian or Chinese visa workers, even though hundreds of thousands of diverse and qualified Americans apply for jobs in the industry each year.
5. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget has blocked a regulation to end the H4EAD program, which was created in 2015 by President Barack Obama to encourage Indian H-1Bs workers to stay in the United States. The H4EAD program awards work permits to at least 100,000 spouses of India’s H-1B workers who are working for many years while waiting for promised green cards.
6. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is fast-tracking requests for H-1B approvals and H4EAD extensions that are needed by roughly 200,000 foreign workers each year.
7. USCIS has dropped plans to curb the use of H-1Bs as white-collar gig-workers for Indian-run staffing companies. A proposed regulation was demoted into a policy, which was recently suppressed by a judge at the request of the Indian staffing firms. The USCIS refused to appeal the case, leaving millions of U.S. graduates vulnerable to replacement by Indian gig-workers imported from Bangalore, Hyderabad, or Tirupathi.
The agencies’ provide “great joy” to the resident population of India’s visa workers, according to Indian visa workers and pro-Indian Twitter accounts:
Small things like premium processing, timely extensions, DL renewal, H4 EAD etc. are things of great joy in the world of EB backlog, immersed in a 100 year time travel for a US greencard.
Nationwide, the federal government allows U.S. and Indian managers at U.S. companies to keep roughly 600,000 H-1B workers in good U.S. jobs, along with roughly 700,000 other white-collar visa workers. That army is boosted by an unknown number of white collar illegals who use fraudulent documents to hide among the legal visa workers
Trump’s agencies also allow many non-college migrants to get jobs sought by Americans.
They include roughly 66,000 H-2B laborers to take a wide variety of blue collar jobs, as foresters, landscapers, waiters, and hotel maids. Those visas are approved by the Department of Homeland Security, which has announced it will not provide an extra bloc of roughly 15,000 visas this year.
Another 100,000 foreigners get J-1 visas from the state department for work in the resort, entertainment, and hotel industry. Without the J-1 program, those jobs would provide training and cash to many young Americans.
At least 200,000 migrants are imported for work by agricultural companies, so reducing the economic pressure on farmers to develop better machines.
But the really big money is the white collar visa workforces. For example, the OPT program delivers up to $40 billion to the universities and colleges because it requires the OPT workers to enroll in education courses before getting their work permits.
Overall, the white collar visa workforce includes roughly 800,000 Indians and 250,000 Chinese, plus a growing population of illegal white collar workers.
The Indian and Chinese workers will work long hours at low wages, without public complaint, because U.S. executives have very powerful sticks and carrots. They can send disfavored workers home and reward favored workers with a huge prize of green cards.
The skewed balance of power makes the Indians and Chinese useful to U.S. executives. In contrast, many executives do not want to hire U.S. graduates who can only be paid with dollars that would otherwise inflate their companies’ stock prices. Besides, U.S. professionals will argue eye-to-eye with their executives and can quit for other jobs.
Companies continue to outsource American jobs — even in the critical infrastructure that needs protection from foreign hackers; The Chattanooga Times Free Pressreported June 2:
The Tennessee Valley Authority is giving formal notice Wednesday to 62 [information technology] workers in Chattanooga and Knoxville that their jobs are ending in 90 days as the federal utility moves to outsource more data and programming work.
Since TVA announced last year it would outsource some of the computer programming work being done at its Chattanooga computer center and its headquarters in Knoxville, nearly half of the 120 jobs being cut have already been phased out as workers found other jobs at TVA or left the agency.
But Trump’s agencies are not doing everything the business groups want.
The State Department is hindering the return of some Indian H-1Bs to the United States by denying embassy approval of needed “visa stamping” documents.
“There is little hope for the early return of more than a thousand unstamped H-1B and other nonimmigrant visa holders stranded in India with no official word on the reopening of U.S. missions there,” which have been closed since March 16, said a report in AmericanBazaarOnline.com. The report continued, “So far 26 people who are awaiting their visa renewals have lost their [U.S.] jobs. Only a fraction of the more than one thousand people currently in India are able to work remotely.”
Almost half of the 1,000 counted contract workers in India are “lawyers, healthcare workers, scientists, architects, students, and those employed in the financial sector,” said the website
The department is also constricting the supply of L-1 visas, which allow companies to import blocs of Indian workers and pay them minimum wages in the United States.
Also, the agency has not accepted the planned 2020 inflow of roughly 2,000 foreign doctors into hospital residencies that would otherwise go to excluded American graduates.
Another poll shows the obvious: Americans want to like migrants, but also really want companies to hire Americans - incl. their kids - before importing more migrants.
