Monday, March 15, 2021

WALL STREET BOUGHT ME BECAUSE OF MY LONG, LONG, LONG HISTORY OF SUPPORTING NAFTA AND THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY'S ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER FOR 'CHEAP' LABOR

Biden's amnesty bill dramatically raises the $$ incentive for Fortune 500 CEOs to NOT hire American graduates.

It is a giveaway to the many CEOs & investors who prefer compliant, no-rights, foreign graduate contract-workers.
IOW, #H1B for every career. https://t.co/WUW5lREV7l



The Number of Extraneous U Visas May Be About to be Tripled by the Biden Administration

By David North on March 10, 2021

Crime happens in the United States to people from all over the world. The U.S. immigration system, oddly in my view, rewards its victims with green cards through U visas.

Why is it that while the four countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, which constitute only 2 percent of the world's population and provided us with 20 percent of our legal immigrants in 2019, for example, gave us 86.6 percent of our green-card-rewarded crime victims in the years 2012-2018? This is through the U visa program.

Mind you, the crime involved routinely occurs in the United States and one needs documentation from a U.S. law enforcement agency to claim this status, so the huge Hispanic involvement in this program does not directly relate to the admittedly high crime rates in those four countries. The crimes that create the green cards happen here. And I suspect that many of these are Hispanic-on-Hispanic crimes.

One might conclude that Mexican nationals and those from the Northern Triangle of Central America are more likely to be crime victims (and know criminals) than other migrants. Maybe, but my sense is that one set of illegal migrants (and their advocates and their lawyers) have found a neat way to produce a specialized amnesty for themselves, a method not (or not yet) well-known to other ethnic groups. It's true that nationals of those four countries constitute the majority of the illegal population, but the disproportion is still striking.

About a generation ago I noticed something similar happening with migration from Turkey. Turkey had a larger proportion of elderly emigrants coming to the U.S. than just about any other nation. Poking a little further, I found that some U.S.-based Turks were bringing the old folks in and putting them immediately on the welfare rolls. The loophole, after the usual delay, was closed, and the average age level of Turkish migrants returned to the norm.

There's a good reason to write about U visas now because the Biden administration's omnibus immigration proposal, which is scheduled to be considered next week by the House of Representatives, calls for a tripling of the annual numerical limit for such visas from 10,000 to 30,000.

I feel sorry for someone who has been, for example, mugged (as I was twice, long ago in the District of Columbia, when I was foolishly going for evening strolls) but there is no reason to reward the victim with a path toward citizenship. As a matter of fact, a new document to me, "U Visa Filing Trends", a USCIS publication, indicates that these visas are also issued to two different kinds of non-victims — relatives of victims and, wait for this: "1.4% were bystanders to the QCA" with the initials standing for Qualifying Criminal Activity. That means that we have handed out green cards at the rate of 140 a year to those who simply witnessed a crime.

This is a foolish way to distribute green cards, and yet it may be about to triple in size. What is worse, there was, in 2019, a backlog of 142,000 of these applications awaiting USCIS decisions. And, even in the Trump years, the approval rate was about 85 percent, indicating a non-thorough screening of these applications.

The beneficiaries of the U visa are not to be confused with the world's best and brightest, or the world's most innocent. Another recent USCIS publication "U Visa Demographics" describes the beneficiaries (the new green card holder) this way:

  • USCIS estimates about 13% of principal petitioners and 8% of derivatives were in removal proceedings at the time of filing. Twenty two percent of principal petitioners and 11% of derivatives were previously in removal, exclusion, or deportation proceedings.
  • The majority of principal petitioners (79%) and derivatives [i.e., relatives] (65%) reported that they did not have a lawful immigration status at the time of filing.

. . .

  • Eighty percent of principal petitions included an application requesting that USCIS waive applicable inadmissibility grounds as initial evidence, as instructed under current regulation.
  • Nearly 10% of approved principal petitioners required a waiver for fraud or willful misrepresentation.

In other words, only a small minority of those applying were in legal status at the time of application. This is not a random sample of aliens here legally, as students or tourists, who became crime victims. The beneficiaries are, though these reports do not mention it, largely law-breakers who have police-recorded contacts with other law-breakers.

For a more detailed description and analysis of the U Visa program, see this comprehensive report by my colleague Jessica Vaughan.

"U Visa Demographics" is a report in the once-over lightly mode, missing many valuable variables that were crying to be reported, as we will detail in a subsequent posting. I am glad that it was written, as a first step, but would call it loaded non-scholarship.

[This post has been edited since publication.]

