BIDEN'S AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS WILL LEGALLY ENABLE THEM TO BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO.
NOW DO THE MATH ON THE JOBS, HOMELESS AND HOUSING CRISIS. WE'RE NEARLY THERE!
"On immigration, all the money is on the same side — the side of more, more and more. So this kind of backroom policymaking is a lot easier to pull than it is in other areas of government activities." NEIL MUNRO
House Speaker Pelosi signals readiness to cut unemployment benefits
5 August 2020
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in an interview on PBS’ “NewsHour” program Tuesday signaled the Democratic Party’s willingness to reduce benefits for the nearly 30 million US jobless workers who had been receiving $600 a week in enhanced federal unemployment pay. The jobless benefit, part of the CARES Act, which allocated trillions for the corporations and banks, expired this past week.
The federal benefit, along with a moratorium on rental evictions from properties with federally backed mortgages, was allowed to lapse at the end of July, leaving millions in the lurch.
Shortly before the expiration of the federal unemployment benefit, the House of Representatives, in a near party-line vote, passed a $694.6 billion defense appropriations bill for 2021. The bill, overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party, included funding for 91 F-35 fighter jets ($9.3 billion) and nine new Navy ships ($22.3 billion). Added together, the cost of these 100 pieces of military hardware could provide supplemental jobless benefits for 30 million people for nearly two weeks.
While both parties worked around-the-clock for the financial oligarchy and their cratering stock portfolios by passing the CARES Act in late March, now that Wall Street has been rescued, the two big business parties are taking their time in working out the terms for imposing the full brunt on the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic on the backs of the working class.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows have been meeting daily behind closed doors with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and Pelosi. While the Democratic negotiators have claimed “progress” in the talks, the White House representatives, who had proposed cutting the unemployment supplement to $200, have said the two sides remain far apart.Throughout the PBS interview, Pelosi, with an estimated net worth of $120 million, portrayed herself and the Democratic Party as champions of working people. However, when gently pressed by the news anchor, Judy Woodruff, the House speaker signaled the corporate-financial elite that the Democrats were prepared to cut the already inadequate $600-a-week benefit, saying, “Let’s find out what we can afford.” She added, “We will find our common ground.”
All parties are seeking to pass a new bill that would provide reduced benefits, using the prospect of hunger and homelessness to blackmail workers into returning to virus-infected work sites or take other work at lower pay when their previous jobs have been eliminated.
At the end of the interview, Pelosi made clear that the goal of the Democrats was the same as the Republicans: “reopening” the economy (i.e., resuming at full blast the flow of corporate profit) by forcing teachers and students back to school so as to allow “our parents to go to work.”
For his part, President Donald Trump in a Tuesday press conference threatened to issue an executive order to suspend the payroll tax, the primary source of funding for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He also took the opportunity to lash out against China, claiming that the looming wave of evictions in the US was “China’s fault.”
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to unemployed workers about the consequences of a cutoff or reduction in the federal unemployment supplement.
April, a cook from rural northern Illinois, said: “The $600 dollar added bonus really did help. We could not have survived without it. It made me realize that everyone needs to be making a basic amount to live and thrive.
“I was actually getting slightly more with the added money than I was with my paycheck before being unemployed, only because my pay was so low. Now that the benefit is gone, I am still unemployed and my partner now makes way less than he did previously.
“I went from working one job. Now I can’t find full-time work. I’ll have to work two or three jobs just to get by. And then my partner started a new job and was denied Medicaid because he makes $3 too much. He makes $11 an hour.
“We have a little saved up. I hope to stay in my apartment and be able to take care of the necessities, but if I don’t find work before then, I am not sure what we will do once September arrives. I am constantly oscillating between being angry and scared. Everything is so unequal. You have millionaires and billionaires and then you have the rest of us just trying to get by.”
A cashier from Virginia who was forced to return to work after the state failed to process her unemployment claim told the WSWS: “I was a cashier, now I am a personal shopper. I applied for unemployment benefits back in April. The benefits never were approved.
