Welfare for Refugees Cost Americans $123 Billion in 10 Years
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/27/refugee-programs-cost-americans-123-billion-in-10-years/
Americans spent almost $100 billion to support 606,000 poor refugees in the 10 years up to 2014, according to a State Department report.
The $96.6 billion cost rises to $126 billion when officials count the extra cost of paying for the refugees’ spouses and children, including U.S.-born children.
The $126 billion bill is just for programs managed by the Department of Health and Human Services. It excludes additional taxpayers’ spending via state programs, as well as federal spending on Social Security, education, and housing programs, plus tax credits, says the State Department’s annual report to Congress on the refugee program.
The one-agency, $126-billion firehose of cash, however, was a huge taxpayer subsidy to the refugee groups which delivered the refugee to cities and towns. It is also a huge subsidy to the low-wage employers who hired the refugees in place of higher-wage Americans, and to the grocery stores and apartments who sold food and rented apartments to the new arrivals.
The huge cost adds up to $670 per working American, not counting the hard-to-assess costs of crowded schoolrooms, flooded labor markets, civic diversity, and shifts in political power away from Americans.
The massive spending will continue because the vast majority of the 606,000 refugees remain in the United States, mostly in low-skilled jobs, and will age into retirement. Since 2014, former President Barack Obama imported an additional 155,000 refugees.
The expenses are high because few of the refugees have the skills to earn a good living. The report noted:
Education level: Respondents age 25 or older averaged 8.7 years of education before arrival; about half did not have a high school diploma upon arrival; and 29 percent of refugees age 25 or older listed their prior educational attainment as “none.” Among respondents age 18 and older, 16 percent were pursuing a degree of some kind, with most seeking high school equivalency.English language proficiency: Respondents improved their English over time, but large deficits remain. Among refugees age 18 or older who had lived in the United States between 4.5 and 6.5 years, 53 percent spoke English “not well” or “not at all,” based on self-assessments.Employment: 59 percent of respondents ages 16 to 64 were employed, lower than the 67.5 percent employment rate for native-born members of the U.S. population. Male respondents were employed at a rate roughly on par with the U.S. population after being in the United States for only two years. Employed refugees age 18 or older earned $12 per hour on average.Public benefits use: Two percent of respondent households reported public assistance as their only source of income; 27 percent received cash welfare of some kind, most often Supplemental Security Income (SSI); and 56 percent received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Among respondents age 18 or older, 57 percent reported having health coverage throughout the previous year, while 34 percent reported no health coverage. Among those with coverage, about half received Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance.
President Donald Trump has dramatically braked the inflow to 53,000 refugees in 2017 and has promised to accept a maximum of 30,000 organized-inflow refugees in 2019.
Also, the Department of Homeland Security has announced a new regulation to deny visas and green cards to foreigners who poor, unskilled, or old. For the moment, the rule does not apply to refugees.
Trump’s slowdown has reduced the impact of refugee migration on Americans cities, such as Lewiston, Maine, or Kansas City, Kansas.
The reduced inflow has also forced many employers, especially meatpackers, to raise wages for Americans. Breitbart News reported:
The reduced inflow has also forced many employers, especially meatpackers, to raise wages for Americans. Breitbart News reported:
The JBS meatpacking company has raised salaries by 25 percent to help persuade more people to work in a Texas slaughterhouse, according to the Washington Post.But that good news, however, is buried by the Post‘s endorsement of the meatpackers’ business strategy, which uses federal immigration programs to recruit replacements for injured or exhausted American (or migrant) workers and to minimize investment in labor-saving automation …Overall, the Post‘s article is wrapped up in a self-serving view of immigration held by many progressives who justify the importation of a subservient class into the United States by promising that the immigrants’ children will advance in society. The article concludes with [Stan] Corbin’s progressive promise that “their children will grow up to be engineers … [but now] there is a great need for laborers.”In this view, the U.S. meatpacking industry is a social service agency for the world’s poor which also provides liberals with cheap restaurants plus the satisfaction of helping distant foreigners. This “telescopic philanthropy” allows urban liberals to feel good about their generosity to foreigners while they ignore the costs they impose on nearby American communities, including the American blue-collar workers who see their salaries cut and the American children who are forced into overcrowded and dysfunctional classrooms.
The State Department’s report provided a chart showing how the HHS agency spent the money:
The report detailed which migrants were treated as refugees:
HHS estimated expenditures from the major HHS programs assisting refugees and asylees and their dependents over the 10-year period 2005-2014. For purposes of its analysis, HHS included individuals who entered the United States since 1980 as refugees, asylees, Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders and their spouses and unmarried children under the age of 21, Cuban and Haitian entrants, certain Amerasians from Vietnam, victims of a severe form of trafficking who have received certification or eligibility letters from ORR, trafficking victims family members with T nonimmigrant visas, and some victims of torture. Individuals who later changed their immigration status to legal permanent resident or naturalized as U.S. citizens are included as well.
Four million young Americans will join the workforce this year, but the federal government will also import 1.1 million legal immigrants, and allows an army of at least 2 million blue-collar and white-collar visa-workers to work U.S. jobs, alongside asylum-claiming migrants and illegal aliens.
Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions. Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because investment flows towards the large immigrant populations living in the coastal states.
ILLEGALS ON THE DOUBLE
New study estimates disturbing number of illegals in USA.
September 26, 2018
New study estimates 16 to 29 million illegals in USA, as false-documented criminals claim American victims such as Mollie Tibbetts and NFL player Edwin Jackson.
The population of the United States is approximately 328 million and any observer might think it strange if the 2018 figure was still the 316 million from 2013 or 309 million from 2009. This raises questions about the number of people in the United States illegally.
“The number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States stayed steady for an eighth straight year in 2016 with 11.3 million people,” reported USA Today last year, citing a report from Pew Research that pegs the “unauthorized” population as “no different from the 2009 or 2015 estimates.” Those who view the 11.3 estimate as bogus now have some support.
A new study from Yale and MIT researchers estimates a range of 16 to 29 million with 22.1 million as the mean. So the number of false-documented illegals in the United States could easily be twice the 11.3 million Pew figure and more than the entire population of Chile (18.1 million), and approaching Taiwan (23.6 million) and Australia, with 24.7 million.
In May, National Public radio claimed “four academic studies show that illegal immigration does not increase the prevalence of violent crime or drug and alcohol problems.” Some illegals who don’t fit that profile have been in the news of late.
Last Friday, Guatemalan national Manuel Orrego-Savala was sentenced to 16 years in prison for killing Edwin Jackson, a linebacker for the Indianapolis Colts of the National Football League. The white Guatemalan illegal had a blood-alcohol content nearly two and a half times the legal limit when he crashed his truck into Jackson, killing the African American and his Uber driver Jeffrey Monroe.
