Friday, October 30, 2020

TRUMP REWRITES H-1B PROGRAM TO HELP AMERICAN WHITE-COLLAR WORKERS - WHO DOES HE THINK HE'S KIDDING? HE COULD HAVE DONE THAT FOUR YEARS AGO!

 

Back in February, I reported to you on the myth of the American worker shortage by spotlighting more than 50 stories of tens of thousands of recent U.S. worker layoffs in tech and other high-skilled industries. MICHELLE MALKIN

Trump Rewrites H-1B Program to Help American White-Collar Workers

Virginia
Getty
NEIL MUNRO
5,122
11:34

President Donald Trump’s deputies have launched a fundamental reform of the H-1B visa system to protect American graduates from outsourcing — despite furious opposition from donors and leaders from Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 companies, and coastal investors.

The reform will end the annual award of 85,000 H-1B visas by lottery, which has been gamed by companies to import foreign workers at wages far below the salaries needed by American professionals. Instead, the visas will be offered to the companies that compete to offer the highest salaries, preventing employers from undercutting American graduates.

“The Trump administration is continuing to deliver on its promise to protect the American worker while strengthening the economy,” said Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli. “The current use of random selection to allocate H-1B visas … hurts American workers by bringing in relatively lower-paid foreign labor at the expense of the American workforce.”

“We have seen more progress in the last few weeks than we’ve seen in the last 30 years,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which opposes the H-1B and other visa worker programs. He continued:

If you look at it on the whole, Trump is side with working Americans. Look at the beginning of his administration when he canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All the elites wanted that — he said no. He allowed labor into [negotiations about] NAFTA II — the USMCA — and they made a better deal for working man and women. On August 3, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, he used the authority he had to protect those white-collar jobs [from H-1B outsourcing]. So he’s clearly made a choice between the elites and working men and women.

Trump has pushed forward with popular and dramatic reforms of the visa worker programs since June, with additional actions taken in August and early October.

The actions may be helping his poll ratings among vital white-collar graduates in two critical states: North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

For example, Monmouth University’s early October poll showed Trump getting 38 percent among white college graduates, while Biden had 57 percent. That is down slightly from a September 2 poll that showed Trump was getting 40 percent but is above Monmouth’s July poll that showed Trump getting only 34 percent of white college voters.

On October 13, Monmouth showed Trump was getting 48 percent of white college graduates in North Carolina, up from 42 percent on September 3.

Both states have been hit hard by H-1B outsourcing, giving Trump a chance to champion the very popular economic self-interest of college graduates.

“There are many financial institutions in North Carolina that are abusing cheap labor and H-1Bs,” Jay Palmer, a civil rights activist who works with abused visa workers, told Breitbart News. He continued:

Charlotte, N.C., is the hotbed of visa fraud. They’re laying off American workers left and right because there is so much cheap [foreign] labor in North Carolina … They’re hiring anybody through third-party consulting companies, and they are paying them on 1099s [as gig workers]  to work at the financial institutions. They’re replacing American workers such as risk managers and actuaries — any jobs they can fill with cheap labor. It’s horrible. You don’t even know how bad it is.

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that H-1B visa workers hold almost 600,000 white-collar jobs.

But other estimates say 900,000 jobs are allocated to H-1B workers. In addition, at least another 600,000 foreign workers hold white-collar jobs after being imported via other pipelines, dubbed Optional Practical Training (OPT), L-1, J-1, TN, Curricular Practical Training (CPT), and H4EAD.

Some of these million-plus foreign workers stay in the United States until they are trained by Americans and can take the white-collar jobs back to India.

But most of these foreign workers come from low-tier universities and work for many years at low wages in mid-skill jobs in the hope or expectation of getting green cards and citizenship delivered via a current or future employer. For example, at least 300,000 Indian H-1B workers are now working while waiting for employer-sponsored green cards. Many more visa workers work as gig workers for little-known subcontractors in the hopes of getting into the H-1B program so they can get citizenship.

CEOs at Fortune 500 companies quietly outsource many of their full-time jobs to this huge “Green Card Workforce,” so cutting costs and boosting near-term stock values for shareholders and C-Suite executives.

This green card outsourcing prevents many American graduates from getting paid jobs where they can use the degrees they earned with borrowed tuition money. Also, outsourcing pushes many experienced American professionals from mid-career jobs, while millions more face lower salaries and persistent job insecurity.

Corporate diversity reports, university reports, and census data show that large slices of the nation’s technology workforce consist of ill-paid, ill-treated foreign workers who have the same job security and professional authority as migrant stoop workers in U.S. fields.

The large number of foreign workers are used to minimize U.S. professionals’ role and prevent the formation of innovative companies. The foreigners’ limited skills and lack of workplace rights help to reduce productivity, the quality of software, and to slow research.