“I had panic attacks fearing for my safety. Luckily for me, my family and girlfriend, who was able to get the expanded benefits, were able to help me with rent throughout the last few months. If it wasn’t for them, I’d have been working throughout this entire pandemic.
“Two weeks ago, the last bit of money I received from the $1,200 check Trump sent ran out and I was forced to return to work. I’m not sure if I have a compromised immune system, but I had open heart surgery, so I’m worried if I catch this disease. My parents are elderly. I see people in my state socializing and not wearing masks. I’m definitely scared.
“The fact that I didn’t get any benefits throughout the entire pandemic has really hurt me financially. My girlfriend and I had plans to move into a house together, but that isn’t going to happen now for a long time.
“This order to get back to work is really tough on people. We’re being forced to take high risks with our health in the middle of a health care crisis. If someone in the US government had actually done something to help people before this pandemic happened, we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”
As Senate adjourns for weekend
New US unemployment claims top 1 million for 20th straight week
7 August 2020
Data published by the US Labor Department on Thursday showed that for the 20th straight week more than 1 million workers filed unemployment claims for the first time. Unlike in previous weeks, the workers who filed last week will not be eligible to receive the enhanced federal unemployment benefit of $600 a week that expired last week along with a partial federal moratorium on evictions.
Thursday’s report did little to prompt movement between the Democrats and Republicans toward an agreement on a fifth coronavirus stimulus bill. This is despite over 30 million workers losing out on the enhanced benefits last week, while over 23 million are facing eviction in the next two months, according to the Aspen Institute.
Hundreds of people wait in line for bags of groceries at a food pantry at St. Mary's Church in Waltham, Mass. earlier this year. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)Instead, the negotiations, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on one side and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer on the other, ended the same as on previous days: without an agreement, much less a date for a possible vote.
Without the possibility of an agreement before Friday, senators from both parties adjourned for a three-day weekend.
“We’re still a considerable amount apart,” Meadows told reporters after another day of dithering. Pelosi, talking out of both sides of her mouth, said she could see “light at the end of the tunnel,” but that the two sides were “very far apart—it’s most unfortunate.”
Making clear the willingness of the Democrats to agree to a cut in benefits, Schumer expressed “disappointment” over Thursday’s talks and blamed the Republicans for being “unwilling to meet in the middle.”
The 1.19 million new unemployment claims for the week ending July 25 were slightly down from the 1.43 million claims the previous week. However, the figure is still nearly double the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 claims set in 1982. Overall, roughly 55 million unemployment claims have been filed since mid-March.
Currently, there are an estimated 5.4 million job openings, while over 31 million people are collecting some form of unemployment pay. The few jobs that are available are mostly low-paying and carry a high risk of contracting the virus.
This important statistic shows the falsity of claims by Republicans and some Democrats that the now expired federal supplement to state unemployment benefits enacted in March as part of the CARES Act corporate bailout is an “overpayment” and creates a “disincentive to work.” Workers are not as a rule refusing to return to previously held jobs, despite legitimate concerns about the risk of COVID-19 infection. Rather, the jobs are not there, as businesses continue to close while the virus spreads out of control across the country.Research conducted by the California Policy Lab found that “more than half (57 percent) of recent unemployment claims” are from workers who are resubmitting or reopening their claims after they had returned to work but were then let go again.
The research conducted by the California Policy Lab coincides with findings released Monday by Cornell University, which found that 31 percent of workers who returned to work after being laid off or furloughed at the start of the pandemic have since been laid off a second time. An additional 26 percent of workers surveyed reported that even though they had been called back to work, their supervisor or boss warned that they could be laid off again.
As with all aspects of the coronavirus crisis, the working class and poor are being made to suffer the brunt of its effects, including joblessness. Recent analysis conducted by economics professor Peter Ganong at the University of Chicago concluded that workers in the lowest income quintile, that is, the bottom 20 percent, have experienced three times as many job losses as higher-paid workers in the top quintile.
