Monday, August 17, 2020

JOE BIDEN - KAMALA HARRIS AND I STAND WITH HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRES TO FLOOD AMERICA WITH 'CHEAP' LABOR INDIANS

 Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.

Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020

2020 ElectionImmigrationPoliticsH-1B VisasJ-1L-1Mike PompeoOutsourcingU.S-India Outsourcing Economyvisa workers

 Immigration?  Even as the daughter of (legal) immigrants from India and Jamaica, Kamala has repeatedly shown that she makes no distinction between the rights and privileges of a citizen and an illegal alien.  Benefits, she claims, belong to citizens and non-citizens alike.


Joe Biden Seeks Indian Votes with Amnesty, Work Permits for India’s Graduates

In this Friday, Feb. 17, 2017 photo, P. Venkateshwarlu, a 27-year old graduate preparing for a government accountant's job, studies in an open ground outside the City Central Library in Hyderabad, India. Hundreds of young college students and job-seekers, armed with their books and other study material sit and prepare …
AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.
7:43

Joe Biden is promising to deliver more of India’s contract workers — plus an unlimited supply of tech graduates — to the small but growing Indian community in the United States.

“He will increase the number of visas offered for permanent, work-based immigration based on macroeconomic conditions and exempt from any cap recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields,” says a new page on Biden’s campaign website. The page is titled  “Joe Biden’s Agenda for the Indian American [sic] Community.”

The document touts his choice for Vice President, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Her mother was Indian, and he promises to put Indian visa workers on a fast track to green cards:

He will support first reforming the temporary visa system for high-skill, specialty jobs to protect wages and workers, then expanding the number of visas offered and eliminating the limits on employment-based green cards by country, which have kept so many Indian families in waiting for too long.

Biden’s outreach to Indian-American voters may help win a very small but critical number of Indian swing votes in a few swing states, including Florida, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Amid a recession that has wiped out 30 million jobs, Biden also offered an amnesty to an estimated population of 500,000 illegal migrants from India:

He will immediately begin working with Congress to pass legislative immigration reform that modernizes our system, with a priority on keeping families together by providing a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants — including more than 500,000 from India.

Harris is also a vocal supporter of Indian migrants in the United States.

For example, she co-sponsored legislation that would greatly increase the incentive for more Indian graduates to seek jobs in the United States. The bill, S.386, is a business-backed bill led by Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee that is stalled in the Senate, despite lack of open opposition from GOP or Democratic legislators.

Biden’s document emphasizes his support for India:

Biden played a lead role, both as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Vice President, in systematically deepening our strategic engagement, people-to-people ties, and collaboration with India on global challenges. In 2006, Biden announced his vision for the future of U.S.-India relations: “My dream is that in 2020, the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States.”

“This is how reckless Joe Biden is — he wants to become joined at the hip with a country where two-thirds of its people are in absolute poverty, beyond any notion of poverty we have here in the United States,” responded Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “There is no bottom to that pool of labor – and so it will destroy any gains Americans have gained,” he added. 

For example, he said, Biden is offering green cards and citizenship to an unlimited number of foreign graduates who pay for technology PhDs at American universities. That plan would allow more Indians and other migrants can flood into the U.S. labor market for professional jobs, he said. “They are prepared to pay a lot of money for [green cards], and you’d see a rise in college enrollments because that’s how you game the get-a-green-card system.”

In June and August, President Donald Trump promised to temporarily block and soon tighten several of the worker pipelines. However, Trump may let his deputies, donors, and business groups block the reforms.  

Biden’s promise marks another step as the U.S. immigration shifts from the 1965 emphasis on diverse immigration from many countries, said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute. Biden would “replace the current diversity system to a system based on Indian immigration and the preference of powerful employers,” said Miano. 

Each year, roughly 25 million young Indians turn 18, or six times the four million Americans turn who will reach age 18 in 2020.