But this labor policy also delivers workplace stability, cheaper graduates, and higher stock values to the current executives and leading shareholders of the Fortune 500 companies.

A statement from the Department of Homeland Security described the new rule:

WASHINGTON —Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced the transmission to the Federal Register of a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that would prioritize the selection of H-1B registrations (or petitions, if the registration process is suspended) based on corresponding wage levels in order to better protect the economic interests of U.S. workers, while still allowing U.S. employers to meet their personnel needs and remain globally competitive.

Modifying the H-1B cap selection process by replacing the random selection process with a wage-level-based selection process is a better way to allocate H-1Bs when demand exceeds supply. If finalized as proposed, this new selection process would incentivize employers to offer higher wages or petition for positions requiring higher skills and higher-skilled workers instead of using the program to fill relatively lower-paid vacancies.

…

This effort would only affect H-1B registrations submitted by prospective petitioners seeking to file H-1B cap-subject petitions. It would be implemented for both the H-1B regular cap and the H-1B advanced degree exemption, but would not change the order of selection between the two as established by the H-1B registration requirement final rule.

DHS will open a public comment period once the NPRM is published in the Federal Register. Interested parties will have 30 days to submit comments relevant to the proposed rule and 60 days to submit comments relevant to the proposed information collection. The Department will review all properly submitted comments, consider them carefully, and draft responses before issuing a final rule.

In contrast to Trump’s partial populism, Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign theme claims, “We are in a battle for the soul of this nation.”

“When Biden talks about ‘Saving the Soul of America,’ he is whistling through a cemetery,” responded Lynn:

Under globalists like Biden, the neoliberals have destroyed of hundreds of thousands of good middle-class and upper-middle-class jobs. That is what killed the American dream. The American Dream is,  if you want to find it, you go to the cemetery. That’s where you’re gonna find the people have actually lived it. If you’re a millennial, looking to get into the job market, or you’re a boomer getting ready to retire, you’re very insecure right now … I wish Biden would be more concerned about the body.

Biden is backed by companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs, he said. “One need only look at the support that he’s been getting from Google, Facebook, and Twitter … it is obvious.”

“This is why it is so critical that if Vice President Biden wins in November, he follows through on his commitment to reforming our failed immigration system,” wrote Todd Schulte, director of the FWD.us advocacy group. The group was created in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other coastal investors who were hoping to get the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty through Congress.

The bill would have dramatically accelerated the inflow of consumers, renters, and workers into the U.S. economy and also allowed an unlimited inflow of foreign postgraduates. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” said a report by the Congressional Budget Office.

If Biden “follows through on his commitment to reforming our failed immigration system … We can create a streamlined modern visa system so that people who want to come to contribute or unify their families can do so,” Schulte wrote October 28.

Biden’s 2020 platform promises to let companies import more visa workers, let mayors import a new class of visa workers, and allow an unlimited flow of foreign graduates through U.S. universities and into white-collar jobs. The plan says Biden would “exempt from any cap [the] recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields.”

In contrast, Trump is likely to reject migrants, narrow asylum claims yet further, and fund the transfer of migrants waiting in Mexico back to Latin American countries. His 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. For example, in many speeches, Trump generally ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.

Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and to get many progressive reporters to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.

 

Michelle Malkin: Plight of Laid-Off American Workers Nothing to Celebrate

 By Michelle Malkin | September 2, 2020 

American workers across the wage scale are hurting. Small-business owners across the country are fighting for their survival. Young people face more uncertainty than ever about their futures and ability to put food on the table.

As we head into Labor Day weekend, I would like to offer a friendly reminder from the "America First" right to the Beltway Republican message machine and the Trump campaign's social media mavens: Now is not the time to be cheerleading for pandemic profiteers, tech billionaires, and "woke capital" globalists who are addicted to cheap foreign labor and abhor American sovereignty. According to one analysis by Oxfam, 17 out of the top 25 most profitable U.S. corporations — including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Facebook, Pfizer and Visa — are projected to rake in $85 billion more in 2020 than in previous years as upward of 40 million Americans are out of work.

SwampCons keep touting the "booming stock market" and "record" S&P 500 highs. President Donald Trump himself bragged last week, "NASDAQ has broken the record, I think 16 times already, during a pandemic." He also warned Republican National Convention viewers that Joe Biden is bad for our "retirement" nest eggs and "401(k)s." True enough. But what about the tens of millions who've lost their jobs and those who haven't even had the chance to start putting away any savings?

Moreover, why should any "Make America Great Again" populists wave pom-poms for Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook? The founders, top executives, and elitist employees of these Silicon Valley firms — the top five companies in the NASDAQ index — hate America, sabotage U.S. workers through advocating for mass migration, Black Lives Matter and Antifa anarchy, and they openly disparage and discriminate against Trump-supporting customers.