In addition to Thursday’s new unemployment claims report, the Department of Labor released data showing that over 16.1 million people are currently collecting traditional unemployment benefits from their state. The ending of the federal supplement means a reduction in weekly income for millions of workers of between 60 percent and 80 percent, depending on the state where they reside.
Oklahoma has the highest drop-off. The average Oklahoma worker will see an 85.6 percent reduction in wages without the federal enchantment. Louisiana is second, with a 75.4 percent reduction, while jobless workers in Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida will receive at least 70 percent less in benefits.
Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to Rick, an unemployed child care worker from Michigan. He said: “I was first put on a leave of absence from my job working in early childhood education in March. It was originally not intended to last very long. I remember my bosses and coworkers being very blindsided by the whole situation.
“It’s been very difficult to remain sheltered in place for this long. I am fairly certain that I will not be able to be rehired at the same job that I left in March.
“In June, I tentatively accepted an offer to return to the job on a limited basis by the end of July, with the hope that COVID cases would stay low. When they began increasing again in early July, I called and told them I was uncomfortable with returning to work at that time. My employer said she understood and that many of my coworkers had also said they wished to wait for a few more months before returning.
“I have fears now that I will be removed and will have to reapply to work there again. This will basically wipe out all the pay raises I’ve received while working there and force me to start all over again. We’re already too low-paid as it is.
“This brings up the $600 expanded benefits. With those, I at least had financial support that I needed if the pandemic continues to remain a problem. Before the pandemic, I would try to limit myself to spending about $10 a day on any items beyond gas for my car or bills.
“Working in child care, there had been weeks when my bank account would run out days before my paycheck arrived. I would bum food from the kitchen at my job. Some of my coworkers actually brought food from home and would share.
“When the first expanded payments came in, I found myself able to actually fill my cart at the grocery store. I would go early in the morning to avoid the crowds and maintain healthy social distancing. Remarkably, I could participate in society somewhat more easily during the pandemic, simply due to actually having some money to spend.
“What really gets me about them saying this benefit is a disincentive to work is that I didn’t create this pandemic. They did. They failed us and want to tell us that we’re the ones being overpaid!
“It’s not easy having to remain inside during the summer, losing contact with friends and coworkers. Not to mention the children. I can hope that I’ll be able to at least last a few more months until it’s safer to look for work. I can only hope.
“I’ve had fights with family because they refuse to take the coronavirus seriously. I don’t know if at this point I’ll even retain all my job skills when I go back because it’s been nearly six months of waiting. I certainly don’t enjoy life being put on hold. Now they want us to risk dying as well. The crisis this has created won’t go away with a return to work. Everything is changed.”
Mike Lee’s S386 Bill Creates ‘Green Card Lite’ for New Waves of Migrants
Sen. Mike Lee’s latest version of S.386 creates a novel “Green Card Lite” legal status to help Fortune 500 companies import many more Indian graduates into U.S. white collar jobs.
“That’s a game changer from the original bill,” said a tweet from a top ranking immigration lawyer Greg Siskind. It gives people “most of the benefits of a green card,” said Siskind, who is working with hospital chains to expand the pipeline of foreign nurses and doctors into U.S. hospitals.
Current law says migrants and foreign contract workers become Legal Permanent Residents of the United States once they get green cards and also become eligible to apply for citizenship and voting cards in five years.
Lee’s “Green-Card Lite” process gives foreign workers all those benefits except a five-year path to citizenship, said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Lee’s bill “grants de-facto green cards by other means — a stealth increase in legal immigration,” Krikorian said, even though GOP legislators say they oppose any increase in green cards.
The new legal status allows foreign contract workers “to be able to stay in the country legally, travel abroad, and change jobs while their green card application is pending,” said Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer who helped craft the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap-labor bill. Fresco is an ally of Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who endorsed Lee’s bill on August 5.
The new status “is a huge benefit of this amended bill,” tweeted immigration lawyer Elissa Taub, from Memphis, Tenn.