India’s government is under intense pressure to help create at least eight million new jobs each year. So it uses trade and diplomacy to deliver Indians to jobs in other countries. In February 2019, the Forsyth County Newreported:

Ani Agnihotri, program chair of the USA-India Business Summit … said India has a massive and young population that could provide skilled, English-speaking workers ready to relocate “even at a seven-day notice” ….

“India has the youngest population in the world. About 25 percent of the population of India, which is 1.25 billion, is below the age of 25,” he said. “We will be the provider of the workforce of the world in about 15 years, after 2035.”

The Indian government claimed in 2018 some 13.5 million Indians were working abroad, mostly in Arab countries. The report also claimed 1.3 million “Non-Resident Indians” are temporarily working, studying, or residing in the United States. The report revealed there are 3.2 million “Person of Indian Origin” in the United States.

If Biden is elected, India’s government will try to export many more of its young people into the U.S. labor market, Miano said.

Already, “India has seized control of the [H-1B] pipeline, and any increase in that pipeline goes to [benefit] India,” he added. Indian comprise roughly 70 percent of contract workers imported via the H-1B pipelines. 

The growing population of Indian and Chinese visa workers in the United States has already pushed many American graduates out of jobs, cut their salaries, and often ended their careers. Indian workers have replaced many Americans, and others have exported many jobs back to India.

U.S. CEOs and investors are lobbying for more Indian labor in the U.S., usually via the H-1B visa program, and the universities’ “Practical Training” pipelines. The pipelines keep roughly 1 million Indian graduates in the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, which is represented by the U.S.-India NASSCOM trade association.

The resident population of Indian visa workers and immigrants is also helping to grow the population of Indian illegal migrants. That population may be far larger than Biden’s estimate of 500,000. The population includes Indians who have overstayed their visas or are working illegally after arriving legally or who are smuggled into the U.S. to work at Indian-owned shops and businesses.

Many Fortune 500 CEOs prefer Indian workers to American graduates. The visa workers have few legal or workplace rights and will remain compliant for many years in the hope of winning the huge payout of company-sponsored green cards. In contrast, U.S. professionals have the legal right to quit their companies, join rival companies, or also to create rival companies. So India’s visa workers and their Indian-born managers allow the tech CEOS to recreate virtual “no-poaching” cartels that were deemed illegal in 2010.

The rising inflow of Indian workers is also booting India’s ability to buy U.S. products, such as oil, grain, and weapons. The expanding trade pressures and rewards U.S. diplomats to help the inflow of Indian visa workers.

 

Silicon Valley Donors ‘Happiest’ with Pro-Big Tech Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s Running Mate

David Becker/Getty Images

13 Aug 20201,717

6:51

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) sparked enthusiasm for the ticket in Silicon Valley as Harris has kept a close relationship with big tech and done little to obstruct the industry during her tenure in office.

Recode wrote on Tuesday that Biden has struggled, until recently, to “excite the wealthiest and most powerful tech moguls,” whereas Harris will bring “superfans” from the Silicon Valley billionaire class to help out the Democrat presidential ticket.

Biden’s selection of Harris, as opposed to anti-tech big tech Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-CA), signals that a Biden-Harris administration would likely take a lax attitude toward big tech regulation, and likely stray away from regulating it or pursuing antitrust solutions for allegedly anti-competitive behavior.

Cooper Teboe, a top Democrat fundraiser in Silicon Valley, said that roughly one-third of the donors he’s spoken to believe Harris would serve as one of the most big tech-friendly vice presidential candidates.

Harris “is the safest pick for the donor community. She will be the pick that the California, Silicon Valley donor community — who are worried about things like tech and repatriation and taxes and so on and so forth — she is the pick that they will be happiest with,” Teboe said.

Big tech billionaires have even developed deep admiration for and friendships with Harris.

Salesforce founder Marc Benioff told Recode that Harris is “one of the highest integrity people I have ever met.”

Former Facebook President Sean Parker invited Harris to his wedding.

Billionaire Democrat donors such as Reid Hoffman and John Doerr donated to Harris’s short-lived presidential bid.

Tony West, Harris’s brother-in-law, is the general counsel of Uber; Harris’s niece worked at Uber.

Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple founder Steve Job’s widow, wrote when Biden announced Harris as his vice presidential nominee, “Joe Biden you made a great choice!”

Joe Biden you made a great choice!

— Laurene Powell Jobs (@laurenepowell) August 11, 2020

Harris also developed a deep friendship with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, which included helping Sandberg market her book Lean In.

Two days after Californians elected Harris to the Senate, Sandberg congratulated Harris, writing:

Kamala,

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! We need you now more than ever.

I just did a Facebook post about you and all the women.

Cheering you on!

Sheryl

While many could claim that Harris has a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley investor, said that Harris could create a “Nixon-to-China” moment to push regulations due to her relationship with big tech.

“As senator from California, Kamala Harris was understandably aligned with Big Tech,” McNamee claimed. “As vice president, she has an opportunity to stand up for all Americans.”

When it comes to her time in the Senate and on the presidential campaign trail, Harris has had a mixed record in regards to her attitude towards big tech.

While she has grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the company’s alleged misuse of Americans’ private data, she has waffled over how she would address calls for using antitrust against America’s largest technology companies. She has also dodged questions over whether the federal government should break up big tech companies, only to suggest that “we have to seriously take a look at that.”

Sen. @KamalaHarris: "Facebook has experienced massive growth and has prioritized its growth over the best interests of its consumers."

"We need to seriously take a look" at breaking up Facebook, "it is essentially a utility that has gone unregulated." #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/ywbJk6gxvC

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) May 12, 2019

“The tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can ensure and the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised,” Harris told the New York Times.

When asked about breaking up big tech companies, she said, And, when asked about breaking up, “My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact.”

However, Sally Hubbard, a director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, said, “All of the problems with Facebook all come down to two things. “Its business model and the fact that it’s a monopoly power. You can’t fix that with better privacy standards alone.”

In one instance, she did call on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ban President Donald Trump’s Twitter account over the president’s questioning of the legitimacy of the intelligence officer “whistleblower,” used to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump.

Big tech donations helped launch her into the Senate after her time as the attorney general of California. Harris received $214,000 in donations from big tech to help get her elected to become the junior senator from California, which included maximum contributions from Sandberg.

“As a senator, Harris has been mostly quiet on policy-making issues that carry implications for Facebook and Google,” HuffPost wrote.

Harris remained quiet on the 2018 sex-trafficking bill, which carried considerable implications for Google and Facebook. She only became a cosponsor of the legislation when it became apparent that it would pass through the Senate.

Big tech remains one of her largest donors over her career in Congress.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, donated $161,137 to Harris over time in the Senate.

Apple donated $81,329 during her time in Congress.

Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm that focuses on technology startups, donated $69,722.

Joel Kotkin in the City Journal noted that Harris is “Silicon Valley’s dream of political control.”

“Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party,” Kotkin wrote in 2019.

He continued:

Given the media’s obsession with style, race, and gender, we would do well to understand what agenda lurks behind Harris’s atmospherics. The reality: if she wins, the tech oligarchy — titans of today’s Gilded Age — will have achieved commanding influence, not just in the information business and the media, but in the White House as well.

Kotkin also explained that Harris did little to prevent the rise of controlled power amongst the Silicon Valley companies. He wrote:

Harris has not called for curbs on, let alone for breaking up, the tech giants. As California’s attorney general, she did little to prevent the agglomeration of economic power that has increasingly turned California into a semi-feudal state dominated by a handful of large tech firms.

“Her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable Partners, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and trade associations opposing strict Internet regulations,” he added.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

 

Big Tech Joins Chamber of Commerce Lawsuit to Import Foreign Workers While 26M Americans Jobless

Getty Images

14 Aug 20201,539

5:55

Giant tech corporations have joined a Chamber of Commerce lawsuit that seeks to overturn President Trump’s executive order halting visa programs to prioritize unemployed Americans for scarcely available jobs. 

Giant tech corporations have joined a Chamber of Commerce lawsuit that seeks to overturn President Trump’s executive order halting visa programs to prioritize unemployed Americans for scarcely available jobs.

Last month, the Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit against Trump’s expanded executive order, signed in June, that halts the H-1B, H-4, H-2B, L-1, and J-1 visa programs to reduce foreign competition against millions of unemployed Americans.

Today, there are 26 million Americans who are jobless — 7.7 million of whom are out of the workforce altogether and about two million who have been out of work for months but want full-time employment. Another 8.4 million Americans are working part-time but want full-time jobs.

Now, CEOs for the largest tech corporations in the world have signed onto the lawsuit in an amicus brief. Tech corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Netflix, Zillow, and PayPal have all signed on to fight Trump’s order.

The full list of those supporting the Chamber of Commerce lawsuit include:

1. Adobe Inc.

2. Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers

3. Amazon.com, Inc.

4. Apple Inc.

5. Atlassian, Inc.

6. Autodesk, Inc.

7. Bates White, LLC

8. Box, Inc.

9. BSA Business Software Alliance, Inc.

10. Consumer Technology Association

11. Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce

12. Dropbox, Inc.

13. Facebook, Inc.

14. FWD.us Education Fund

15. GitHub, Inc.

16. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company

17. HP Inc.

18. HR Policy Association

19. Information Technology Industry Council

20. Institute of International Bankers

21. Intel Corp.

22. Internet Association

23. Juniper Networks, Inc.

24. LinkedIn Corporation

25. Metro Atlanta Chamber

26. Microsoft Corporation

27. Netflix, Inc.

28. New Imagitas, Inc.

29. North Texas Commission

30. Partnership for a New American Economy Research Fund

31. PayPal, Inc.

32. Plaid Inc.

33. Postmates Inc.

34. Reddit, Inc.

35. salesforce.com, inc.

36. SAP SE

37. Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA)

38. ServiceNow, Inc.

39. Shutterstock, Inc.

40. Silicon Valley Bank

41. Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)

42. Splunk Inc.

43. Square, Inc.

44. SurveyMonkey Inc.

45. Twitter, Inc.

46. Uber Technologies, Inc.

47. Upwork Inc.

48. Vail Valley Partnership

49. VMware, Inc.

50. Workday, Inc.

51. Xylem Inc.

52. Zillow Group, Inc.

The corporate lobbying effort to reopen pipelines of foreign workers to take U.S. jobs comes as companies are cutting Information Technology (IT) jobs, about 134,000 in July, due to economic shutdowns spurred by the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Across all sectors, job postings in IT fell to roughly 235,000 in July, down from nearly 269,000 in June and about 358,000 in March. The sectors with the most tech-job postings in July were professional and technical services with 39,956 postings, finance and insurance at 18,756, and manufacturing at 17,473. [Emphasis added]

Tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Tim Cook signing onto the lawsuit is significant because of their tremendous sway in the Washington, D.C. beltway, particularly when it comes to labor and immigration policy.

In July, the Trump administration clarified that foreign nationals taking online courses with American colleges and universities would not be eligible for F-1 student visas. A lawsuit was quickly filed with the support of tech executives.

Weeks later, the administration dropped the policy. A Yahoo Finance report admitted that the tech executives signing onto the lawsuit had “underscored the power wielded by tech companies, who have lots of money and political influence at their disposal.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

DHS Recycles 14,500 H-1B Visas for Fortune 500 Employers

AP/Jason DeCrow

15 Aug 2020581

7:46

The Department of Homeland Security is recycling 14,500 unused H-1B visas to employers after worried companies declined to accept the work visas they had won in the annual lottery.

The redistributed visas will be used to import foreign workers to fill the Fortune 500 jobs that will appear when the economy recovers, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, a group of white-collar professionals who oppose the Fortune 500’s visa workers programs that damage their careers.

Those jobs are needed by the hundreds of thousands of skilled young Americans who are graduating this year and by the hundreds of thousands of American professionals who have lost their jobs in the coronavirus crash, he said, adding:

Our immigration system is on autopilot. It is not flexible, it does not make allowances for how the economy is doing, what the true labor needs are to make sure immigration is working for American employees … We need employment-visa reform that doesn’t allow for Americans to be displaced.