Biz responds: Stare deeply into CNN: This isn't about money, it's all about 'dreamers'https://bit.ly/3dbvXzF
The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent and payrolls unexpectedly rose by 2.5 million workers as the easing of restrictions on business activity and government aid led to new hiring in May.
The U.S. unemployment rate fell below last month’s record-high 14.7 percent, which was the highest on record in data going back to 1948. Economists estimate that the unemployment rate reached 25 percent during the Great Depression, although that predated the scientific economy-wide record keeping the government now deploys.
The job gains mark a sudden turnaround from a month earlier, when the economy shed a staggering 20.5 million jobs, by far the worst monthly decline on records back to 1939.
Economists had expected the unemployment rate to rise to nearly 20 percent and the economy to shed an additional 8 million jobs.
The mandatory closures of many businesses and stay-at-home orders slammed what had been a very healthy labor market hard. The economy added jobs for 113 straight weeks through February, a record streak of growth. The unemployment rate was 3.5 percent in February. And yet job creation was running very hot, with the economy adding an average of 211,000 new jobs each month.
The government has undertaken unprecedented efforts to support employment and provide aid to those who have lost their jobs. Around 150 million taxpayers received stimulus payments of up to $1200 for adults in their household plus additional amounts for children. The Treasury’s Paycheck Protection Program is backing $669 billion of loans to small businesses that can be forgiven if borrowers do not lay off workers. The federal government has been providing an additional $600 on top of state unemployment benefits, paying some Americans more than they earned on the job.
Recent data suggest the labor market has been stabilizing and is now improving. The number of people applying for unemployment benefits has declined every week since hitting a record high 6.8 million in March. Last week, this number fell to around 1.8 million. Over 40 million new claims have been made for unemployment since the wave but ongoing claims are just over 20 million, indicating many Americans have been rehired after losing jobs.
In May, employment in leisure and hospitality jumped by 1.2 million after falling by 7.5 million in April and 743,000 in March. Bars and restaurants hired an additional 1.4 million workers following a combined 6.1 million in job losses in April and March.
Construction employment jumped by 464,000 in May, gaining back almost half of April’s decline.
Dentist offices added 245,000 jobs. Health care employment overall rose by 312,00.
Retail shops added 368,000 jobs in May, after a loss of 2.3 million inApril. Over-the-month job gains occurred in clothing and clothing accessories stores were 95,000. Auto dealers added 85,000. General merchandise stores added 84,000.
Manufacturers added 225,000 jobs, about evenly split between the durable and nondurable goods components. Twenty-eight thousand of those were in auto making plants.
In the epoch of COVID-19, many have willingly abdicated personal sovereignty and liberty to the State. Many more, however, have led the continuing renaissance of constitutional nationalism that was ushered in with the election of Donald Trump.
It's high time to apply nationalism to the issue that will most singularly determine whether we nationalists keep our republic: immigration.
The United States is overpopulated (or, if you prefer, has enough people here), and it's time to seal the borders until further notice. No, I'm not talking just The Wall at our southern border or our temporary groundings of flights or refugees and asylum-seekers — no more new bodies who are coming to live in the U.S. indefinitely until further notice.
To truly put America first, we need a moratorium on legal immigration for the next five to ten years. Our national system imports one foreign national every minute of every day, 24/7, totaling 459,000 new arrivals in Fiscal Year 2019 (572,000 more obtained lawful permanent residency — green cards — in F.Y. 2019).
Because of COVID-19, our unemployment rate is nearly 15 percent — the highest in almost nine decades, since the Great Depression. Our jobless population totals over 21 million Americans.
Please spare me the narrative that at least some of the tens of millions out of work couldn't, with some training, fill at least some of the jobs of the 190,098 H-1B visa lottery recipients in FY 2019. Even if you disagree with a full pause, shouldn't we at least somewhat reduce the number of recipients, to make it even slightly easier for unemployed Americans and recent college graduates to work at the companies addicted to foreign labor (I'm looking at you, Democrat-run Big Tech)? The balance of imported immigrants receive J-1 Visas (foreign exchange visitors) and H-2B visas for non-agricultural, blue-collar jobs.
There are also currently 13 million green card–holders nationwide.
Trump may restrict immigration visas for the next few months, but more (meaning longer) is needed. The 2018 Trump v. Hawaii U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirmed a president's broad constitutional powers to limit — or altogether cease — legal immigration. Trump would be on strong legal footing if a moratorium were challenged in the courts.
The Bodies Politic
Need convincing beyond the economic benefits? How about a moratorium for public health?
Unwittingly or not, The New York Times' recent report, entitled "The Coronavirus Is Deadliest Where Democrats Live," concurs with me.
It's been grotesquely fascinating to watch all these Democrats — who pack themselves like sardines into these cities and suburbs, to politically outnumber everyone else — lament when there aren't enough coronavirus testing kits, masks, or ventilators. When Democrats are enjoying the benefits of outnumbering everyone else (registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 7 to 1 in New York City, for example), they're pigs in mire, and they remind us that "there are more of us than you." But the Democrats' overcrowded chickens came home to roost.
What cities have coped the worst with COVID-19? Overpopulated, Democrat-majority cities: Detroit, New Orleans, and New York, among a few others. Fifteen percent of the world's population lives in a 90-mile radius around the island of Manhattan — making it the densest collection of bodies on the planet. And while New York State's overall population has been declining for years (higher taxes and redistribution of wealth!), New York City's five boroughs have been increasing since 2000; 26,000 live in each square mile, and in Manhattan, 66,000 per square mile. In San Francisco, the second most densely populated city in the U.S., 6,000 live in each square mile. Even if officials in these cities had responded flawlessly to the pandemic, there were too many bodies to avoid chaos.
Pray tell, where do those hundreds of thousands of new immigrants annually move to? Cheese farms in Wisconsin? Coal mines in Pennsylvania or Ohio? No; they live in America's big cities (more on this shortly). Though there was no precedent for the COVID-19 outbreak, the high death counts in overwhelmingly Democrat-populated cities underscored that too many bodies living in too-small municipal spaces presents public health crises waiting to happen.
Political Self-Obsolesce
A long-term pressing of the immigration pause button would elicit scorn from the Democrats and the GOP, which is precisely why it's the winning play.
The ceasing of a bodies influx into America is anathema to Democrats because large quantities of bodies are the primary reason they have monopolized control of most of America's largest cities; the primary reason they always win the political youth war; and the primary reason why their influence never seems to wane, even when they lose electorally. As I write in my upcoming first book, 10 Warning Signs Your Child Is Becoming a Democrat: How to Make America Grown-Up Again, bodies are what enable the Democrats and the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex) to never stray from their mantra of "vote blue no matter who." They move in a singular direction, unified toward a singular goal — to protect and elect Democrats, no exceptions.
Conversely, it's anathema to globalist and open-borders Republicans whose fetish is Third World–produced goods on the year 1381 minimum wage pay. Furthermore, Republicans are utterly petrified to come within a parsec of what I'm proposing, for fear of the "xenophobic" branding by the editorial boards of The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Bipartisanship is overrated, and it usually means that both sides have been wrong rather than one side.
America has been the most generous nation in world history. The time, though, has come for altruism to defer to science and the American workforce of small business and manufacturing.
Both of our major political parties are afraid to reform our immigration quagmire because with reform will be the revelation of how many illegal aliens live here. Our federal government has little to no knowledge of how many illegals are here. Are there "only" 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S.? Doubtful; it's been 11 million, since, well, forever, and it's likely double to triple that figure.
It is neither my nor your responsibility to render ourselves politically obsolete. Where do you think the vast majority of legal immigrants live? In small towns inhabited by AR-15-carrying Jeffersonian and Adamsian constitutionalists whose book club members are currently reading The Federalist Papers? Of course not; they predominantly live in cities that would vote for an Attila the Hun/Genghis Khan presidential ticket if it had a "D" attached to it.
Even though permanent legal residents cannot (legally) vote, they do influence (in the Democrats' favor) Congressional apportionment and federal funding grabs. And let's be candid: when legal immigrants become naturalized citizens, they are far likelier to vote Democrat than for another party.
For those who believe that a crisis justifies the abridgment of, and infringement upon, our guaranteed constitutional rights: the Framers penned the Constitution in response to a crisis — a war against a foreign power, which didn't recognize our independence until seven years after we declared it. The Founders would want us to be even more zealous in the application of these rights during a crisis.
We nationalists know dangerous freedom must always reign supreme over peaceful slavery; our Founders keenly understood that a tyranny of the majority would eventually euthanize the republic.
Rich Logis is host of The Rich Logis Show, at TheRichLogisShow.com, and author of the upcoming book 10 Warning Signs Your Child Is Becoming a Democrat: How to Make America Grown-up Again. He can be found on Twitter at @RichLogis.
JARED KUSHNER IS BEHIND TRUMP'S BACKROOM AMNESTY
Business Lobbies Bombard Trump to Block Immigration Reforms
Business lobbyists are bombarding President Donald Trump with demands that he drop his draft plan to let Americans get some of the U.S. jobs now held by at least one million foreign contract workers.
The alarm among business groups suggests that Trump has decided — although not announced — to shut down part of the Fortune 500’s special pipeline of foreign workers, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“I think they are clearly nervous that in this [economic and political] environment that a president who ostensibly champions American workers may go against the recommendations of the technology industry,” he said. “They are right to be nervous,” he said, adding, “but they shouldn’t be that worried given this administration’s track record.”
Cutbacks of foreign workers “would substantially limit the ability of many companies to help get the American economy moving again,” said a May 26 letter by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council.
The May 26 letter arrived as U.S. unemployment numbers headed towards 30 million — including many swing-voting college graduates who will either vote for or against Trump in November.
Any cutback to foreign workers “would be potentially devastating to [our members’] ability to grow their business and drive innovation,” said a May 28 letter from a trade association for hiring managers, SHRM.
“Our members have similarly signaled alarm at the prospect of any curtailment of the Optional Practical Training [OPT] program,” said the SHRM letter, referring to the huge OPT program that gives tax-subsidies to U.S. employers that hire foreign graduates, usually by dangling the promise of free citizenship.
The letters from the Chamber and SHRM follow a March 26 letter from many large and smaller firms, which suggested that any visa cutbacks will force companies to unfairly discriminate against foreigners:
We urge you to avoid outcomes, even for temporary periods, that restrict employment-authorization terms, conditions, or processing of L-1, H-1B, F-1, or H-4 [visa worker] nonimmigrants. Constraints on our human capital are likely to result in unintended consequences and may cause substantial economic uncertainty if we have to recalibrate our personnel based on country of birth.
The pipeline of H-1B, OPT, and other visa workers allows Fortune 500 companies, including many technology firms, to keep at least 1.3 million foreign workers in U.S. jobs. It also allows the firms to provide on-the-job training to hundreds of thousands of additional workers in India and elsewhere, so helping the companies to shift at least one million additional jobs overseas via the U.S-India Outsourcing Economy.
But Trump’s draft cutbacks would pressure Fortune 500 companies to hire U.S professionals and graduates.
Polls show the pro-American plan has at least 2:1 support among swing voters in what will be a hard-fought reelection campaign.
“It is mystifying that the president hasn’t done anything meaningful to keep his [2016] campaign promise about ending the H-1B program,” said Krikorian. “They’ve done some very minor administrative things, but there is plenty more they could have done and could still do. Why they are not acting now when the economy is so weak, and there is widespread political support for reforming H-1Bs, I’m not sure … [but] they’re too solicitous of the concerns of tech lobbyists.”
Critics of the OPT program say the numbers show it is used by companies to hire foreign graduates instead of qualified U.S. graduates.
U.S. CEOs prefer foreign graduates because foreign workers will stay put and do repetitive skilled work for many years to get green cards. The OPT program also allows companies to keep importing foreigners for jobs in the high-cost districts along the coasts, instead of setting up offices in lower-cost employees and locations, such as in the districts of Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH).
But Stivers is trying to collect signatures from fellow legislators for a letter urging Trump to preserve the OPT program:
We urge the administration to publicly clarify that OPT will remain fully intact so we send the right messages abroad about the U.S. as an attractive destination for international students.
…
The last thing our nation should do in this area is make ourselves less competitive by weakening OPT. The program is essential to the many international students who desire not just to study in the U.S. but also have a post completion training experience.
Stivers appeal for more hiring of foreigners — instead of graduates in his own 15th District — is echoed by several additional signatories to his letter. The other signatories include Reps. Bill Flores (R-TX), Peter King (R-NY), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), John Katko (R-NY), and Rob Woodall (R-GA).
The SHRM letter included a threat from one of its members saying they would rather shrink recruitment than hire older Americans or Americans from lower-prestige universities:
The OPT program serves largely as a pipeline for talent in the U.S, also most often for our engineering department. Our on-campus recruiters have shared with us that at the top-tier schools where they recruit, the vast majority of computer science/engineering students are foreign students who rely on OPT to work in the U.S. after graduation. In 2019, we had roughly 45% of software engineering training class hires that were in need of OPT work authorization. Without support of OPT work authorization, we would likely hire 45% less people that would be contributing to engineering work as we can’t find enough qualified U.S. workers to fill these positions.
“What the companies are saying is that Americans are not good enough to staff the modern economy,” said Krikorian. “You have to admire that gall — they are arguing with a straight face that 25 percent of unemployment is not high enough for them to resort to hiring Americans.”
The government’s job is not to provide favored companies with planeloads of suitable workers, Krikorian said. “It is not Congress’s job to maximize their share price — the role of federal policy is to create the rules within which American companies and American workers hash out their relationship” in the free market, he said.
But, he added, “the point is to make sure that companies hire Americans [because] it is really of little benefit [to Americans] if the people they are hiring are not Americans.”
Supporters of the OPT foreign-employee scheme release data showing OPT sends jobs & wealth to wealthy, coastal states. Why would heartland Senators & Reps. support a GWBush/Obama scheme that sends their jobs to the coasts & their wealth to Wall St.?#H1Bhttps://bit.ly/2LPRrX1
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
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