“This is a pretty fundamental change to the legal immigration system without anybody debating it,” said Krikorian. “It is a de facto increase in [legal] immigration — but presented dishonesty,” he said.
Section 7. Adjustment of Status For Employment-Based Immigrants – This is the other section that’s a game-changer from the original bill. It’s key because it offers rest of world applicants (and currently backlogged people) most of the benefits of a green card while waiting. 43
— (((Greg Siskind))) (@gsiskind) August 5, 2020
2) it allows all new applicants to have the same wait time for a green card and to be able to access “early filing” for green cards which allows everyone to be able to stay in the country legally, travel abroad, and change jobs while their green card application is pending.
— Leon Fresco (@FrescoLeon) August 5, 2020
Advocates for the legislation say it is intended to help India’s contract workers and their families get green cards so they can stay in the United States.
Much of the street-level lobbying for Lee’s bill is conducted by the India visa worker, while lobbyists for the Fortune 500 and the tech sector pushed legislators from behind closed doors. The legislation passed the House as H.R.1044 in July 2019 after a huge and secret lobbying campaign.
Indian visa-workers declare Sen. Rick Scott as a KKK racist b/c he blocked Mike Lee's S386 labor-supply bill.
The tactics by @immivoice pressure Sens. to support Lee's tech-$ bill that invites floods of 'green-card lite' foreign grads into US jobs #H1Bhttps://t.co/UGN1jmmWG5— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 6, 2020
But advocates for Lee’s bill — including Lee’s office, Fresco, and the Cato Institute’s David Bier — declined to discuss the impact of the Green Card Lite language.
The Green Card Lite is created on page 27 of Lee’s S.386 legislation, which is also being presented as “H.R.1044 with the Lee amendment.”
The text says foreigners can get the Green Card Lite if they have to wait two years to get a green card after they are nominated by their employer. The bill says:
An alien … who has filed a [green card] petition or on whose behalf a [green card] petition has been filed for immigrant status … may file an application with the Secretary of Homeland Security for adjustment of status [to a legal resident] if such petition was approved not less than two years before the date on which the application for adjustment of status is filed … [and] shall be eligible for work authorization and travel permission.
Overall, Lee’s bill is designed to increase the flow of Indian workers into Fortune 500’s white collar jobs, because the only national group that needs to wait two years for green cards are Indians. Lee’s “Early Filing” rule was first mentioned during December 2019 negotiations with Durbin. But it was finally revealed August 4, just before the bill was denied Senate passage via Unanimous Consent by an August 5 objection from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla.
At least 300,000 Indian workers, plus at least 300,000 immediate family members are waiting for green cards.
They are waiting because investors, Fortune 500 companies, and the Indian government together created a U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, in which roughly 200,00o Indian graduates are imported each year to replace American graduates or to bring U.S. white collar jobs back to India.
The little recognized outsourcing economy keeps at roughly one million Indians legal and illegal workers in the United States. This population floods the white collar labor market and cuts opportunities and salaries for American professionals, so boosting stock values for American investors and sending roughly $80 billion in trade back to India.
Many U.S. CEOs prefer Indian workers because they are cheap — but also because they are compliant and cannot quit for another job. Their reduced legal status makes them much easier to manage and discard than a workforce of outspoken and mobile U.S. professionals.
Yet there is growing evidence this executive preference is shrinking the innovative workforce of U.S. professionals. This labor policy gives U.S. tech leaders more control over the high tech economy, but it also blocks innovative technologies and companies from getting to the U.S. market.
However, U.S. CEOs recognize their U.S.-India pipelines are now clogged.
The pipelines are clogged because Indian graduates in India know that they cannot get one of the 23,000 green cards that can be issued to Indians each year because the 300,000-plus Indian workers and their families have gotten into the lines ahead of them. New Indian graduates know they will likely have to stay with the same employer for decades — at a huge career risk — while they work and wait for delivery of the promised green card.
But Lee’s green card lite proposal will remove the backlog, clear the pipeline, supercharge the outsourcing – and smash the middle class that is the political base of the GOP.