Orrego-Savala, or whatever his real name is, was in the country illegally and had been deported in 2007 and 2009, returning with no difficulty. Jackson’s mother, Mary Ellen Powell Jackson, got the news as she was leaving church. “Our hearts have been ripped apart and we’re always asking, ‘Why Edwin?’” she told reporters, a hardworking, caring son with “a heart of gold.”
Deborah Monroe, Jeffrey’s widow, spoke directly to the Guatemalan illegal. “My family and I are serving a life sentence because of you,” Monroe said, “you’re a drunk, a liar, a murderer and a coward.”
Last Wednesday, a Mexican who calls himself Cristhian Rivera pleaded not guilty to the murder of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, 20. She died from “multiple sharp force injuries,” after being abducted by the false-documented Mexican, who claims he “blacked out,” and doesn’t remember stabbing Tibbetts to death.
The murder victim’s brother, Jake Tibbets, told Fox News his sister, “a beautiful young girl,” was killed by a “horrible person that came in from Mexico, illegally.” Investigators said he entered illegally between four and seven years ago, evidence that the border is totally porous and that U.S. officials have no clue how many illegals are in the United States.
One of the illegals is Mexican national Luis Bracamontes, who in 2014 in Sacramento gunned down police officers Danny Oliver and Michael Davis. In his trial earlier this year, the Mexican said “I wish I had killed more of the motherfuckers” and called witness Anthony Holmes a “nigger” before yelling at the jury “black lives don’t matter!” The racist Mexican had also been previously deported.
So had the Mexican criminal calling himself Garcia Zarate, along with other fake names. He was slated to be handed over to federal officials but in 2015 the sanctuary city of San Francisco released him. The Mexican criminal then gunned down Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier. A San Francisco jury found Garcia Zarate not guilty and defense attorney Francisco Ugarte called the verdict “a vindication for the rights of immigrants.”
Mexican national Juan Corona was deported in 1956 but duly returned and became a labor contractor. Corona wound up killing 25, including Charles Fleming, Melford Sample, Donald Smith, John J. Haluka, Warren Kelley, Sigurd Beierman, William Emery Kamp, Clarence Hocking, James W. Howard, Jonah R. Smallwood, Elbert T. Riley, Paul B. Allen, Edward Martin Cupp, Albert Hayes, Raymond Muchache, John H. Jackson, Lloyd Wallace Wenzel, Mark Beverly Shields, Sam Bonafide and Joseph Maczak.
Not a single one was Mexican and Corona also sodomized the victims and mutilated them with a machete. So the worst murderer in California and possibly U.S. history, now 84, was not even supposed to be in the country. Neither was Mexican national Lorenzo Sanchez, who raped 12-year-old Cally Jo Larson, stabbed her in the chest, then strung up the victim’s bleeding body from a staircase banister.
Even those who didn’t vote for Donald Trump might think that kind of violent crime calls for tough border security and building the wall. As the president recently tweeted.
“I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing Law Enforcement and Border Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!”
So far they aren’t, and the left doesn’t want the government to know how many false-documented illegals are criminals or even how many illegals are in the country. The Trump administration has proposed a citizenship question on the 2020 census. The ACLU calls this “a deliberate attempt by President Trump to once again attack immigrants.”
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla is urging residents of California to “resist” the inclusion of a citizenship question on the U.S. Census in 2020 by submitting comments to the U.S. Census Bureau by the August 7 deadline.
On Tuesday, Padilla launched a new web portal, “All Californians Count,” through which residents are encouraged to send “feedback” to the federal government. Although the website does not take an explicit position on the citizenship question, it reminds users that the state is already suing the federal government over the issue, and adds: “A fair and accurate count will ensure that California is apportioned the appropriate number of congressional members as well as billions in funding.”
In February, Padilla declared: “California can’t afford to sit idly by while this administration sabotages the census. And we won’t. We will resist and we will win.” In March, he added: “The citizenship question is the latest attempt by President Trump to stoke the fires of anti-immigrant hostility. He’s demonized Mexicans, insulted Africans and Central Americans, discriminated against Muslims, and torn families apart with harsh deportation orders.”
Padilla took to Twitter on Tuesday to make his own feelings known:
We're making sure #AllCaliforniansCount by launching an online portal to submit public comments opposing a citizenship question to the census. Let’s push back on this blatant effort by the Trump Administration to intimidate non-citizens from participating in the census.
We have until August 7th to speak out against the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census — a Trump administration’s blatant attempt to intimidate our diverse communities from participating.twitter.com/thenation/stat…
Bay Area public radio station KQED reports that Padilla’s effort is being supported by “advocacy groups for immigrant, Muslim and other communities.”
California has a large population of non-citizens, including illegal aliens. Conservatives have argued that “sanctuary” states like California should not benefit from flouting federal law by receiving more federal funds or congressional seats. Liberals argue that “immigrants” — including legal immigrants — will be dissuaded from answering the Census if a citizenship question is included.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who filed a lawsuit against the citizenship question in March, told a federal court at the time: “California has more foreign-born residents (over 10 million) and non-citizens (over 5 million) than any other state.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Five-Time Illegal Alien Deportee Gets 9 Months in Jail for Felony DUI, ID Fraud
A Mexican national who resided in the U.S. illegally for 28 years and had been removed from the U.S. five times was sentenced to nine months behind bars in Virginia on Monday.
A Chesterfield County judge sentenced Mario Santos-Ochoa, 44, to nine months in jail for committing his third drunk-driving offense and felony identity fraud, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have also placed a detainer on Santos-Ochoa, meaning that he will be deported after he serves his sentence.
The officer who arrested Santos-Ochoa determined the illegal alien suspect had a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.11 percent—which is 0.3 percent over the 0.08 percent legal limit to operate a vehicle in the state of Virginia.
Prosecutors say Santos-Ochoa had two other DUI convictions—one in 2009 and one in 2016. The illegal alien was also accused of providing an officer with a fake ID during his 2016 arrest.
The Mexican national reportedly had a family with four children during his time in the U.S.
Santos-Ochoa had been deported on five different occasions between September 1997 to September 2014, and illegally re-entered the country once more after ICE officials last removed him, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell.
The illegal alien also had three prior convictions for re-entering the country illegally in Texas federal court after federal immigration officials deported him in 2009, 2011, and 2012. A judge sentenced him to just over seven months in federal prison for those offenses, according to court documents.
Chesterfield Circuit Judge Frederick G. Rockwell III warned Santos-Ochoa at his sentencing that if he is caught re-entering the U.S. illegally again, he could face a maximum penalty of nine years and three months in prison.
Another illegal alien who attacked two women in Portland, Oregon, was also sentenced to prison time on Monday.
Sergio Martinez-Mendoza, a Mexican national and 11-time deportee, was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for illegally re-entering the U.S., the Associated Press reported.
ICE statistics show that up to tens of thousands of illegal aliens are arrested by ICE each year for immigration charges, including re-entering the U.S. illegally.
Breitbart News reported that in fiscal year (FY) 2017, more than 62,500 of the illegal aliens apprehended had been charged or convicted of an immigration violation.