In ordinary times, I used to be one of those reliable voices touting the "free market," "invisible hand," and miracles of American capitalism over "socialism." But our current condition is not one of "limited government conservatism" vs. "big government socialism." As I've illustrated all summer long, we live in a bloody state of anarchotyranny. The lawless reign while big business collectively allies itself with the mob to reap profits at the expense of the law-abiding.

Back in February, I reported to you on the myth of the American worker shortage by spotlighting more than 50 stories of tens of thousands of recent U.S. worker layoffs in tech and other high-skilled industries. Among the U.S. corporations and institutions responsible for laying off, replacing, offshoring, and outsourcing tens of thousands of American jobs:

Wayfair, TripAdvisor, LogMeIn, Inc., Zume Pizza, VMWare, Shutterfly, Intel, Comcast, Xilinx, 23andMe, NortonLifeLock, AT&T, Macy's, Walgreens, Uber, Lyft, UCSF Medical Center, Baptist Health, Sysco, WeWork, American Family Insurance, Tennessee Valley Authority, Amway, UPS subsidiary Coyote Logistics, Comcast, Lime, Bird, Unicorn, Getaround, Cerner, Oracle, Samsung US, Edmunds.com, Textron Aviation, Morgan Stanley, Spirit AeroSystems, Mozilla, UiPath, Plexus, Cisco, Ancestry.com, Clover Health, State Street Corporation, Anthem, Transamerica, Verizon, MassMutual, Disney, Carnival, Abbott Labs, EmblemHealth, Harley Davidson, Cargill, Eversource Energy, Best Buy, Southern California Edison, and Qualcomm.

Six months later, record layoffs are piling up.

—Last week in California, VMWare, downtown San Jose's Hilton Hotel, Veritas, Blackhawk Country Club, Gap, Chartwells, and Silver Creek Sportsplex in San Jose all announced hundreds more Bay Area layoffs.

—Among the companies confirming new COVID-related permanent layoffs reported by The Wall Street Journal: GM Resorts International, Stanley Black & Decker Inc., and Coca-Cola.

—American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. are threatening to ax more than 53,000 workers unless they get new federal bailouts. Frontier Airlines signaled nearly 400 layoffs in Colorado.

—Even as it crowed about record quarterly sales, Salesforce handed out pink-slip notices to 1,000 of its employees.

—Despite promising not to cut workers in the midst of the COVID chaos, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo are now all considering doing just that.

—In Florida, more than 1,900 hotel employees are facing layoffs or temporary layoffs at Loews Hotels and Co and Marriott.

—Telecom giant Cisco plans to lay off an unspecified number of workers amid business troubles.

—Manufacturing giant 3M slashed 1,500 jobs at the beginning of the month.

—Walmart laid off hundreds of employees in its logistics, real estate, and retail location planning departments over the past two months.

—Hundreds of health care workers have been laid off in Cook County, Illinois, Cape Cod, the University of Texas Medical Branch Health system, Lynwood Hospital in Los Angeles, and Minnesota's state hospital system.

Remember these laid-off workers when Beltway crapweasels come back from their Labor Day holiday to lobby for more imported foreign farmworkers, work permits for illegal immigrant DREAMers, H-1B tech visas, more foreign doctors and other medical professionals, Silicon Valley tax breaks, and Fortune 500 bailouts.

I repeat: There is no American worker shortage — only a shortage of politicians who truly put American workers first.

Michelle Malkin is a conservative blogger at michellemalkin.com, syndicated columnist, author, and founder of hotair.com. Michelle Malkin's email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com.

 

Chamber of Commerce Backs Freshmen House Dems Over Trade and Immigration

AP

2 Sep 202011

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has decided to endorse 23 freshmen House Democrats in this fall’s elections, a bipartisan move by an organization that has long leaned strongly toward Republicans.

The country’s largest business group is also endorsing 29 freshmen House Republicans, said a person familiar with the organization’s decision who described the actions. Even so, the decision has prompted internal divisions, with some state chamber officials criticizing the national group’s decision to back freshmen Democrats in their areas.

The House freshmen the chamber is endorsing 

include several who face tough reelections, such as 

Reps. Abby Finkenauer and Cindy Axne of Iowa, Andy 

Kim of New Jersey, Xochitl Torres Small of New 

Mexico, Anthony Brindisi of New York, Kendra Horn 

of Oklahoma, Joe Cunningham of South Carolina and 

Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia.