In April of each year, companies enter an annual lottery for 85,000 H-1B visas. The lottery allows new H-1B workers to arrive each October, so joining a growing population of at least 600,000 resident H-1B workers, many of whom are working as powerless gig-workers for subcontractors in Fortune 500 companies. Non-profits — including hospitals, research centers, and universities — can import as many H-1Bs as they wish.

In an August 14 statement to Breitbart News, the DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau declined to say how many H-1B visas are being recycled from companies that no longer want the visas they won in the Spring:

Recently, USCIS determined that additional registrations needed to be selected to reach the numerical allocations. A selection of previously submitted electronic registrations was completed on Aug. 11. The petition filing period based on registrations selected on Aug. 11 will begin on Aug. 17 and close on Nov. 16.

Companies can apply for the visas under “existing statutory and regulatory requirements,” the USCIS statement said.

The unused visas are being reallocated 81 days before the election, and two days after the Department of State gutted President Donald Trump’s June 22 Executive Order barring the entry of H-1B visa workers until at least January.

The news was cheered by the immigration lawyers who bring in the white-collar workers for the Fortune 500 companies:

And, new H-1B selections flutter into the email, like snowflakes from the winter sky. Of course, @USCIS notified no one publicly it was reopening the H-1B lottery b/c not enough applications were submitted to reach the cap. Nor have the said how many new apps will be accepted.

— Charles Kuck (@ckuck) August 14, 2020

Yes we also are seeing those

— Helena S. Younossi (@helenayounossi) August 14, 2020

The recycled visas will be used by CEOs to replace innovative Americans with imported and compliant foreign workers, said Lynn. CEOs “want to build a serf economy — where workers work for less and accept worse conditions,” usually in the hope of getting a green card from the government, he said.

The new welcome for H-1B and other visa workers is an apparent reversal from policies Trump announced in June and early August –and from the promises that candidate Trump made in 2016.

On June 22, Trump blocked the inflow of roughly 90,000 H-1B workers until at least January 1, and he directed his deputies to rewrite the regulations to prevent H-1Bs from cutting white-collar salaries.

The policy was a late and partial implementation of Trump’s 2016 campaign trail promise, “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions,” Trump said in March 2016.

On August 3, President Donald Trump met with a group of Americans whose jobs at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were being transferred to H-1B workers. Trump said:

It doesn’t work that way. As we speak, we’re finalizing H1-B regulations so that no American worker is replaced ever again.  H1-Bs should be used for top, highly paid talent to create American jobs, not as inexpensive labor program to destroy American jobs.

“The H-1B visa is sort of a Trojan horse to bring in folks who cannibalize our own workforce and ultimately take any number of intellectual property secrets, or proprietary information, back to their home countries,” White House adviser Theo Wold told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow. He continued:

That cuts [Americans’] wages, not only for the American workers they replace. It also has as a cascading effect on related sectors of the economy [and] on overall wage-growth in the country writ large.

So, the Swamp, the tech sector, the Silicon Valley barons, the big banks, all of these folks, love the idea of being able to import cheap labor.

I think the main thing your listeners need to know on the H-1B visa is, ultimately, it just perpetuates the lie — and it is a lie — that Americans lack the talent, the ability, or the credentials to fill these jobs.

The visa worker pipelines are fiercely defended by Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors, by investors, Silicon Valley CEOs, and the nations’ universities.

The resident population of at least 1.3 million foreign contract workers allows the CEOs to cut salaries, boost stock values, and curb the creation of rival technologies by innovative American professionals. The fierce defense also minimizes media coverage and suppresses social media debate over the harm caused by the visa worker programs.

In addition to DHS’s second lottery of H-1 visas, officials from other agencies are opening the door to tens of thousands of excluded H-1Bs during the few months before the election.

On August 12, the three agencies responsible for approving, selecting, and admitting visa workers “gutted” Trump’s June 22 policy by creating numerous exemptions for favored H-1B, L-1, and J-1 visa workers. “You can drive a Mack truck through this,” Lynn said as he read the exemptions. “The exemptions basically cover anyone on an H-IB or a J-1 or an L-1 …. Boom! They’re in. … With all the exemptions, there is no EO — they’ve eliminated the EO through the exemptions.”

Lynn worked to highlight the TVA outsourcing and helped bring about the August 3 meeting of Trump and the TVA workers.

For years, the White House has used exemptions to defang lawsuits and media sob-stories. For example, the L-1a exemptions are engineered to minimize problems for the senior managers of foreign-owned auto factories.

But pro-migration lawyers welcomed the breadth of the exemptions:

There's more there than just cheap labor. It could be tax evasion, indentured servitude, spying or something else. In addition, there is widespread hacking, sabotaging data stealing and complete incompetence throughout the Indian takeover of IT in America and  the world.

— Arthur Rosalind *** this account has been blocked (@arthur_oslund) August 14, 2020

So far, the White House has not announced a response to the nullified rules.

In a statement to Breitbart News, the Department of State stressed that its exemption policy was developed with DHS and the Department of Labor:

One important thing to note is this line … “Such exceptions …. were developed in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor as directed in the proclamation.

The state department also noted that the number of H-1B “issuances” in 2020 had declined by roughly 60,000 for the March 1 to July 31 period, compared to 2019. The agency did not explain if the reduced number of “issuances” opened up H-1B jobs to Americans.

The State Dept. has nullified Pres Trump's popular visa-worker Executive Order.
An agency memo provides easy workarounds for CEOs to import 
#H1B, J-1, etc, workers for the Fortune 500 jobs needed by US grads, despite protections in Trump's June 22 rulehttps://t.co/Uk3YFmBwSK

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 13, 2020

 

Big Tech Joins Chamber of Commerce Lawsuit to Import Foreign Workers While 26M Americans Jobless

Getty Images

14 Aug 20201,539

5:55

Giant tech corporations have joined a Chamber of Commerce lawsuit that seeks to overturn President Trump’s executive order halting visa programs to prioritize unemployed Americans for scarcely available jobs. 

Giant tech corporations have joined a Chamber of Commerce lawsuit that seeks to overturn President Trump’s executive order halting visa programs to prioritize unemployed Americans for scarcely available jobs.

Last month, the Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit against Trump’s expanded executive order, signed in June, that halts the H-1B, H-4, H-2B, L-1, and J-1 visa programs to reduce foreign competition against millions of unemployed Americans.

Today, there are 26 million Americans who are jobless — 7.7 million of whom are out of the workforce altogether and about two million who have been out of work for months but want full-time employment. Another 8.4 million Americans are working part-time but want full-time jobs.

Now, CEOs for the largest tech corporations in the world have signed onto the lawsuit in an amicus brief. Tech corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Netflix, Zillow, and PayPal have all signed on to fight Trump’s order.

The full list of those supporting the Chamber of Commerce lawsuit include:

1. Adobe Inc.

2. Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers

3. Amazon.com, Inc.

4. Apple Inc.

5. Atlassian, Inc.

6. Autodesk, Inc.

7. Bates White, LLC

8. Box, Inc.

9. BSA Business Software Alliance, Inc.

10. Consumer Technology Association

11. Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce

12. Dropbox, Inc.

13. Facebook, Inc.

14. FWD.us Education Fund

15. GitHub, Inc.

16. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company

17. HP Inc.

18. HR Policy Association

19. Information Technology Industry Council

20. Institute of International Bankers

21. Intel Corp.

22. Internet Association

23. Juniper Networks, Inc.

24. LinkedIn Corporation

25. Metro Atlanta Chamber

26. Microsoft Corporation

27. Netflix, Inc.

28. New Imagitas, Inc.

29. North Texas Commission

30. Partnership for a New American Economy Research Fund

31. PayPal, Inc.

32. Plaid Inc.

33. Postmates Inc.

34. Reddit, Inc.

35. salesforce.com, inc.