El Centro Sector Border Patrol Arrests 28th Sex Offender in 2018
The arrest marks the 28th sex offender caught by El Centro Sector in the fiscal year 2018, as reported by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Border Patrol Agents arrested a 43-year Mexican national identified as Maximo Flores-Lezaman, a previously convicted sex offender after he illegally entered the United States approximately five miles west of the Calexico Point of Entry. Record checks revealed a felony conviction in April of 2002 in California for Sex with a Minor and was sentenced to one year in prison and three years’ probation. After completing his sentence, he was deported back to Mexico.
Flores-Lezaman will remain in federal custody pending prosecution for violation of criminal law.
Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.) You can follow him on Twitter. He can be reached at robertrarce@gmail.com
SENATOR SMACKDOWN GETS THE NOD FOR NOVEMBER
"The man who, as Wikipedia explains, is “known professionally as Kevin de León” testified that “half of my family” would be eligible for deportation under Trump’s executive order because they used false identification, drivers licenses, Social Security and green cards. And that explains why the man who styles himself Kevin de León authored California’s sanctuary state law." LLOYD BILLINGSLEY - FRONTPAGEMAG
California Dems endorse Kevin de León over Dianne Feinstein, and illegal votes will be crucial.
July 31, 2018
In California primaries the top two vote-getters advance regardless of party. Republicans are again shut out of the Senate race, leaving state senate boss Kevin de León to contend with Dianne Feinstein. The San Francisco Democrat, 85, seeks her fifth term in the Senate but the California Democratic Party fails to follow along.
In July, 28 percent of the Party’s executive board voted “no endorsement” for Feinstein and a full 65 percent supported Kevin de León, only 51 and a newcomer to the national scene. So there’s a few things people nationwide should know.
“The name on his birth certificate isn’t Kevin de León,” explains Christopher Cadelago of the Sacramento Bee. On his birth certificate and voter rolls, the name is Kevin Alexander Leon and “the certificate says he was born on Dec. 10, 1966, at California Hospital on South Hope Street in Los Angeles.”
According to this document, which has not been revealed to the public, the father is Andres Leon, “a 40-year-old cook whose race was Chinese and whose birthplace was Guatemala” and mother Carmen Osorio, “was also born in Guatemala.” Kevin Alexander Leon remembers meeting Andres and thinks he is “a quarter, or as much as half-Chinese, pointing to the pockets of Asian populations in Mexico, including Mexicali.”
So at some point the Guatemalan Andres Leon must have moved to Mexico. But as a child his son Kevin Alexander de Leon “spent time on both sides of the border” and “identifies strongly with Mexican culture.” The story defies belief but does clarify some issues.
The man who, as Wikipedia explains, is “known professionally as Kevin de León” testified that “half of my family” would be eligible for deportation under Trump’s executive order because they used false identification, drivers licenses, Social Security and green cards. And that explains why the man who styles himself Kevin de León authored California’s sanctuary state law.
In a variation on Jose Vasconselos’ La Raza Cosmica, the California senate boss believes that illegals are “more American” and just better people than those Anglo Yankees who are destined to fade away along with blacks and those underachieving “Mongols.” So no surprise that the senate boss appointed a false-documented illegal to a state position, a violation of state law that bans ethnic preferences in state employment. So the termed-out senate boss does not exactly support the rule of law, state or federal.
The professional Kevin de León is a big fan of the late New Left icon Tom Hayden, a fervent supporter of Communist Vietnam. Last year, when Vietnamese refugee Janet Nguyen spoke out against Hayden, the Democrats shut down the Republican’s microphone then had her carted off the senate floor. So the Democrat senate boss is not exactly a fan of free speech or legal Asian refugees from Communist countries. Opponent Dianne Feinstein, on the other hand, pioneered the Nazi smear.
In 1992, when FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi killed Vicky Weaver as she held her infant daughter, Democrats such as Herb Kohl and Patrick Leahy showed sympathy with the family. Feinstein took a hard line, asking husband Randy Weaver if his children wore Nazi arm bands and shouted Nazi slogans at neighbors.
Feinstein showcased the smear last September in a confirmation hearing involving Amy Coney Barrett and Joan Larsen, both on President Trump’s original list for the Supreme Court. Feinstein said the backdrop for the hearing was the “neo-Nazis and white supremacists” in Charlottesville. “These are ideologies that people across the world died in a war fighting to defeat Nazism,” and just in case anybody wondered, “there isn’t any good in Nazism.”
Feinstein may deploy the Nazi smear in hearings for Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. That would be a way to show she is tougher on Trump than her Democrat opponent, who has other forces working for him.
A 2015 California law “streamlines” the process of voter registration and kicks in when someone gets a driver’s license at the DMV. As of March, 2018, more than one million illegals have received licenses. Secretary of state Alex Padilla touts “firewall” protections against ineligible voters. This is the same official who refused to cooperate with a federal probe of voter fraud, so legal residents and taxpayers have good reason to wonder what he is hiding. It is already a matter of record that false-documented illegals vote in local, state and federal elections.
At this writing, Feinstein leads de León 46 to 26 percent among “likely voters.” That leaves the question of how man illegals are likely to vote. By way of preparation, Democrats are allowing non-citizens to vote for school board members, a tacit authorization for non-citizens to vote for national candidates.
The man known professionally as Kevin de León protects false-documented illegals, even criminals, from deportation. In return, the illegals know how they are supposed to vote.
So polls aside, the leftist who identifies strongly with Mexican culture, gives state jobs to illegals, and smacks down free-speech rights may prevail in November. After all, nobody expected upstart socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to unseat powerful Democrat Joe Crowley, but she did. As President Trump says, we’ll see what happens.
Kevin De Léon is the LA RAZA “The Race” FASCIST SUPREMACIST for U.S. Senate.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-la-raza-mexican-welfare-state-of.html
De Léon holds far-left views on immigration, gun control, and other issues. Last year, he admitted that half of his family was in the country illegally. Earlier this year, he appointed an illegal alien to a statewide office. He is also the author of SB 54, one of the three surviving “sanctuary state” laws that the Trump administration challenged earlier this year.
KEVIN DeLEON SAYS MEXICANS ARE ABOVE THE LAW IN THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY STATE of MEXIFORNIA
ILLEGAL IN CA LAW SCHOOL, AND HER ILLEGAL FAMILY SHOVE THEIR MEX FLAG and the LAWS OF THIS STATE and COUNTRY UP AMERICA’S NOSES!
How much welfare, “free” education, “free” healthcare and tax free mex underground economy have these Mexicans sucked in and yet they wave their mex flags in our faces.
In a Facebook post in 2016, apparently celebrating her graduation from Santa Clara University School of Law, Mateo declared, in Spanish: “[E]verything is dedicated to Oaxaca, Mexico!! to that land that I miss so much.”
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
BLOG: MANY DISPUTE CALIFORNIA’S EXPENDITURES FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN MEXIFORNIA JUST AS THEY DISPUTE THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. APPROXIMATELY HALF THE POPULATION OF CA IS NOW MEXICAN AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE LIKE BUNNIES. THE $22 BILLION IS STATE EXPENDITURE ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING AT OVER A BILLION DOLLARS PAID OUT YEARLY TO MEXICO’S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS. NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY THE NUMBER OF COUNTIES IN CA AND YOU START TO GET AN IDEA OF THE STAGGERING WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE ERECTED SANS ANY LEGALS VOTES. ADD TO THIS THE FREE ENTERPRISE HOSPITAL AND CLINIC COST FOR LA RAZA’S “FREE” MEDICAL WHICH IS ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR.
Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
If Immigration Creates Wealth, Why Is California America's Poverty Capital?
California used to be home to America's largest and most affluent middle class. Today, it is America's poverty capital. What went wrong? In a word: immigration. According to the U.S. Census Bureau'...: The Golden State is peddling fool's gold lately.
California used to be home to America's largest and most affluent middle class. Today, it is America's poverty capital. What went wrong? In a word: immigration.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure, California's poverty rate hovers around 15 percent. But this figure is misleading: the Census Bureau measures poverty relative to a uniform national standard, which doesn't account for differences in living costs between states – the cost of taxes, housing, and health care are higher in California than in Oklahoma, for example. Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.
Likewise, income inequality in California is the second-highest in America, behind only New York. In fact, if California were an independent country, it would be the 17th most unequal country on Earth, nestled comfortably between Honduras and Guatemala. Mexico is slightly more egalitarian. California is far more unequal than the "social democracies" it emulates: Canada is the 111th most unequal nation, while Norway is far down the list at number 153 (out of 176 countries). In terms of income inequality, California has more in common with banana republics than other "social democracies."
More Government, More Poverty
High taxes, excessive regulations, and a lavish welfare state – these are the standard explanations for California's poverty epidemic. They have some merit. For example, California has both the highest personal income tax rate and the highest sales tax in America, according to Politifact.
Not only are California's taxes high, but successive "progressive" governments have swamped the state in a sea of red tape. Onerous regulations cripple small businesses and retard economic growth. Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, gives a few specific examples of how excessive government regulation hurts California's poor. He writes in a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times:
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. By some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50% higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics ... found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ... energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income."
Some government regulation is necessary and desirable, but most of California's is not. There is virtue in governing with a "light touch."
Finally, California's welfare state is, perhaps paradoxically, a source of poverty in the state. The Orange Country Register reports that California's social safety net is comparable in scale to those found in Europe:
In California a mother with two children under the age of 5 who participates in these major welfare programs – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), housing assistance, home energy assistance, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – would receive a benefits package worth $30,828 per year.
... [Similar] benefits in Europe ranged from $38,588 per year in Denmark to just $1,112 in Romania. The California benefits package is higher than in well-known welfare states as France ($17,324), Germany ($23,257) and even Sweden ($22,111).
Although welfare states ideally help the poor, reality is messy. There are three main problems with the welfare state. First, it incentivizes poverty by rewardingthe poor with government handouts that are often far more valuable than a job. This can be ameliorated to some degree by imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, but in practice, such requirements are rarely imposed. Second, welfare states are expensive. This means higher taxes and therefore slower economic growth and fewer job opportunities for everyone – including the poor.
Finally, welfare states are magnets for the poor. Whether through domestic migration or foreign immigration, poor people flock to places with generous welfare states. This is logical from the immigrant's perspective, but it makes little sense from the taxpayer's. This fact is why socialism and open borders arefundamentally incompatible.
Why Big Government?
Since 1960, California's population exploded from 15.9 to 39 million people. The growth was almost entirely due to immigration – many people came from other states, but the majority came from abroad. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that 10 million immigrants currently reside in California. This works out to 26 percent of the state's population.
BLOG: COME TO MEXIFORNIA! HALF OF LOS ANGELES 15 MILLION ARE ILLEGALS!
This figure includes 2.4 million illegal aliens, although a recent study from Yale University suggests that the true number of aliens is at least double that. Modifying the initial figure implies that nearly one in three Californians is an immigrant. This is not to disparage California's immigrant population, but it is madness to deny that such a large influx of people has changed California's society and economy.
Importantly, immigrants vote Democrat by a ratio higher than 2:1, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies. In California, immigration has increased the pool of likely Democrat voters by nearly 5 million people, compared to just 2.4 million additional likely Republican voters. Not only does this almost guarantee Democratic victories, but it also shifts California's political midpoint to the left. This means that to remain competitive in elections, the Republicans must abandon or soften many conservative positions so as to cater to the center.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there. Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.
REALITIES OF A STATE IN MELTDOWN:
THE INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA
De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton
In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York, the customs agent rifling my bag looked at my passport and said, with a Bronx sneer, “Bruce Thornton, huh. Must be one of them Hollywood names.”
Hearing that astonishing statement, I realized for the first time that California is as much an idea as a place. There were few regions in America more distant from Hollywood than the rural, mostly poor, multiethnic San Joaquin Valley where my family lived and ranched. Yet to this New Yorker, the Valley was invisible.
BLOG: FEINSTEIN & BOXER THREE TIMES ATTEMPTED TO INSERT IN VARIOUS BILLS AN AMNESTY FOR FARM WORKERS TO REPAY THEIR BIG AG BIG DONORS.
ONE-THIRD OF ALL FARM WORKERS END UP ON WELFARE AS SOON AS THE ANCHOR BABIES START COMING
Coastal Californians are sometimes just as blind to the world on the other side of the Coast Range, even though its farms, orchards, vineyards, dairies, and ranches comprise more than half the state’s $46 billion agriculture industry, which grows over 400 commodities, including over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts.
Granted, Silicon Valley is an economic colossus compared to the ag industry, but agriculture’s importance can’t be measured just in dollars and cents. Tech, movies, and every other industry tends to forget that their lives and businesses, indeed civilization itself, all rest on the shoulders of those who produce the food. You can live without your iPhone or your Mac or the latest Marvel Studios blockbuster. But you can’t live without the food grown by the one out of a 100 people who work to feed the other 99.
A Politically Invisible Valley
Living in the most conservative counties in the
deepest-blue state, Valley residents constantly see
their concerns, beliefs, and needs seldom taken
into account at the state or federal level.
Registered Democrats in California outnumber registered Republicans by over 19%, and the State Legislature seats about twice as many Democrats as Republicans (California’s one of only eight states nationwide with a trifecta of a Democratic and two Democratic controlled legislative bodies).
California’s Congressional delegation is even more unbalanced: in the House of Representatives, currently there are fourteen Republicans compared to thirty-nine House Democrats (at least half of those GOP districts are in danger of turning blue this fall); half the Republicans represent Central Valley districts, none bordering the Pacific Ocean. The last elected Republican US Senator left office in 1991. The last Republican governor was the politically light-pink action-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose second term ended in 2011.
This progressive dominance of the state has led to policies and priorities that has damaged its agricultural economy and seriously degraded the quality of life in the Valley.
Despite a long drought that has diminished the run-off of snow from the Sierra Nevada, projects for dams and reservoirs are on hold, seriously impacting the ag industry that relies on the snowmelt for most of its water. Worse yet, since 2008, a period including the height of the drought, 1.4 trillion gallons of water have been dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect the endangered Delta Smelt, a two-inch bait-fish. Thousands of agricultural jobs have been lost and farmland left uncultivated, all to satisfy the sensibilities of affluent urban environmentalists. And even after a few years of abundant rain, Valley farmers this year are receiving just 20% of their South-of-the-Delta water allocation.
Or take California’s high-speed rail project, currently moribund and $10 billion over budget just for construction of the easiest section, through the flat center of the Valley. Meanwhile, State Highway 99, which bisects the Valley from north to south for 500 miles, is pot-holed, inefficient, and crammed with 18-wheel semis. It is the bloodiest highway in the country, in dire need of widening and repair. Yet to gratify our Democratic governor’s
high-tech green obsession, billions of dollars are
being squandered to create an unnecessary link
between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. That’s $10 billion that could have been spent building more reservoirs instead of dumping water into the ocean because there’s no place to store it.
The common thread of these two examples of
mismanagement and waste is the romantic
environmentalism of the well-heeled coastal left.
They serially support government projects and
regulations that impact the poor and the aged, who
are left to bear their costs.
The same idealized nature-love has led to regulations and taxes on energy that have made California home of the third-worst energy poverty in the country. In sweltering San Joaquin Valley counties like Madera and Tulare, energy poverty rates are 15% compared to 3–4% in cool, deep-blue coastal enclaves. Impoverished Kings County averages over $500 a month in electric bills, while tony Marin Country, with an average income twice that of Kings County, averages $200. Again, it’s the poor, aged, and working class who bear the brunt of these costs, especially in the Valley where temperatures regularly reach triple digits in the summer; unlike the coast, where the clement climate makes expensive air-conditioning unnecessary.
Deteriorating Quality of Life
It’s no wonder then that Fresno, in the heart of the
Valley, is the second most impoverished city in the
poorest region of a state that has the highest
poverty levels in the country and one of the
highest rates of income inequality. Over one-fifth
of its residents live below the poverty line, and it
The greatest impact on the Valley’s
deteriorating quality of life, however, has been
the influx of illegal aliens. Some are attracted by
plentiful agriculture and construction work, and
others by California’s generous welfare transfers
— California is home to one in three of the
country’s welfare recipients— all facilitated by
California’s status as a “sanctuary state” that
regularly releases felons rather than cooperate
with Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE). As a result, one-quarter of the country’s
from underdeveloped regions of Mexico and Latin
America that have different social and cultural
mores and attitudes to the law and civic
responsibility.
The consequences of these feckless policies are
found throughout the state. But they are
especially noticeable in rural California. There
high levels of crime and daily disorder—from
murders, assaults, and drug trafficking, to
driving without insurance, DUIs, hit-and-runs,
and ignoring building and sanitation codes—
have degraded or, in some cases, destroyed the
once-orderly farming towns that used to be
populated by earlier immigrants, including
many legal immigrants from Mexico, who over
a few generations of sometimes rocky
coexistence assimilated to American culture
and society.
Marginalized Cultural Minorities
More broadly, the dominant cultures and mores of the dot.com north and the Hollywood south are inimical to those of the Valley. Whether it is gun-ownership, hunting, church-going, or military service, many people in the San Joaquin Valley of all races are quickly becoming cultural minorities marginalized by the increasingly radical positions on issues such as abortion, guns, and religion.
Despite the liberal assumption that all Hispanics favor progressive policies, many Latino immigrants and their children find more in common with Valley farmers and natives with whom they live and work than they do with distant urban elites.
Indeed, as a vocal conservative professor in the local university (Fresno State), I have survived mainly because my students, now more than half Latino and Mexican immigrants or children of immigrants, are traditional and practical in a way that makes them impatient with the patronizing victim-politics of more affluent professors. They have more experience with physical labor, they are more religious and, like me, they are often the first in their families to graduate from college. As I did with the rural Mexican Americans I grew up with, I usually have more in common with my students than I do with many of my colleagues.
And this is the great irony of the invisibility of the “other” California: the blue-coast policies that suit the prejudices and sensibilities of the affluent have damaged the prospects of the “others of color” they claim they want to help. Over-
represented on the poverty and welfare rolls, many
migrants both legal and illegal have seen water
policies that destroy agricultural jobs, building
restrictions that drive up the cost of housing,
energy policies that increase their cost of living, “sanctuary city” policies that put back on the
streets thugs and criminals who prey mainly on
their ethnic fellows, and economic policies that
favor the redistribution rather than the creation of wealth and jobs.
Meanwhile, the coastal liberals who tout a cosmetic diversity live in a de facto apartheid world, surrounded by those of similar income, taste, and politics. Many look down on the people whom they view as racists and xenophobes at worst, and intellectually challenged rubes at best. This disdain has been evident in the way the media regularly sneer that House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes is a “former dairy-farmer” from Tulare County, an origin that makes “the match between his backstory and his prominence” seem “wholly incongruous,” per Roll Call's David Hawkings.
Finally, those of us who grew up and live in the rural Valley did so among a genuine diversity, one that reflected the more complex identities beyond the crude categories of “white” or “black” or “Hispanic.”
Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans, Filipinos, Southern blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Volga Germans, Scotch-Irish Dust Bowl migrants—all migrated to the Valley to work the fields and better their lives. Their children and grandchildren went to the same schools, danced together and drank together, helped round up each other’s animals when they got loose, were best friends or deadly enemies, dated and intermarried, got drafted into the Army or joined the Marines—all of them Americans who managed to honor their diverse heritages and faiths, but still be a community. Their most important distinctions were not so much between races and ethnicities, though those of course often collided, but between the respectable people––those who obeyed the law, went to church, and raised their kids right–– and those we all called “no damned good.” Skin-color or accents couldn’t sort one from the other.
What most of us learned from living in real diversity in the Valley is that being an American means taking people one at a time.
That world still exists, but it is slowly fading away—in part because of the policies and politics of those to our west, who can see nothing on the other side of the Coast Range.
ABOUT BRUCE THORNTON
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.
The Department of Justice announced charges against 25 individuals on Friday who committed fraud using Puerto Rican identities in an effort to gain government benefits and in some cases even vote. 22 of the 25 charged were illegal aliens, many with records of drug dealing, violent crimes, and some previously deported.
Imposters regularly use birth certificates and social security cards stolen or copied from Puerto Ricans to pose as American citizens in order to receive Medicare, evade arrest, and take advantage of welfare benefits such as EBT cards and food stamps. In a sting operation known as, “Operation Double Trouble” the DOJ was able to nab 25 individuals who took advantage of poor oversight at Massachusetts’ Registry of Motor Vehicles and steal people’s identities.
“Across this city and across America, teachers, truck drivers, construction workers are going to work and paying taxes that are being stolen from the public treasury by fraudsters and criminals,” Sessions said at a press conference held earlier this week
“These government programs are intended to help the poor, the elderly, American citizens. Not those that are trespassing in the country,” Sessions added. “This kind of fraud is a theft from our seniors, a theft from our taxpayers, and a theft from the needy, theft from America.”
Illegal aliens often use Puerto Rican identities because the Hispanic surnames are less likely to cause suspicion amongst the government than non-Hispanic surnames. Lapse oversight at the RMV then allows these individuals to gain numerous identities.
Republicans Vote to Gut Enforcement, Increase Foreign Workers
The DHS funding bill shows the skewed priorities of GOP appropriators
By Mark Krikorian
National Review Online, July 27, 2018
The House Appropriations Committee this week approved the Department of Homeland Security funding bill for fiscal year 2019 (starting October 1, 2018), after considering a raft of amendments. This is not necessarily the final product; the bill will likely be amended further if and when considered by the full House of Representatives, and again when the House and Senate confer on reconciling their respective versions of the legislation.
Nevertheless, at this stage the DHS appropriations bill, passed Wednesday on a party-line vote of 29–22, is a snapshot of priorities of this most important committee. And it contains several harmful provisions that would increase illegal immigration and the importation of foreign workers on “temporary” visas — provisions passed with the support of the Republican chairmen of the full committee and its Homeland Security subcommittee.
The following is not necessarily an exhaustive listing of its immigration-related provisions, but it highlights the most important ones.
Funding levels. The provision most remarked on is the $5 billion for “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure,” i.e., construction of an estimated 200 miles of border barriers, without the restrictions that are in the current-year funding bill that prevent use of funds for anything like a wall.
The bill also funds more than 400 additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and increases the number of detention beds by more than 3,000 over the current level, to 44,000. That said, the funds approved are very different from what the administration requested. The mostly non-immigration part of ICE, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is given about 17 percent more funding than the administration requested, while Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which handles deportations, is given 19 percent less than requested.
Asylum standards. The worst mischief comes in the amendments. Among those added in Wednesday’s markup, perhaps the most damaging is one introduced by Representative David Price (D., N.C.), supported by Representative Kevin Yoder (R., Kan.), chairman of the panel’s Homeland Security subcommittee, and approved by voice vote. The measure prevents U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) from implementing the attorney general’s ruling regarding eligibility for asylum.
Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the creeping expansion of asylum by formally determining that domestic abuse and gang violence are not grounds for asylum from persecution due to “membership in a particular social group,” as specified in the 1980 Refugee Act. This expansion of the grounds for asylum took place under the prior administration without congressional action and has contributed to the surge of Central American minors and families at the border.
The amendment to the funding bill would have its immediate impact on the first step in the asylum process, called the “credible fear” interview. When an alien at a port of entry or in the custody of the Border Patrol expresses a fear of return to his home country, he is interviewed by a USCIS officer to determine whether the fear is credible and could lead to a successful asylum claim. If the alien’s fear of return is deemed credible, he may then pursue an asylum claim, though many who are released into the U.S. to do so don’t follow through, but simply disappear into the illegal population. Aliens have thus been coached by smugglers to claim asylum as a way of gaining access to the U.S.
The attorney general’s ruling, and the subsequent guidance from USCIS to its officers, has had an immediate effect at the border. For if fear of gangs or of an abusive partner — i.e., private violence rather than state or state-sanctioned violence — is no longer a grounds for asylum, then aliens asserting such fears no longer pass the credible-fear interview and can be turned away or deported immediately.
Were the Price-Yoder amendment to be signed into law, the attorney general’s ruling would remain unchanged, but USCIS officers could not rely on it in making credible-fear determinations. It’s not clear how that would work as a practical matter, but the clear goal is to ensure that any alien who claims “persecution” on the ineligible grounds would nonetheless be let into the United States. This would make regaining control of the border difficult, if not impossible — no matter how big the wall might be — because the Obama-era welcome mat for bogus asylum seekers would not only be restored but enshrined in statute, meaning smugglers could rely on it as a means of getting their customers past the Border Patrol and into the interior of the country.
Foreign workers. Two amendments expanding work-visa programs were also passed by the Appropriations Committee. The first determines that H-2A seasonal-farmworker visas no longer have to be seasonal. This was done to satisfy lobbyists for the dairy industry, which works year-round and wants to import cheap foreign labor through this unlimited visa program; it is stymied by the wording of the statute, which limits the visa to work “of a temporary or seasonal nature.” The appropriations bill does not change the wording of the statute creating the farmworker visa; it merely says that workers will be admitted in FY 2019 under that provision of the law “without regard to whether such labor is, or services are, of a temporary or seasonal nature.” It would result in large, ongoing increases in the number of these “temporary” foreign workers.
The other foreign-worker amendment affects the H-2B visa, which is the non-agricultural equivalent of the H-2A, used mainly by landscapers and hotels and restaurants. The amendment was just the latest round in lobbyists’ relentless backroom push to exempt from the visa’s numerical cap all those workers who came in prior years (in this case, in the prior two years). This was accomplished in the previous two budgets via a gutless gimmick — the DHS secretary would be authorized (wink, wink) to exempt returning workers from the cap if it seemed necessary. That way, congressmen wouldn’t have their fingerprints on the increase. At least this time they chose not to hide behind the gimmick.
Country caps. Another amendment also benefits those on “temporary” visas, though it doesn’t increase overall numbers. This measure (which has been floating around for years and was reintroduced in this Congress as H.R. 392) would eliminate the per-country cap for employment-based visas and increase it for family-based visas.
The per-country caps were enacted decades ago as a kind of circuit breaker, to prevent a handful of countries from monopolizing the immigration flow. Their effect today is to lengthen the wait for certain immigrants from India, China, the Philippines, and Mexico, compared with similarly situated immigrants from countries that account for less of the immigration flow. The caps result in a more diverse immigration flow.
The lobbying juice behind this change is Big Tech and the Indian “temporary” workers it has imported on H-1B and L visas. These are also ostensibly temporary visas, but are widely used as stepping-stones to permanent immigration. But so many of them are given out that the workers endure extended periods of de facto indentured servitude waiting for their numbers to come up. Eliminating the cap would speed up the issuance of their green cards, making the H-1B that much more attractive to potential low-paid tech workers and that much more useful for employers looking to replace their American workforce with foreigners. The flip side is that people from other countries, generally more highly skilled than the H-1Bs, would be crowded out as virtually all employment-based green cards went to Indians.
There’s more! Not to drag this out, but there are more bad amendments that the GOP appropriators tacked on. Representative Yoder himself co-sponsored a provision prohibiting the separation of children from parents unless “the parent has a criminal history, a communicable, disease, or is determined to be unfit or a danger to the child.” This is a formal, statutory exemption from prosecution for illegal entry for all adults who bring children with them — and will thus result in even more border-jumpers’ bringing (or renting) children.
A seemingly pointless amendment prohibits the deportation of anyone in the lawless Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. It’s pointless because DACA, by definition, prevents your deportation, and the only DACA beneficiaries who get deported are those who forfeit their status because of crimes. Since the amendment can have no actual result, the real point seems to be to codify Obama’s illegal DACA power grab by getting Congress to acknowledge it and incorporate it into law.
And needless to say, the Republican-run Appropriations Committee did nothing to defund sanctuary cities.
It’s not clear to me why Representative Yoder, as Homeland Security subcommittee chairman, orchestrated this fiasco. He actually has a respectable career immigration grade from Numbers USA of B+; not as good as Ted Cruz’s A+ but better than John Cornyn’s C+. And, for including wall funding, Yoder was effusively endorsed by President Trump and rewarded with a ride on Air Force One — and the next day he sabotaged the president’s immigration agenda.
Hill staff assured us that the most egregious items won’t make it to the floor or will be killed in conference (if the bill even gets that far). But why take the chance? Will the Democratic appropriators stock their bills with Republican priorities if they take over next year?
Nevertheless, at this stage the DHS appropriations bill, passed Wednesday on a party-line vote of 29–22, is a snapshot of priorities of this most important committee. And it contains several harmful provisions that would increase illegal immigration and the importation of foreign workers on “temporary” visas — provisions passed with the support of the Republican chairmen of the full committee and its Homeland Security subcommittee.
The following is not necessarily an exhaustive listing of its immigration-related provisions, but it highlights the most important ones.
Funding levels. The provision most remarked on is the $5 billion for “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure,” i.e., construction of an estimated 200 miles of border barriers, without the restrictions that are in the current-year funding bill that prevent use of funds for anything like a wall.
The bill also funds more than 400 additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and increases the number of detention beds by more than 3,000 over the current level, to 44,000. That said, the funds approved are very different from what the administration requested. The mostly non-immigration part of ICE, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is given about 17 percent more funding than the administration requested, while Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which handles deportations, is given 19 percent less than requested.
Asylum standards. The worst mischief comes in the amendments. Among those added in Wednesday’s markup, perhaps the most damaging is one introduced by Representative David Price (D., N.C.), supported by Representative Kevin Yoder (R., Kan.), chairman of the panel’s Homeland Security subcommittee, and approved by voice vote. The measure prevents U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) from implementing the attorney general’s ruling regarding eligibility for asylum.
Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the creeping expansion of asylum by formally determining that domestic abuse and gang violence are not grounds for asylum from persecution due to “membership in a particular social group,” as specified in the 1980 Refugee Act. This expansion of the grounds for asylum took place under the prior administration without congressional action and has contributed to the surge of Central American minors and families at the border.
The amendment to the funding bill would have its immediate impact on the first step in the asylum process, called the “credible fear” interview. When an alien at a port of entry or in the custody of the Border Patrol expresses a fear of return to his home country, he is interviewed by a USCIS officer to determine whether the fear is credible and could lead to a successful asylum claim. If the alien’s fear of return is deemed credible, he may then pursue an asylum claim, though many who are released into the U.S. to do so don’t follow through, but simply disappear into the illegal population. Aliens have thus been coached by smugglers to claim asylum as a way of gaining access to the U.S.
The attorney general’s ruling, and the subsequent guidance from USCIS to its officers, has had an immediate effect at the border. For if fear of gangs or of an abusive partner — i.e., private violence rather than state or state-sanctioned violence — is no longer a grounds for asylum, then aliens asserting such fears no longer pass the credible-fear interview and can be turned away or deported immediately.
Were the Price-Yoder amendment to be signed into law, the attorney general’s ruling would remain unchanged, but USCIS officers could not rely on it in making credible-fear determinations. It’s not clear how that would work as a practical matter, but the clear goal is to ensure that any alien who claims “persecution” on the ineligible grounds would nonetheless be let into the United States. This would make regaining control of the border difficult, if not impossible — no matter how big the wall might be — because the Obama-era welcome mat for bogus asylum seekers would not only be restored but enshrined in statute, meaning smugglers could rely on it as a means of getting their customers past the Border Patrol and into the interior of the country.
Foreign workers. Two amendments expanding work-visa programs were also passed by the Appropriations Committee. The first determines that H-2A seasonal-farmworker visas no longer have to be seasonal. This was done to satisfy lobbyists for the dairy industry, which works year-round and wants to import cheap foreign labor through this unlimited visa program; it is stymied by the wording of the statute, which limits the visa to work “of a temporary or seasonal nature.” The appropriations bill does not change the wording of the statute creating the farmworker visa; it merely says that workers will be admitted in FY 2019 under that provision of the law “without regard to whether such labor is, or services are, of a temporary or seasonal nature.” It would result in large, ongoing increases in the number of these “temporary” foreign workers.
The other foreign-worker amendment affects the H-2B visa, which is the non-agricultural equivalent of the H-2A, used mainly by landscapers and hotels and restaurants. The amendment was just the latest round in lobbyists’ relentless backroom push to exempt from the visa’s numerical cap all those workers who came in prior years (in this case, in the prior two years). This was accomplished in the previous two budgets via a gutless gimmick — the DHS secretary would be authorized (wink, wink) to exempt returning workers from the cap if it seemed necessary. That way, congressmen wouldn’t have their fingerprints on the increase. At least this time they chose not to hide behind the gimmick.
Country caps. Another amendment also benefits those on “temporary” visas, though it doesn’t increase overall numbers. This measure (which has been floating around for years and was reintroduced in this Congress as H.R. 392) would eliminate the per-country cap for employment-based visas and increase it for family-based visas.
The per-country caps were enacted decades ago as a kind of circuit breaker, to prevent a handful of countries from monopolizing the immigration flow. Their effect today is to lengthen the wait for certain immigrants from India, China, the Philippines, and Mexico, compared with similarly situated immigrants from countries that account for less of the immigration flow. The caps result in a more diverse immigration flow.
The lobbying juice behind this change is Big Tech and the Indian “temporary” workers it has imported on H-1B and L visas. These are also ostensibly temporary visas, but are widely used as stepping-stones to permanent immigration. But so many of them are given out that the workers endure extended periods of de facto indentured servitude waiting for their numbers to come up. Eliminating the cap would speed up the issuance of their green cards, making the H-1B that much more attractive to potential low-paid tech workers and that much more useful for employers looking to replace their American workforce with foreigners. The flip side is that people from other countries, generally more highly skilled than the H-1Bs, would be crowded out as virtually all employment-based green cards went to Indians.