The chamber has a long track record of using most of its political might to back Republican candidates, especially with money. But the organization has had to recalibrate its tactics as the once-reliably pro-business GOP has taken a more populist, conservative hue on issues like immigration and trade, reflecting the views of President Donald Trump and hard-right tea party adherents whose numbers in Congress have grown.

In earlier indications of the chamber’s more bipartisan approach, it has boosted some campaign contributions to Democrats and changed how it assigns publicly released scores about whether lawmakers help business, now factoring in whether they try reaching across party lines.

The moves come as Democrats seem all but certain to continue running the House after November’s elections. Any support for Democrats helps the chamber maintain lines of communication with them, especially as growing numbers of progressive Democrats in Congress makes it harder for business groups to find allies in the party.

Democrats in tough reelection fights can cite the chamber’s backing “as a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” said Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former GOP political operative.

The chamber is also endorsing freshmen 

Democratic Reps. Greg Stanton of Arizona; 

Josh Harder, TJ Cox and Harley Rouda of 

California; Sharice Davids of Kansas; David 

Trone of Maryland; Haley Stevens of Michigan;

Angie Craig and Dean Phillips of Minnesota; 

Susie Lee of Nevada; Antonio Delgado of New 

York; Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas 

and Ben McAdams of Utah.

The person describing the chamber’s endorsements would only do so on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the moves publicly. The decision by the chamber, which issued no statement about the matter, was first reported by The Hill newspaper.

Earlier this year, the chamber said it spent six figures on digital ads opposing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in a primary that the progressive lawmaker won easily.

Otherwise, all of the chamber’s $2 million so far in the 2020 campaign on outside spending — money spent without coordinating with candidates — went to helping Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. So did all of the $40 million in outside spending by the chamber during the 2018 and 2016 campaigns.

Yet the chamber’s much smaller, direct contributions to candidates have been more evenhanded, if politically pragmatic.

The $210,000 the chamber’s political action committee has donated directly to 2020 candidates’ campaigns has been split about evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the center’s data shows. In 2018, about 2-in-3 dollars it gave to House candidates went to Republicans.

The chamber has also contributed $168,000 this year to GOP candidates for the Senate and nothing to Democrats. Since it is unclear if Republicans will continue running the Senate, the chamber’s contributions to Senate GOP candidates have more political weight than spending on the House, where control isn’t in serious doubt.

Some state chambers complained to U.S. chamber officials about the expected endorsements, arguing that the Democratic lawmakers did not have sufficiently pro-business records.

Chad Warmington, president of the Oklahoma state chamber, opposed the expected endorsement of Horn, who was narrowly elected in 2018 to a district centered on Oklahoma City. Warmington said he believes Horn hasn’t been supportive enough of the state’s oil and gas industry.

“A U.S. chamber endorsement can be persuasive in convincing voters that she’s pro-business,” Warmington said in an interview last week. “And I don’t believe there is enough evidence to say she is. I was saying to them, ‘Stay out’” and don’t endorse anyone.

Alan Cobb, president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, said he objected to the U.S. organization’s expected endorsement of Davids, from the Kansas City area. Cobb said he prefers Davids’ GOP opponent, Amanda Adkins, a businesswoman and former member of the state chamber’s board.

Warmington and Cobb both said they’d not been consulted by the national chamber about the endorsements.

 

No Labor Shortage: 20.6 Million Jobless Americans Want Full-Time Jobs

AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

4 Sep 20205

2:13

Tens of millions of Americans remain jobless, but all want full-time jobs, mostly as a result of economic shutdowns spurred by the Chinese coronavirus crisis, new unemployment data shows.

The latest Burea of Labor Statistics data from August reveals that about 20.6 million Americans remain out of a job, but all want full-time employment. Another 7.6 million Americans said they are involuntarily working part-time jobs but want full-time hours.

About 16.1 percent of those considered unemployed, 13.6 million last month, are teenagers and 13 percent are black Americans. As employment data showed in July, working class Americans continue to be the hardest hit by the crisis’s economic repercussions.

Of the millions unemployed, 6.2 million Americans were temporarily laid off from their jobs, while 3.4 million were permanently laid off.

In addition to the unemployed, seven million Americans are out of the labor force entirely. This total includes about 535,000 considered “discouraged workers” because they did not believe there were jobs available for them.

For August, there continues to be nearly 30 million Americans who are either unemployed or underemployed, but all of whom want full-time jobs without facing increased foreign competition in the labor market.

President Trump has sought to prioritize unemployed Americans for jobs. In an executive order months ago, Trump halted the inflow of H-1B, H-4, H-2B, L-1, and J-1 foreign visa workers. Since then, State Department officials issued guidance on the order, creating loopholes for visa flows to continue.

Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants on green cards to permanently resettle in the country. In addition, another 1.4 million foreign workers are admitted every year to take American jobs.

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

 

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