The Lee bill lifts the pro-diversity “country caps,” so allowing the Indians to get a far greater share of the 140,000 cards issued each year.
The Lee bill creates the “Early Filing” process, which provides the Green Card Lite to an uncapped number of Indians each year. “They will be legal] immigrants at that point,” said Krikorian.
The Lee bill sets no limits on the uncapped number of foreign workers who can get U.S. jobs via the existing L-1 and H-1B visa worker pipelines, or via the universities’ “Practical Training” pipelines. The Lee bill does not set any cap on the number of Green Card Lite cards that can be won by migrants each year. Also, the Lee bill does create a requirement for companies to hire Americans who can do the job.
Currently, these white collar pipelines keep roughly 1.3 million foreign workers in U.S. jobs.
The total includes roughly 600,000 H-1B workers, roughly 500,000 Practical Training Workers, roughly 40,000 L-1 workers, and at least 100,000 white-collar illegals, including many gig-worker jobs at subcontractors of Fortune 500 companies. Companies also use the B-1/B-2 visa to legally import people for illegal work.
The labor pipelines also import many non-Indians — such as Filipino nurses and Chinese technical managers — into jobs around the United States,
The vast majority of these workers are college graduates, and most of them hope to win green cards.
But the inflow also includes thousands of people who are trying to get green cards by working in tough, blue collar jobs for very low wages. CEOs use these work-for-green-card people as meatpackers, chefs, home health aides, and in many other tasks.
More data re. the obvious: 2:1 majorities of Americans want fewer CEOs hiring visa workers #H1B & migrants in the economic crash.
That's good for Trump's team & bad for Biden's team, so it gets minimal coverage by the powerless journos in estb. media. https://t.co/azheWrAYLH— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 6, 2020
Lee’s proposal cuts the price of Indian labor for Fortune 500 companies, said Krikorian.
Visa workers are accepting the prospect of compensation in the form of a [promised] green card, but it is uncertain. What this does is it makes it more predictable when they are going to get permanent residency. In a sense, the value of the [promised] immigration benefit is increased [by Lee’s predictability], which potentially could allow employers to reduce the actual [cash] pay.
Rosemary Jenks, the policy director at NumbersUSA, said Lee’s bill would worsen the claimed problem of too many visa workers competing for the annual supply of 140,000 employer-provided green cards:
The [Green-Card Lite] legislation will make the problem worse … [because] it is basically turning a temporary visa into a permanent visa, and once you do that, anyone here on that visa will claim a right to say permanently.
This is an absolutely unprecedented change … This undermines the entire purpose of guest-workers. The whole claim of guest workers is that the employer can’t find an immediate person, so someone else can take the job from abroad [temporarily] while an American is trained, graduates or moves. This blows that out the window and says these jobs will be gone from Americans permanently.
The legislation is supported by officials at the Department of Homeland Security. It has not been denounced by the White House, or even by President Donald Trump’s deputies on Capital Hill.
“It is entirely possible [GOP legislators] have no idea” what they are doing, said Krikorian, who added:
This exemplifies the whole process of making immigration policy. That’s the way immigration policy has been made, where people from both parties join with special interests behind closed doors and nobody really notices until it is too late.
It is harder to do in other issues because there are always lots of well-funded lobbies and experts on either side of many issues, whether it is military questions, tax policy, or environmental policy. On immigration, all the money is on the same side — the side of more, more and more. So this kind of backroom policymaking is a lot easier to pull than it is in other areas of government activities.
Durbin and other Democrat support Lee’s Green Card Lite plan.
“Immigration defines this country, our diversity defines this country,” Durbin said August 5, amid a national economic crash that has pushed 30 million Americans out of their jobs.
Lee & Durbin #S386 bill tears a vast hole in Americans' economic rights by letting CEOs recruit UNlimited foreign workers w/ offers to live & work in US.
Fla. Sen. Scott said he blocked it b/c it hurts Latino migrants.
So Trump's opposition seems decisivehttps://t.co/o9bbb91KkZ— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 5, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment