Jeff Bezos, the world's second-richest individual with a net worth of $203.7 billion, has made significant real estate moves in Florida's exclusive Indian Creek Island, known colloquially as "Billionaire Bunker."
The home, featuring six bedrooms and nine bathrooms, was acquired by Bezos through an off-market deal. Property records show the house was last sold in 1998,= for $2.5 million to banker Javier Holtz.
Despite its luxurious attributes, the property's valuation by Zillow stands at approximately $41 million, significantly lower than the price Bezos agreed to pay for it. This discrepancy highlights the premium Bezos placed on the property, possibly because of its location, exclusivity or potential as a custom home site beyond the estimated market value.
Bezos’s latest property acquisitions are located next to the homes of Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner as well as the famed NFL quarterback Tom Brady. Situated in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, Indian Creek is home to just 80 residences, each set in expansive mansions. These homeowners enjoy exclusive amenities, including a private golf course and country club, highlighting the area’s luxurious lifestyle.
The latest reports from Bloomberg suggest an ambitious plan: Bezos intends to demolish the first two properties to make way for a massive mansion. However, this plan has not been officially confirmed by Bezos himself.
Beyond the sphere of luxury real estate, Bezos's relocation to Florida is strategically savvy, coinciding with selling approximately $8.5 billion worth of Amazon shares. Florida's tax environment, known for its absence of a state income tax, offers a significant tax advantage, particularly for high-net-worth individuals handling large transactions like Bezos.
Bezos's latest real estate dealings and his decision to sell Amazon stock open a new chapter in his life, blending personal desires with a move to Florida, known for its favorable tax laws. His relocation to Miami, bringing him closer to family and his aerospace company Blue Origin, highlights a mix of reasons for the move, including personal, professional and tax-related benefits.
While Bezos's real estate moves are out of reach for most people, getting into the real estate industry doesn't require millions.
You can find opportunities to start investing in real estate with as little as $100 through this Bezos-backed company, real estate investment trusts (REITs) or crowdfunding websites, which offer a way for individuals to invest in property and real estate projects with minimal initial capital. These options provide a way for almost anyone to get a foot in the door of the real estate market, democratizing the ability to invest in this traditionally high-barrier industry.
Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, touted as a fully automated checkout-free system, has been revealed to rely heavily on human reviewers, particularly a team of over 1,000 workers in India.
Gizmodo reports that Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, introduced in 2016 as a groundbreaking innovation in grocery shopping, promised customers a seamless, checkout-free experience. However, recent reports have shed light on the reality behind the technology, revealing that it relies heavily on human reviewers, rather than being a purely AI-driven system.
LONDON, ENGLAND – MARCH 04: A general view of the exterior of the UK’s first branch of Amazon Fresh, on March 04, 2021, in the Ealing area of London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
According to The Information, the “Just Walk Out” technology, which uses cameras and sensors to track customer purchases, employed more than 1,000 people in India to watch and label videos to ensure accurate checkouts. These workers essentially served as remote cashiers, monitoring customers as they shopped.
The report stated that as of 2022, 700 out of every 1,000 ‘Just Walk Out’ sales required human intervention, falling significantly short of Amazon’s internal goal of less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. This revelation raises questions about the true nature of the technology and its reliance on human labor.
An Amazon spokesperson, while disputing the characterization of how many purchases require reviews, acknowledged that Machine Learning data associates validate “a small minority” of shopping visits when AI cannot determine a purchase. However, the scale of human involvement in the “Just Walk Out” system appears to be more significant than initially believed.
The heavy reliance on human reviewers has led Amazon to phase out the technology in its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, opting for a more reliable solution called Dash Carts. These shopping carts feature embedded scanners and screens, allowing customers to check out as they shop.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that Dash Carts are replacing “Just Walk Out” technology in existing stores. “We’re rolling out Amazon Dash Cart, our smart-shopping carts,” the spokesperson stated. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self-checkout counters for customers who are not Amazon members.
Read more at Gizmodo here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
THERE IS NO GREATER DANGER TO MIDDLE AMERICA THAN THE BRIBES SUCKING DEMOCRAT PARTY!
The visa is being used to import cheap labor, not for specialty occupations … It’s impacting actual American workers. There are jobs which Americans should be taking up and they’re more than skilled to do. … The U.S. graduates who have taken up such a huge loan for their education, how are they going to be able to work or pay it off?