This is where Biden has an opening. Many American workers who voted for Trump were lifelong Democrats. They bought into his agenda only because it seemed like someone was finally hearing them. Biden, the ultimate empath, has built a political brand on listening.

“His personal grief has become a synecdoche for a nation of suffering, be it Covid-related loss or diminishing job opportunities or opioid addiction,” the article concluded.

Biden’s Deputies OK Illegals Importing More Children, Teen Workers

BERLIN, GERMANY - FEBRUARY 11: In this aerial view cubicles furnished with bunk beds stand ready to accommodate refugees and asylum applicants in Hangar 6 of former Tempelhof Airport on February 11, 2016 in Berlin, Germany. Tempelhof, once an airport in the city center and first built in the 1930s, …
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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President Joe Biden’s deputies are making it easier for U.S.-based illegal migrants to import and pick up more so-called Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) at government shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Officials told reporters on Friday they would end a 2018 policy set by President Donald Trump. The Trump policy allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to scrutinize the U.S.-based people who offered to sponsor children and teenagers being held at HHS shelters.

“There will not be any immigration enforcement consequences for a family member or a sponsor who comes forward to be united with an unaccompanied child in our care,” one of Biden’s deputies told reporters Friday afternoon.

The proposed fix to the current traffic jam at the border likely will increase the cross-border flow — because it gives the green light to illegal migrants living in the United States to import more of their left-behind children — and to traffic in more teenage workers into child-labor jobs.

In the current crush, many of the children and teenagers are overstaying the 72-hour limit in the bare-bones border facilities. During Trump’s term, such crowding prompted jeering from migration advocates about “kids in cages.” So Biden’s deputies are using the media’s narrative of “kids in cages” as an excuse to remove curbs on the movement of more children and youths into the United States.

Many illegal migrants choose to leave all or some of their children behind in their home country as they sneak across the border or jump through the asylum and Flores border loopholes. The new Biden policy allows the large population of recently arrived migrants to get their children delivered to the border by paid coyotes — and then delivered to their U.S. homes by taxpayer-funded federal agencies.

But the Trump 2018 policy was adopted also because poor foreign parents agreed to let traffickers move their older teenagers into low-wage U.S. jobs until they worked off their smuggling debts — with interest.

A March 11 report by BuzzFeed News suggests that 35 percent of the current youth migrants claim to be 17, and 24 percent claim to be 16.

Biden’s officials insisted in a March 12 statement that “the new agreement does not change safeguards designed to ensure unaccompanied children are unified with properly vetted sponsors who can safely care for them while they await immigration proceedings.”

Outside the DHS, the view is quite different.

“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told a ProPublica reporter: “They want to help their parents,” she said in a November 2020 article.

ProPublica cited the case of Garcia, a Guatemalan youth who used the UAC loophole in 2018:

He was 15 and he had debts to pay, starting with the roughly $3,000 he owed for the “coyote” who guided him across Mexico from Guatemala. To finance the trip, his parents had taken out a bank loan, using their house as collateral. If he didn’t repay it, the family could lose its home.

Within a week of arriving, Garcia accompanied his aunt and uncle to the factory where they worked making auto parts. He got hired on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, cleaning newly made screws and bolts with an air blow gun. Workers wore safety goggles to protect their eyes from the shards of metal that blew in their faces. It was a dirty job. “I didn’t like it, working with so many oily parts,” he recalled. “And it was dangerous.”

Garcia was not directly employed by the factory. Instead, he got the job through an “oficina,” the word Spanish-speaking immigrants use to describe the dozens of temporary staffing agencies that employ hundreds of thousands of workers in Illinois. In some cases, the [migrant] teens interviewed by ProPublica — all but one of them male — say they don’t even know the name of the staffing agency that employs them; it’s just the place where someone told them they could find work.

In February 2016, the Washington Post‘s editorial board warned officials of labor trafficking into a hidden child-labor economy:

A recently released Senate report confirmed that HHS in 2014 placed at least six children with a ring of human traffickers, who then forced them to work at Trillium egg farm in Ohio for as little as $2 a day. According to a 2015 criminal indictment, the children were subjected to inhumane treatment — forced to work six or seven days a week, 12 hours a day, and the traffickers “repeatedly threatened the victims and their families with physical harm, and even death, if they did not work or surrender their entire paychecks.” The children were housed in trailers with “no bed, no heat, no hot water, no working toilets, and vermin.”

The Trillium trafficking case is symptom of a wider problem with monitoring unaccompanied minors once they enter the United States. The Senate report noted 13 other cases of post-placement trafficking of minors, with 15 more cases indicating signs of possible trafficking. Inexcusable gaps in HHS policies and procedures led to unaccompanied minors being placed with sponsors or relevant adults in a household without background checks.