36. SAP SE

37. Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA)

38. ServiceNow, Inc.

39. Shutterstock, Inc.

40. Silicon Valley Bank

41. Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)

42. Splunk Inc.

43. Square, Inc.

44. SurveyMonkey Inc.

45. Twitter, Inc.

46. Uber Technologies, Inc.

47. Upwork Inc.

48. Vail Valley Partnership

49. VMware, Inc.

50. Workday, Inc.

51. Xylem Inc.

52. Zillow Group, Inc.

The corporate lobbying effort to reopen pipelines of foreign workers to take U.S. jobs comes as companies are cutting Information Technology (IT) jobs, about 134,000 in July, due to economic shutdowns spurred by the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Across all sectors, job postings in IT fell to roughly 235,000 in July, down from nearly 269,000 in June and about 358,000 in March. The sectors with the most tech-job postings in July were professional and technical services with 39,956 postings, finance and insurance at 18,756, and manufacturing at 17,473. [Emphasis added]

Tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Tim Cook signing onto the lawsuit is significant because of their tremendous sway in the Washington, D.C. beltway, particularly when it comes to labor and immigration policy.

In July, the Trump administration clarified that foreign nationals taking online courses with American colleges and universities would not be eligible for F-1 student visas. A lawsuit was quickly filed with the support of tech executives.

Weeks later, the administration dropped the policy. A Yahoo Finance report admitted that the tech executives signing onto the lawsuit had “underscored the power wielded by tech companies, who have lots of money and political influence at their disposal.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

DHS Recycles 14,500 H-1B Visas for Fortune 500 Employers

AP/Jason DeCrow

15 Aug 2020581

7:46

The Department of Homeland Security is recycling 14,500 unused H-1B visas to employers after worried companies declined to accept the work visas they had won in the annual lottery.

The redistributed visas will be used to import foreign workers to fill the Fortune 500 jobs that will appear when the economy recovers, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, a group of white-collar professionals who oppose the Fortune 500’s visa workers programs that damage their careers.

Those jobs are needed by the hundreds of thousands of skilled young Americans who are graduating this year and by the hundreds of thousands of American professionals who have lost their jobs in the coronavirus crash, he said, adding:

Our immigration system is on autopilot. It is not flexible, it does not make allowances for how the economy is doing, what the true labor needs are to make sure immigration is working for American employees … We need employment-visa reform that doesn’t allow for Americans to be displaced.

In April of each year, companies enter an annual lottery for 85,000 H-1B visas. The lottery allows new H-1B workers to arrive each October, so joining a growing population of at least 600,000 resident H-1B workers, many of whom are working as powerless gig-workers for subcontractors in Fortune 500 companies. Non-profits — including hospitals, research centers, and universities — can import as many H-1Bs as they wish.

In an August 14 statement to Breitbart News, the DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau declined to say how many H-1B visas are being recycled from companies that no longer want the visas they won in the Spring:

Recently, USCIS determined that additional registrations needed to be selected to reach the numerical allocations. A selection of previously submitted electronic registrations was completed on Aug. 11. The petition filing period based on registrations selected on Aug. 11 will begin on Aug. 17 and close on Nov. 16.

Companies can apply for the visas under “existing statutory and regulatory requirements,” the USCIS statement said.

The unused visas are being reallocated 81 days before the election, and two days after the Department of State gutted President Donald Trump’s June 22 Executive Order barring the entry of H-1B visa workers until at least January.

The news was cheered by the immigration lawyers who bring in the white-collar workers for the Fortune 500 companies:

And, new H-1B selections flutter into the email, like snowflakes from the winter sky. Of course, @USCIS notified no one publicly it was reopening the H-1B lottery b/c not enough applications were submitted to reach the cap. Nor have the said how many new apps will be accepted.

— Charles Kuck (@ckuck) August 14, 2020

Yes we also are seeing those

— Helena S. Younossi (@helenayounossi) August 14, 2020

The recycled visas will be used by CEOs to replace innovative Americans with imported and compliant foreign workers, said Lynn. CEOs “want to build a serf economy — where workers work for less and accept worse conditions,” usually in the hope of getting a green card from the government, he said.

The new welcome for H-1B and other visa workers is an apparent reversal from policies Trump announced in June and early August –and from the promises that candidate Trump made in 2016.

On June 22, Trump blocked the inflow of roughly 90,000 H-1B workers until at least January 1, and he directed his deputies to rewrite the regulations to prevent H-1Bs from cutting white-collar salaries.

The policy was a late and partial implementation of Trump’s 2016 campaign trail promise, “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions,” Trump said in March 2016.

On August 3, President Donald Trump met with a group of Americans whose jobs at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were being transferred to H-1B workers. Trump said:

It doesn’t work that way. As we speak, we’re finalizing H1-B regulations so that no American worker is replaced ever again.  H1-Bs should be used for top, highly paid talent to create American jobs, not as inexpensive labor program to destroy American jobs.

“The H-1B visa is sort of a Trojan horse to bring in folks who cannibalize our own workforce and ultimately take any number of intellectual property secrets, or proprietary information, back to their home countries,” White House adviser Theo Wold told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow. He continued:

That cuts [Americans’] wages, not only for the American workers they replace. It also has as a cascading effect on related sectors of the economy [and] on overall wage-growth in the country writ large.

So, the Swamp, the tech sector, the Silicon Valley barons, the big banks, all of these folks, love the idea of being able to import cheap labor.

I think the main thing your listeners need to know on the H-1B visa is, ultimately, it just perpetuates the lie — and it is a lie — that Americans lack the talent, the ability, or the credentials to fill these jobs.

The visa worker pipelines are fiercely defended by Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors, by investors, Silicon Valley CEOs, and the nations’ universities.

The resident population of at least 1.3 million foreign contract workers allows the CEOs to cut salaries, boost stock values, and curb the creation of rival technologies by innovative American professionals. The fierce defense also minimizes media coverage and suppresses social media debate over the harm caused by the visa worker programs.

In addition to DHS’s second lottery of H-1 visas, officials from other agencies are opening the door to tens of thousands of excluded H-1Bs during the few months before the election.

On August 12, the three agencies responsible for approving, selecting, and admitting visa workers “gutted” Trump’s June 22 policy by creating numerous exemptions for favored H-1B, L-1, and J-1 visa workers. “You can drive a Mack truck through this,” Lynn said as he read the exemptions. “The exemptions basically cover anyone on an H-IB or a J-1 or an L-1 …. Boom! They’re in. … With all the exemptions, there is no EO — they’ve eliminated the EO through the exemptions.”

Lynn worked to highlight the TVA outsourcing and helped bring about the August 3 meeting of Trump and the TVA workers.

For years, the White House has used exemptions to defang lawsuits and media sob-stories. For example, the L-1a exemptions are engineered to minimize problems for the senior managers of foreign-owned auto factories.

But pro-migration lawyers welcomed the breadth of the exemptions:

There's more there than just cheap labor. It could be tax evasion, indentured servitude, spying or something else. In addition, there is widespread hacking, sabotaging data stealing and complete incompetence throughout the Indian takeover of IT in America and  the world.

— Arthur Rosalind *** this account has been blocked (@arthur_oslund) August 14, 2020

So far, the White House has not announced a response to the nullified rules.

In a statement to Breitbart News, the Department of State stressed that its exemption policy was developed with DHS and the Department of Labor:

One important thing to note is this line … “Such exceptions …. were developed in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor as directed in the proclamation.

The state department also noted that the number of H-1B “issuances” in 2020 had declined by roughly 60,000 for the March 1 to July 31 period, compared to 2019. The agency did not explain if the reduced number of “issuances” opened up H-1B jobs to Americans.

The State Dept. has nullified Pres Trump's popular visa-worker Executive Order.
An agency memo provides easy workarounds for CEOs to import 
#H1B, J-1, etc, workers for the Fortune 500 jobs needed by US grads, despite protections in Trump's June 22 rulehttps://t.co/Uk3YFmBwSK

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 13, 2020

 

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