The visa workers are often touted by U.S. investors as “top tier” graduates. But the flood of cheap unskilled labor changes the incentives for executives and workforces at Fortune 500 companies, Manohar said. “Since American workers are losing out on their jobs and Indian workers are coming in on cheap labor –the bare minimum wage — there’s no growth in innovation at all. It’s just [the] bare minimum — if you ask a person to do Task X, that’s all he does.”
The lottery fraud is acknowledged by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency within Alejandro Mayorkas’ DHS.
Biden’s Deputies Hide Mass Fraud in H-1B Middle-Class Outsourcing Visa
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/06/18/bidens-deputies-hide-mass-fraud-in-h-1b-outsourcing-program/
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AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
NEIL MUNRO
18 Jun 20231,927
19:29
Indian-born CEOs are closing their firms and fleeing back to India to escape charges of fraud in the annual lotteries for visas to import H-1B foreign contract workers, says a lawyer for many Indian-owned subcontractors and visa workers.
“So yes, they are getting prosecuted, they are getting investigated, and that’s the reason why some of them are packing their bags and closing their companies,” said Rahul Reddy, an immigration lawyer in Texas.
Reddy made his comments during an online question-and-answer session with Indian graduates who are worried about the federal investigations into the H-1B fraud in the annual lottery for 85,000 new H-1B work permits. The work permits are used to import lower-wage migrants to take the jobs needed by U.S. college graduates.
Many Indian graduates in India cooperate with the fraud because the H-1B visas put them on a long, indentured-service path to U.S. jobs, green cards, and citizenship.
But many other Indian graduates from U.S. colleges oppose the lottery fraud because it hinders their three legal chances to convert their “Optional Practical Training” (OPT) work permits into an H-1B visa with its valuable path to U.S. citizenship.
“This is the most important point,” one Indian graduate told Breitbart News. “Graduates here are working on STEM OPT [work permits] … they’re in their final or penultimate attempt [to win the H-1B lottery], and they’re employed to a legitimate employer … They are the ones who are affected,” said the graduate, who described himself as “Manohar from the Midwest.”
“I know people around me who are doing this,” Manohar said, adding:
Since they’re on their last year of the STEM OPT, they applied to the legitimate employer where they are employed and submitted another five, six applications through a consultancy [labor broker] … So they got a [fake] job offer [which is needed to apply for the lottery] which they know is bogus and everyone knows it is bogus.
“At least 500 of us on a subreddit group have been reporting these cases [to the government] … They said they’re investigating them, but there has been no update whatsoever,” he added.
The Facebook video shows Reddy reading questions from his online audience:
“Have any employees been charged for colluding so far? What penalty are they looking at?” Yes, there are a lot of companies that are under criminal investigation right now. We get a lot of contact from people who are getting criminally investigated, and employers getting investigated. Some of the employers are running away to India. Some of the employers are just closing the entire business. Some of the employers are not filing their H-1B’s even though got them in the lottery. So all different things are going on.
And it’s spreading around a lot of prosecution of these employers. Were employers prosecuted for [fraudulent] filing in 2021? Yes, they did …. Two years ago, people, let’s say for example, you’re a very nice guy, you only applied for one lottery [visa], and this other guy who applied for 10 lotteries, he got five or four selected. He was beating his chest and saying “I got my lottery.”
But now, when the prosecution happens, when the revocation [of fraudulent visas] happens, they don’t announce the information though. But yes, we do get the consultations. We do get the information. Unfortunately, we can’t put them on the video. We can only put nice people on video because the bad people, they don’t want to come on the video, and we don’t want them [on video]… If a client is consulting us and filed for 17 [duplicate H-1B visas] and he got selected four or five times, we don’t want to put that guy in there [on video].
Reddy is a founding member of the ITServe Alliance trade association that represents many Indian-born CEOs. Reddy declined to answer questions from Breitbart News.
The lottery fraud has been recognized since 2021 by top officials at President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security. “There is literally no [DHS] follow-up to fake filings that we can ascertain, and no effort is made by [DHS to] weed out folks who have filed multiple applications with multiple employers,” Charles Kuck, an Atlanta lawyer, told Breitbart News in 2021.