The [Obama] administration says that it has strengthened its background-check procedures and that adults with serious criminal offenses are now disqualified from becoming sponsors … HHS and the Department of Homeland Security urgently need to establish a clear agreement as to which federal agency is responsible for monitoring the welfare of unaccompanied minors from the time they are placed with a sponsor until the time of their immigration hearings.

A 2016 Washington Post article explained the egg-farm labor trafficking scandal:

[O]ne Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.

One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay.

Amid the border crush, pro-migration groups are pushing for even looser rules to help more migrants get into the United States. For example, some advocates want border agencies to allow foreign relatives to escort younger migrants through the border and HHS processes. According to a March 7 report in USAToday:

Other times, a grandparent who has raised the child since birth will take the arduous journey with them and arrive at the U.S. border – only to be separated from the child for weeks or maybe months, [Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services at the National Immigrant Justice Center] said.

“There should be a way legally for the children to be essentially reunified in place with the adult caregiver without having to go through the entire system,” she said.

Many of those demands will likely be approved by Alejandro Mayoras, the pro-migration advocate who is now secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

“The numbers are enormous, and we are working through it, and we have plans that we will be unveiling shortly to bring order to that,” he told Univision anchor Jorge Ramos in a March 12 interview.

Mayorkas admitted some of the young migrants are picked up by traffickers:

What we need to do as a nation is, we need to invest and address the root causes so that parents do not need to send their children alone to leave their countries of origin, to leave their homes, to traverse Mexico, only to get to get to the southern border and to be placed in the hands of traffickers.

But Mayorkas also indicated he believes Americans have no choice but to watch as progressives extract an unending flow of poor migrants for use in Americans’ homeland:

What we are seeing is a pent-up demand for freedom and humanity, because, over the last four years, the border has been closed, our asylum laws have not been honored and our country’s values have not been advanced.

I’m incredibly proud to be in this administration and to serve a president who has made a commitment and lived up to that commitment to restore our nation’s identity as a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws.

Mayorkas claims the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants.” But more than 85 percent of Americans were born in America. and more than 50 percent favor a sharp reduction in the annual inflow of one million legal immigrants. Only about one-in-eight Americans favor policies to increase migration numbers, such as Mayorkas’s current policy of raising the inflow of Central American migrants through the 2008 Unaccompanied Alien Child back door.

The Trump 2018 policy was crafted when officials recognized many of the sponsors are not in the United States legally and were using coyotes — and the federal agencies — to deliver their Central American children to their addresses throughout the United States.

“We’ve arrested 41 individuals thus far that we’ve identified,” Matthew Albence, acting chief of ICE, said in September 2018. “Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens,” he added.

Roughly one-third of would-be sponsors backed out during the period when the policy was in effect, according to a pro-migration organization.

However, in 2019, Republican legislators let Democrats impose a legislative ban on the 2018 policy, largely ending the arrest and deportation of illegal migrant sponsors:

Bloomberg: White-Collar Visa Workers Take 2/3 of New Tech Jobs Each Year

H1-B Visa Workers
MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty
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Two-thirds of entry-level tech jobs go to compliant foreign guest-workers, not to the young American professionals who may create a new wave of establishment-shaking companies, according to a report from Bloomberg.

In 2018, “the U.S. had between 96,000 and 143,000 openings in IT occupa­tions that typically went to candidates with a bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science or engineering,” said the March 10 report, headlined “STEM Graduates Deserve a Better Path to Good Jobs.”

But the government each year provides “Occupational Practical Training” (OPT) work permits to hundreds of thousands of foreigners who have paid tuition to American universities. It also invites roughly 85,000 foreign graduates on H-1B work visas, the report says.

“So, OPT participants accounted for anywhere from one-third to one-half of new hires. If you add H-1B candidates, up to two-thirds of openings went to guest workers,” said the report, which relies heavily on Hal Salzman, an expert on high-tech employment at Rutgers University.

Few of the OPT workers are high-skilled, Bloomberg acknowledged: “More than 70% of nonresident computer science master’s degrees awarded in 2018 came from unranked programs, or those ranked 50 and lower by U.S. News and World Report. Just 17% came from schools ranked in the top 25. [universities]”

Breitbart News has extensively reported on the fraud-ridden OPT program — and its sister program, the Curricular Practical Training program — which provides Fortune 500 companies with roughly 400,000 cheap foreign workers each year.

The OPTs — and the many similar H-1B, L-12, J-1, and TN visa workers — fill many starter-jobs and mid-career white-collar jobs in a wide variety of industry sectors, including tech, healthcare, academia, accounting, and design.