Much of the fraud is being conducted by Indian-born CEOs who run many of the second-tier or third-tier white-collar subcontracting under the Fortune 500.
The software sweatshops allow the Fortune 500 to replace American grads with disposable teams of indentured Indian workers. Many of the Indian workers in the subcontractor pyramids under the Fortune 500 companies are recent graduates of American universities with OPT work permits. But many are white-collar illegals — and nearly all are competing for H-1B work permits by working long hours at low pay.
The workers’ participation in fraud also traps many in the sweatshops. Their CEOs can use their prior frauds to block them from getting legal work permits that would help them pay off the huge debts that their families accepted to get the young men into U.S. jobs.
The lottery fraud is acknowledged by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency within Alejandro Mayorkas’ DHS.
But officials say little about the fraud. The Department of Justice will periodically announce settlements with CEOs. It only displays one H-1B case for 2023 — related to fraud in the dentistry business — even though it has helped close other fraud cases.
However, there is no evidence that the government’s fraud investigation is intended to reduce the large-scale extraction of migrants from poor countries for use by the Fortune 500 and Wall Street.
On June 14, for example, Mayorkas’ DHS announced a policy change to let more visa workers keep working after their visa expires or stay after their temporary contracts end.
On May 15, a top White House official said “We’re working with the State Department and DHS … to make it easier for [migrants] that have these skill sets that we think can really contribute to implementing these new policies, that we can bring them in faster.”
Instead, the DHS’s fraud investigation is likely intended to assert federal control over the process. Elsewhere, Mayorkas justifies his legal changes to southern migration as a push to replace cartel smuggling networks with safer, government-run legal pathways into American workplaces and housing.
The federal silence about the H-1B fraud is also a diplomatic concession for India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. He is a strong backer of the H-1B program because it steers vast wealth to Indians and India. He will visit Biden on June 22 for a high-status state dinner when officials will announce high-tech sales to India in a quiet exchange for allowing more Indian graduates to take more U.S. jobs.
Visa Worker Fraud
There are many categories of visa worker fraud in the various H-1B, J-1, L-1, OPT, H4EAD, J-1, B-1/B-2, H1BI, E-3, E-2, and other visa programs. There are no firm caps on the inflow of foreign workers into the United States, ensuring a resident white-collar population greater than 1.5 million. This imported workforce inflates corporate profits and stock values, and it pushes most American graduates out of their technology careers — and out of the comfortable middle class.
The most important fraud is the “LCA” fraud.
This fraud occurs when employers claim that they need an H-1B visa to import a particular worker — or a bloc of workers — who has a specific skill that cannot be hired in America and that the worker is needed for an existing contract or to fill a full-time job. This claim is dubbed a “Labor Condition Application” and is processed by the Department of Labor.
Congress has set minimal checks on the rubber-stamp LCA process. In 2021, Biden’s deputies canceled reforms established by President Donald Trump.
In practice, this LCA fraud allows the body shops to import blocs of low-wage, poorly trained Indian graduates to help them win future contracts by underbidding the employers who hire American graduates. “The contractors [pocket] somewhere between 20 and 30 percent” of the salaries paid by Fortune 500 companies, Manohar said.
“This is organized human trafficking,” said Jay Palmer, a fraud expert and a civil rights advocate for Americans and immigrants. “If you don’t know what you’re seeing, it all looks legitimate,” he told Breitbart News.
The problems are spotlighted in a video by the Center for Immigration Studies, he said. “I was so happy to see that,” Manohar said.
This fraud-ridden LCA process also allows Indian-born managers in the United States to quietly sell many Americans’ jobs to Indian graduates in exchange for a salary kickback, said Palmer.
But Chinese immigrants are also smuggling Chinese workers into U.S. jobs, said Palmer. “China is flying under the radar, big time,” said Palmer.
The job-selling process has been repeatedly described to Breitbart News by H-1B workers and U.S. managers.
It starts when managers fire an American professional, often when they reach age 40 and need higher salaries for their kids.
The managers, typically foreign-born managers, then offer the job to a same-country foreign visa worker who has been imported by one of the subcontracting companies. The deal is conducted in their home-country language and typically involves a kickback from the job’s salary to the hiring manager. The kickback is conducted outside the office, for example, at a main street business created by the hiring manager, or via a home-country transaction.