Few of the OPT workers complain about their lower-wage jobs because their CEOs can fire them at will.

More importantly, the foreign OPT workers accept the low wages and long hours in exchange for the promise of green cards. This means that employers can pay foreign graduates with government-supplied free green cards — in contrast them paying American graduates with dollars subtracted from company profits, stock values, and executive bonuses.

Nationwide, at least 1 million foreigners are working in lower-wage, white-collar jobs in the hope of getting green cards. This huge “Green Card Workforce” helps lower many Americans’ salaries, diminish the importance of professional advice in business, and smother the future creation of innovative companies by experience and outspoken American graduates.

Jay Palmer closely monitors this layered hiring system in his role as a human rights advocate for migrants, visa workers, and trafficked workers.

U.S. college graduates owe so much in student loans that they have to work for at least $45,000 or $50,000, but the OPT worker “will come out and work for $30,000 because of the poverty levels back in their home country,” he told Breitbart News, adding:

They’ll work for 30 percent to 40 percent less than Americans can work and drive American salaries down and drive the [U.S.] college students out of work.

The [OPTs] will live very cheaply, sometimes five and seven and eight to a house. They will send their money back to their country, for example, India, Slovenia, Croatia, or China or Vietnam, Venezuela, or other countries. So it is not helping the economy because they’re not spending money here .. tax receipts decline, municipalities lose out.

And the [employers] are paying them on 1099s. The majority of them on 1099s never file their taxes. This is a huge scheme that I know that the State Department and Department of Labor is looking at. The Fortune 500 companies have their master services agreements with third-party contractors and are saying that they’re not liable for this.

If a company hires an American college graduate, the company has to pay employment tax, unemployment tax, Social Security taxes, pay their health care, all of the normal benefits. But if they hire an OPT worker, they’re hiring them through a third-party contractor, paying them on 1099s, without benefits or taxes. So their rate of return [per employee] is about 80 percent higher. They save up to 28 percent just by not paying benefits.

And the [subcontractor hourly] rates are lower. If the rate [paid by the Fortune 500 company to the subcontractor] is $50 an hour [per graduate], the workers probably end up maybe getting $20 an hour, and the subcontractors pocket the difference. That scheme is known as the layer system.

Palmer works with the Weiser Law Firm in Pennsylvania.

Over time, the mass of foreign tech workers are getting a greater share of careers — and wealth — from CEOs in the prestigious tech firms, as many American graduates into lesser jobs.

graph 1

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Media interviews spotlight the foreign graduates’ sense of entitlement to Americans’ jobs. CNBC reported February 19:

Shantanu, 33, received his Ph.D. in structural biology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in December. His OPT application arrived on Nov. 17 and he didn’t receive a filing receipt until Feb. 11. He’s still waiting for work authorization and is unable to start his postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“We invest a lot of time coming to the U.S., working in the U.S. and contributing to the U.S.,” said Shantanu, who asked to be identified only by his first name. “And after a while, when we are treated like this, it makes us wonder why we chose the U.S. in the first place.”

The Bloomberg article includes a few proposed reforms to the OPT program, but those reforms would not significantly reduce the number of American graduates who get sidelined by CEOs who prefer to pay compliant foreign workers with government-supplied green cards.

Bloomberg writes:

Shifting oversight from DHS to the Labor Department should be an obvious baseline, according to Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute and Ronil Hira of Howard University …  Costa and [Ronil] Hira have sensibly proposed that foreign students should be “paid according to U.S. wage standards.”

Eliminating the payroll tax advantage would also help ensure that merit rather than pay drives hiring … A carrot-and-stick approach, for example, could exempt employers from such taxes for two years when they hire new U.S. STEM graduates, and charge a 10% penalty for displacement when an OPT student is hired.

Finally, the U.S. should focus on attracting talent for jobs where a shortage truly exists. This involves ensuring visa holders have a legitimate job offer with a wage at or above specified levels, making a concerted effort to recruit U.S. workers and targeting the truly “best and brightest.”

President Donald Trump missed the opportunity to make himself a champion for white-collar workers in the 2020 election, largely because a few of his top aides simply favored the major donors and the Fortune 500 companies.

But according to Bloomberg, Biden may grab the political prize by forcing pro-employee changes to the visa-worker programs:

This is where Biden has an opening. Many American workers who voted for Trump were lifelong Democrats. They bought into his agenda only because it seemed like someone was finally hearing them. Biden, the ultimate empath, has built a political brand on listening.

“His personal grief has become a synecdoche for a nation of suffering, be it Covid-related loss or diminishing job opportunities or opioid addiction,” the article concluded.

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