The employee knows the kickback is worth paying because the hiring manager is expected to nominate him for the huge prize of green cards and citizenship. That deferred bonus allows each foreign worker to move himself, his family, and his descendants out of poor India and into the United States.
Most of these transactions involve Indian-born managers in the United States and Indian migrants to the United States.
Indian hiring managers will sell jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, an Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News in 2020. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you will become a bottleneck in the [kickback] chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,” he said. In contrast, mid-level American managers do not sell jobs, he said, adding, “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million.”
These quiet deals are creating a fast-growing population of Indian visa workers in U.S. jobs who are waiting for one of the 140,000 green cards each year – and a continued mass layoffs of American professionals. The backlog may reach 1.8 million in the next few years, says an immigration lawyer.
When the Indian worker cannot do the American’s former job, he is expected to hire a cheap India-based support expert to do it for him online. This service is widely advertised in India and is funded from the workers’ American salary, regardless of U.S. privacy or security rules.
The empty job at the subcontractor’s company is then refilled by the next wave of Indian H-1B workers.
This black market in U.S. white-collar jobs is routine and ubiquitous, partly because many U.S. executives prefer their back offices be filled with many subordinate Indians or Chinese instead of a few outspoken American professionals.
The scale is hidden because few Americans recognize the transactions — even when their jobs are sold to visa workers.
Also, the federal government does not want to investigate the foreign-language transactions and the covert kickbacks within the Fortune 500 labor pyramids. The U.S. government also knows that each investigation will likely end up back in India, whose trade policy is based on the unspoken swap of American jobs for exports of U.S. weapons, grain, and energy. The job transactions are also protected within India’s ancient zero-sum caste culture which deters witnesses from speaking out. “It’s too hard” for the feds to track, said Palmer.
U.S. professional journalists are powerless to notice, cover, and spotlight this black market in U.S. jobs, even as it hollows out the salaries and workplace clout of their own professional class. So editors hire U.S. journalists to police transgender pronouns instead of corporate visa fraud or middle-class outsourcing.
Breitbart News, however, has reported many lawsuits, legal settlements, and witness claims where Indian managers and CEOs have allegedly engaged in fraud.
Lottery Fraud
But Reddy’s and Manohar’s comments about lottery fraud are focused on a subsidiary type of fraud in the H-1B selection process.
The process is built on the federal lottery that randomly awards 85,000 new H-1Bs visas to a lucky minority of the several hundred thousand H-1B applicants.
Each candidate worker and CEO is expected to submit one request per year per candidate to the lottery because the LCA rules require them to claim each worker is uniquely skilled for a particular job.
But the vast majority of poor Indian workers are desperate to win the life-changing lottery. Also, the cost of applying for an H-1B visa is only $10, and the payoff is huge.
The result is that many thousands of Indian candidates and CEOs have cheated in the lottery since 2021 by submitting multiple applications per person.
A USCIS chart shows 52 percent of the applications for the current lottery are duplicates. The number of duplicative applications has spiked from 28,000 cases for 2021 visas up to 409,000 cases for 2024 visas.
Often, the H-1B applicants are willing to pay the application fees that should be paid by each sponsoring company, many of which are shell companies with networks run by cliques of Indian CEOs.
“The employer who is supposed to be paying the [H-1B] petitioning fees, he is going to collect money [from workers] in India, and USCIS has no way to trace it,” said Manohar, adding:
The major part of this fraud is happening from people who have done their bachelor’s [degree] in India, although I agree some here with masters [degrees from U.S. universities] are involved as well. But the major part of the scam is happening in India [with people] who have a bachelor’s degree. So they pay [the U.S. companies] in India for the filing [fees] and then [the U.S.] employers over here pays USCIS. I mean, there’s no way to track it back. How would USCIS go back and track back transactions in India?
Let me tell you something — they shell out their entire life savings in India to go to the U.S. … Everyone within the Indian community knows that. We all know it, but we’re not sure how to get it to the public spotlight over here.
The fraud is pervasive, the Indian graduate told Breitbart News. Online, “people are discussing it openly,” he said. “They’re openly doing it thinking that this is the process, it’s fine to register multiple times.”
A Facebook page shows Indian workers asking for advice about multiple H-1B applications and about companies that are recruiting workers for future projects:
The Facebook requests are answered with a variety of advice, including comments that workers who submit fraudulent claims are not being penalized.
The corrupt practices in the H-1B are aided by some Indian-born lawyers operating in the United States, Manohar said:
Even [some Indian immigration] lawyers, they come out …. and say “‘This is fraud and you shouldn’t be filing [fraudulent] petitions.” But in the background, we know people who pay them a day consultation and then they say ‘”It’s good, fine, go ahead and file [the duplicate application]” even though they know that they’re committed fraud.
Everybody here knows, it’s not a secret anymore. It’s very open. Everybody knows they know it.
“This [lottery] fraud is growing rampant,” said Manohar. “Look at it this way. I mean, next year, there could be a million registrants or a million and a half registrants,” he said, adding:
The visa is being used to import cheap labor, not for specialty occupations … It’s impacting actual American workers. There are jobs which Americans should be taking up and they’re more than skilled to do. … The U.S. graduates who have taken up such a huge loan for their education, how are they going to be able to work or pay it off?
The visa workers are often touted by U.S. investors as “top tier” graduates. But the flood of cheap unskilled labor changes the incentives for executives and workforces at Fortune 500 companies, Manohar said. “Since American workers are losing out on their jobs and Indian workers are coming in on cheap labor –the bare minimum wage — there’s no growth in innovation at all. It’s just [the] bare minimum — if you ask a person to do Task X, that’s all he does.”
India’s high-tech sector has grown enormously as U.S. companies use the visa workers programs to train Indians for jobs in India. But this growing Indian sector also means that many of the relatively few skilled Indians prefer to stay at home.
Most Indian graduates, however, have few skills partly because much of India’s university sector is corrupt. In April 2023, Bloomberg reported:
One Bhopal resident, twenty-five-year-old Tanmay Mandal, paid $4,000 for his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He was convinced the degree was a pathway to a good job and a better lifestyle. He wasn’t deterred by the fees that were high for his family, which has a monthly income of only $420. Despite the cost, Mandal says he ended up learning almost nothing about construction from teachers who appeared to have insufficient training themselves. He couldn’t answer technical questions at job interviews, and has been unemployed for the last three years.
The employability of new graduates “is still a challenge,” said Dileep Mangsuli, the director at Siemens Healthineers AG, a medical-technology company in India.“Till they’re trained and retrained and many times trained, they don’t become employable,” he told Bloomberg in June 23.
But there is an easy government fix to the cheap-labor racket, Manohar said: H-1B visas should be awarded to the companies that pay the highest salaries. “They would still be getting what they want if they just fixed the fraud and picked the eligible ones — they have all the data and information right in front of them.”
Five hundred federal investors would help find, prosecute, and deter the labor fraud, said Palmer.
Meanwhile, India’s Prime Minister Modi will attend a State Dinner at the White House on June 22.
Council on Foreign Relations
NY Times: Kamala Harris Is the ‘Face of America’s Demographic Shift’
Flickr/Gage Skidmore
JOHN BINDER
16 Aug 2020529
3:58
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is the “face of America’s demographic shift,” spurred by record levels of immigration to the United States over the last six decades, according to the New York Times.
Harris, whose mother was born in India and father was born in Jamaica, is being declared one of the faces “of this country’s demographic future” by the Times, a result of mass immigration that has brought more than 60 million new arrivals to the U.S. since 1965.
The Times reported:
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s choice of Ms. Harris as his running mate has been celebrated as a milestone because she is the first Black woman and the first of Indian descent in American history to be on a major party’s presidential ticket. But her selection also highlights a remarkable shift in this country: the rise of a new wave of children of immigrants, or second-generation Americans, as a growing political and cultural force, different from any that has come before. [Emphasis added]
…
At 55, Ms. Harris is on the older side of this second generation of Americans whose parents came in those early years. But her family is part of a larger trend that has broad implications for the country’s identity, transforming a mostly white baby-boomer society into a multiethnic and racial patchwork. [Emphasis added]
The Times acknowledged that the rapid shift to the American electorate via immigration is a boon for Democrats, noting “because [immigrants] and their children have tended to vote for Democrats, the political winds are shifting in states like Arizona, Nevada, Virginia, Georgia, and Texas.”
The Washington Post, New York Times, The Atlantic, Axios, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal have all acknowledged the trend.
“The single biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability is demographics,” Axios acknowledged last year. “The numbers simply do not lie … there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”
Since 2000, the number of immigrants arriving from India has more than doubled to roughly four million. In 1960, as the Times reported, there were less than 25,000 immigrants from Jamaica in the United States. Today, there are more than 733,000 Jamaicans living across the nation.
Immigration from India has ballooned so much that demographers project Asians to be the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by the year 2055 — outpacing 40 years of Hispanics being the largest immigrant group.
Today, the foreign-born population has jumped to nearly 14 percent and the total of foreign workers in the American economy has hit the highest level since 1996.
BLOG EDITOR: NOW DO THE MATH ON THE JOBS, HOUSING AND HOMELESS CRISIS YOUR CHILDREN WILL ENDURE!
With no reductions to legal immigration levels, the U.S. is set to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters by 2040. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will have arrived through the process known as “chain migration,” where newly naturalized citizens can sponsor an unlimited number of foreign relatives for green cards.
In the 2020 presidential election, about 1-in-10 U.S. voters will have been born outside the country. Likewise, Hispanic Americans are set to outpace black Americans as the largest voting minority group in this year’s election.
Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants on green cards to permanently resettle in the country — 70 percent of which arrive as chain migrants. In addition, 1.4 million foreign workers are admitted every year to take American jobs. These totals do not include the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who arrive annually, the majority of which are never deported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
State Dept. ‘Guts’ Donald Trump’s Curbs on Fortune 500’s Visa Workers
MONEY SHARMA/AFP via Getty
NEIL MUNRO
13 Aug 2020160
7:25
The state department is allowing Fortune 500 companies to freely import H-1B visa workers for jobs needed by American voters, despite President Donald Trump’s June 22 Executive Order barring nearly all visa workers.
“They have totally eviscerated the requirements” of Trump’s E.O., said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute. “There is no doubt about it — whoever created this is thumbing their noses at President Trump,” he said, adding, “you can bet that the guys who did this are voting for [Joe] Biden.”
‘This is an insult to the President of the United States, it is an insult to working men and women of the United States,” said Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers.
There are less than 90 days to go in the election. How can he persuade Americans he’s keeping any of this 2016 promises if he allows the State Department to nullify and gut the E.O. he signed to protect Americans from [outsourcing by Fortune 500 companies]? More than that — I think it is beginning to make Trump look stupid in front of the voters. He needs to call in Pompeo and talk to him about his job prospects because [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo does not seem to give a hoot about Americans’ job prospects.
The exemptions are “expansive,” admitted Greg Siskind, a lawyer who is working to widen the pipelines of foreign doctors into U.S. hospital chains. “They are backing off … that could be good news for thousands of you guys,” he told his clients.
On August 3, Trump met with Lynn and several employees of the Tennesee Valley Authority to announce he would block the outsourcing of their jobs to H-1B workers imported by three staffing companies. 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.
On June 22, Trump signed another Executive Order to close down the pipeline of white-collar H-1B, J-1, and L-1 workers, as well as the pipeline of H-2B manual laborers. The E.O. is expected to temporarily bar the arrival of perhaps 80,000 H-1Bs, plus thousands of J-1s and L-1s, while hundreds of thousands of new graduates and fired professionals look for jobs. Trump also directed his agency deputies to write new regulations that would reduce the Fortune 500’s widespread use of visa workers as cheap labor replacements for American voters.
Trump’s intervention to save U.S. white collar jobs is very popular among millions of American voters whose futures are threatened by the Fortune 500’s preference for docile and cheap visa workers. The CEO’s workforce policy keeps at least 1.3 million foreign graduates in U.S. jobs, even amid the dramatic economic crash caused by China’s coronavirus.
The official unemployment rate for U.S. tech grads has jumped to 4.4 percent, according to an industry association. But the calculation does not count the many U.S. tech grads who were forced into lesser careers by the many visa workers in the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
But the State Department’s June 12 bulletin provides a long list of many easy exemptions for Fortune 500 companies and their Indian staffing subcontractor. The document says Trump’s directions:
… include exceptions, including an exception for individuals whose travel would be in the national interest, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their respective designees. The list below is a non-exclusive list of the types of travel that may be considered to be in the national interest, based on determinations made by the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, exercising the authority delegated to him by the Secretary of State.
Pompeo is the Secretary of State. Carl Risch is the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs.
The list of exemptions is very wide:
Travel by technical specialists, senior level managers, and other workers whose travel is necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States … The petitioning employer has a continued need for the services or labor to be performed by the H-1B nonimmigrant in the United States.
Miano is an expert on visa worker laws and studied the long list of exemptions:
The first one on the list is what they needed to do to get the visas in the first place … Number 2, any of them can do that, no problem … Number 3 is totally meaningless — anyone can do that … ‘Financial Hardship’ for an employer is so loosey goosy that anyone can meet that … ‘Critical Infrastructure’ is basically anything.
Lynn was less formal;
This is effing b….. Who the f… came up with these exceptions? … You can drive a Mack truck through this …. 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.”
One of the most notable exemptions are for visa workers who have jobs at government agencies, usually via Indian-run staffing companies:
… individuals, identified by the Department of Defense or another U.S. government agency, performing research, providing IT support/services, or engaging other similar projects essential to a U.S. government agency.
The document also provides exemptions to foreign workers who have taken jobs from Americans in “critical infrastructure,” such as the TVA jobs blocked by Trump:
The applicant’s proposed job duties or position within the petitioning company indicate the individual will provide significant and unique contributions to an employer meeting a critical infrastructure need. Critical infrastructure sectors are chemical, communications, dams, defense industrial base, emergency services, energy, financial services, food and agriculture, government facilities, healthcare and public health, information technology, nuclear reactors, transportation, and water systems.
“The people who are doing this are ignoring the president,” said Miano. “I can only guess at their motivations, but we can say it is Deep State acting independently.”
“In a close election, with time running out, with [2016] expectations not met … Trump needs things to go smoothly from now till November, and this list clearly he has people in the State Department sabotaging him,” said Miano.
“When word of this gets out to the public that every E.O. he writes is not worth the paper it is written on,” said Lynn. “Because through exceptions, they become get nullified by the Deep State, he loses the voters’ trust and confidence.”
He added: “What good is a State Department that becomes the tool of corporations that want to displace Americans, when tens of millions of Americans are under extreme financial duress?”
The State Department did not respond to emails from Breitbart News requesting comment.
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
Kamala Has Already Struck Out
By Janice Shaw Crouse
Even before the Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, named his choice for vice president, a group of Democrat Party activists released an unprecedented document outlining their "rules" for how the media could address issues surrounding the woman Biden ultimately chose. These guidelines made it abundantly clear that the media were "required" to handle Biden's choice with kid gloves. Questions were not to be probing; instead, this veep candidate, unlike the vicious coverage Sarah Palin endured years ago, was to be above questioning. With astounding hubris, the Democrats actually warned the media that they would "monitor coverage" of the female veep candidate and that anything even slightly critical would be condemned as "racist and sexist." Hollywood celebrities and the usual line-up of leftist women's groups (NARAL, Planned Parenthood, etc.) have promised Kamala, "We've got your back."
Bottom line: Biden is in hiding; Kamala is untouchable.
This mafia-style intimidation cannot be allowed to stand. The public needs to know that Kamala's quest, as in baseball, has already struck out. She has three strikes against her that are a death knell for her prospects. There is no way, after these strikes, she should be anywhere near a heartbeat or a brain flare away from the presidency of America.
1. Opportunistic Career Path — We are not supposed to have noticed (or it's not supposed to make a difference or matter), but Kamala Harris came into politics as a mistress under the patronage of the notoriously unethical speaker of the House in California, Willie Brown. Numerous public servants in government in California at the time noted that Kamala was a pretty twenty-something young woman that Brown, a married man in his 60s, regularly showed off as his mistress at political events. She received prestigious, powerful, and profitable political appointments in state government and moved on from there. Anyone who brings up this opportunism is against her "ambition" and is trying to keep her "in her place." In short, anyone raising these well documented facts is both misogynistic and racist.
Kamala is known as being "pragmatic, rather than principled." Some Democrat strategists claim to be happy with Kamala as a "messenger" (meaning she is good TV) but cringe at her inconsistent and problematic "messages" (meaning she is all over the map on any given issue).
Harris has flip-flopped on issue after issue, depending on what's politically expedient. She excuses this inconsistency by saying being a prosecutor is, by its very nature, "controversial." As a prosecutor, she defended capital punishment, but she ran for office on an "anti–death penalty" platform. Her truancy policies were a problem; also her drug programs. She opposed police body cameras, claiming they disadvantaged blacks and minorities. She was criticized for siding with police too often; now she is vocal about police "brutality." She is now very pro-LGBT and transgender issues and blames her previous inconsistency on staffers who disregarded her personal views. She was against decriminalization of "sex work" before she suddenly advocated for criminalization. Same with marijuana; she was against it before flippantly claiming that marijuana brings joy and "we need more joy in the world." She's taken both sides on whether a convicted terrorist should be able to vote from prison!
2. Radical Woke Ideologies and Policies — Many analysts believe that Kamala Harris will be America's most radical left political candidate ever. She's consistently among the top two "most progressive" members of the Senate. She has been called one of the most radical-left politicians today; pick any pet woke cause, and Kamala will be farthest left! These policy positions are not only constitutionally problematic; they are also prohibitively expensive, with a price tag in the multiple billions of dollars!
Guns? Kamala supports extremist laws to restrict our 2nd Amendment rights. She advocates a wide array of increased gun control measures, including executive orders to implement problematic regulations.
Health care? Kamala co-sponsored Bernie Sanders's "Medicare for All" health insurance proposal. She wants to abolish all private health insurance, saying, "Let's eliminate all of that!" She strongly supports a single-payer system. Observers note that both her position and Biden's on the issue have solidified during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Education? Kamala attended all-white schools until she chose to attend Howard University. She passed the bar in 1990 and progressed as a prosecutor to become district attorney of San Francisco thanks to political muscle from her benefactor, Willie Brown. She advocates for free college and university education for all — especially for free tuition at historically black colleges and universities.
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.
Environment? She joined forces with the socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to require additional regulations on environmental policies.
3. Kavanaugh Hearings Debacle — The final strike is the most disgraceful. The way Kamala Harris treated Brett Kavanaugh at the 2018 confirmation hearings was the most disrespectful and vicious of the senators. She stood out at the hearings for her deceitful questioning and the revolting tone of her accusations. She accepted the flimsiest of evidence in attacking Kavanaugh – for instance, the implausible and unsubstantiated accusation of gang rape — and praised an obviously "deceptively edited video" claiming that Kavanaugh opposed birth control, claiming that it was all about "punishing women."
Her extreme positions were so bad that she was actually called out by the left. Her attacks — called fear-invoking lies and possibly attempts at a presidential audition — were acknowledged as false and criticized by left-wing PolitiFact and her liberal hometown newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. As President Trump said, she was, indeed, "extraordinarily nasty" to Brett Kavanaugh.
Guy Benson, Townhall political editor, described her Kavanaugh performance as "particularly demagogic, cynical and abysmal." In their excellent book, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court, Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino detailed all the egregious procedural maneuvers Harris tried in her efforts to get Kavanaugh to commit perjury, as well as the fawning media coverage.
In a normal election, the veep choice would be relatively irrelevant, but Joe Biden is not a normal presidential candidate. At 77, "Gaffe-Prone Joe" Biden has said he'd be a "transitional" president, and it is generally acknowledged that he is more likely than other previous candidates to become (sooner rather than later) incapacitated or unable to serve more than one term. Thus, Kamala must be viewed as a possible presidential contender. She fails on every measure — significantly! Leadership? She is obviously, much like Hillary, a ruthless opportunist willing to do or say whatever it takes to get ahead. Ideas/Policies? She can be swayed however the political winds are blowing at the time. Even her friends explain that she is "not ideological," meaning she doesn't take principled stances on important issues. Experience? She has dramatically failed upward! The media have frequently acknowledged her "history of flip flopping and deceit."
What Kamala Harris offers in the veepstakes is a promise to promote a grab bag of assorted radical goals of every oddball progressive from Bernie to AOC to Obama and be an advocate for special constituencies — pro-abortion voters, instigators of the BLM movement's racism, gun control activists, and illegal aliens.
Image: Mobilus In Mobili via Wikimedia Commons.
Big Tech Joins Chamber of Commerce Lawsuit to Import Foreign Workers While 26M Americans Jobless
Getty Images
JOHN BINDER
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.
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.
Silicon Valley Donors ‘Happiest’ with Pro-Big Tech Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s Running Mate
David Becker/Getty Images
SEAN MORAN
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.