There’s more! Not to drag this out, but there are more bad amendments that the GOP appropriators tacked on. Representative Yoder himself co-sponsored a provision prohibiting the separation of children from parents unless “the parent has a criminal history, a communicable, disease, or is determined to be unfit or a danger to the child.” This is a formal, statutory exemption from prosecution for illegal entry for all adults who bring children with them — and will thus result in even more border-jumpers’ bringing (or renting) children.
A seemingly pointless amendment prohibits the deportation of anyone in the lawless Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. It’s pointless because DACA, by definition, prevents your deportation, and the only DACA beneficiaries who get deported are those who forfeit their status because of crimes. Since the amendment can have no actual result, the real point seems to be to codify Obama’s illegal DACA power grab by getting Congress to acknowledge it and incorporate it into law.
And needless to say, the Republican-run Appropriations Committee did nothing to defund sanctuary cities.
It’s not clear to me why Representative Yoder, as Homeland Security subcommittee chairman, orchestrated this fiasco. He actually has a respectable career immigration grade from Numbers USA of B+; not as good as Ted Cruz’s A+ but better than John Cornyn’s C+. And, for including wall funding, Yoder was effusively endorsed by President Trump and rewarded with a ride on Air Force One — and the next day he sabotaged the president’s immigration agenda.
Hill staff assured us that the most egregious items won’t make it to the floor or will be killed in conference (if the bill even gets that far). But why take the chance? Will the Democratic appropriators stock their bills with Republican priorities if they take over next year?
AMERICA: NO LEGAL NEED APPLY
REPORT: The assault to finish off the American middle-class is NOT over
“The report noted that many illegals don't have jobs or have difficulty in landing good jobs because of local laws.”
“However, it identified several states that have begun easing employment laws so that illegals can get a job.”
College-Grad Salaries Eroded by Hidden Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers
Every CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
STARING IN THE FACE of AMERICA’S UNRAVELING and the ROAD TO REVOLUTION
“It will more likely come on the heels of economic dislocation and dwindling wealth to redistribute.”
"The kind of people needed for violent change these days are living in off-the-grid rural compounds, or the “gangster paradise” where the businesses of drugs, guns, and prostitution are much more lucrative than “transforming” America along Cuban lines." BRUCE THORNTON
*
There can be no resolution to any social problem confronting the population in the United States and internationally outside of a frontal assault on the wealth of the financial elite.
*
The political system is controlled by this social layer, which uses a portion of its economic plunder to bribe politicians and government officials, whether Democratic or Republican.
THE INVITED INVADING HORDES: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."
Illegal Immigration and Poor Americans
The Democrats and the left have a rallying cry regarding the Trump administration's policy toward those crossing the border illegally. They point to the separation of children from their parents and deplorable conditions. They claim that it is a humanitarian effort, but how humanitarian is it to drop off numerous unaccompanied children or release them into an unknown territory where they can become the victims of predators? They never address the negative impact on the poor American citizen.
They are calling attention to pictures of children in cells, yet, in 2014, when Obama was president, American Thinker interviewed then-governor of Arizona Jan Brewer, who stated, "Each child has a designation of cells, such as 'cell 7 or cell 8.' There is a chain link fence surrounding them and they are sleeping on bed mats with just a blanket. It breaks my heart to see babies being born in these facilities. I spoke with a fifteen-year-old who is pregnant. I was told by a lot of these children that they had to pay between $5,000 and $7,000 and that they still owe money to those who brought them here. You know what these cartels will do – use extortion. We need to question if there were any children that never arrived, and what happened to them? What about the potential for these children to be part of a human-trafficking ring? Do we know anything about the people they are being released to? As a mother, I can never conceive that these children would be sent with a stranger to a strange land on a fifteen-day hazardous journey. I understand the humanitarian argument and feel the situation is pathetic and pitiful. But what about the children who are American citizens living in ghettos and are fearful for their lives because of gang violence? The bottom line is, America is not big enough or rich enough to accept all these people."
Another instance was told to American Thinker by a member of the Civil Rights Commission, Peter Kirsanow, who also happens to be a great thriller-writer, his latest being Second Strike. A few years ago, he and his colleagues went to a Texas detention center and found the conditions to be the opposite of Arizona's. "We found very nice facilities where the people there were given three meals a day, dental/medical care, clothing, and a nice recreational area. Yet the majority report included two photos showing horrific conditions. My assistant discovered that these were not of the detention center, but of prisons," which also separate families when either a mother or father is incarcerated.
Kirsanow is frustrated with what is happening in America today. He is a black American and believes that illegal immigration has a devastating effect on low-income American citizens. It seems that the Democrats and left are just using the illegal immigration issue as a talking point, supporting aliens at others' expense. "We need to understand illegal immigrants have some negative competitive effects on American workers. They drag down wage rates, drag down employment, and compete directly with blacks in industries such as service, hospitality, and construction. Welfare and college spots have been taken from Americans and given to illegal immigrants. They are a net drain on the economy."
Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, agrees. "Because the overwhelming share of illegal immigrants residing in the country have not completed high school or have only a high school education, it would require highly implausible assumptions to avoid a substantial net fiscal drain from this population. In short, illegal immigrants are a large net fiscal drain because of their education levels, and this fact drives the results."
He compared the amount in annual expenditures on children in detention centers to those of American children: "the March 2017 Current Population Survey has 24 percent of American children living in a household making $35,000 or less. And it is my understanding that is what we spend on kids in detention."
Senator Robert Kennedy was in the Mississippi Delta 50 years ago for a Senate subcommittee examination of War on Poverty programs. Ellen B. Meacham wrote in an op-ed, "What he saw on his widely publicized trip shocked a nation, but Americans would be even more shocked to know that 50 years later, the Delta remains desperately poor," with one in three people running out of food each month. Perhaps this is because the attention has shifted to the illegal alien.
Concerning the separation of families, the Heritage Foundation found that single parents make up the overwhelming majority of all poor families with children in the United States. Welfare programs create disincentives to marriage because benefits are reduced as a family's income rises, such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
It is striking that the conditions of a poor American child do not draw the same attention and sympathy as children of illegal aliens. Kirsanow wants people to understand that 73% of black children are born to a single mother, up from 20% in the 1960s. "Liberal policies have been responsible for this. The Democratic policies facilitate single parenthood, separating children from their families."
Kirsanow cites the statistic that competition from illegal aliens has caused 40% of the nineteen-point decline of black employment levels over a couple of decades. "We are talking over a million jobs. Black wage rates were suppressed by $1,000 annually. Democrats are throwing blacks under the bus by appealing for the Hispanic vote by calling for open borders. The lives of blacks in cities like Detroit, with uninterrupted Democratic rule for decades, have not improved significantly. These policies have been devastating to blacks."
All Americans should strive to protect our fellow citizens and their interests first. As Kirsanow summarized, "it is really disappointing to see an entire party more invested in the plight of foreigners than in the welfare of Americans. The Democrats understand that even though they have policies devastating to blacks they still get 90% of their votes. They have disjointed appeals to different identity groups, with electoral politics trumping all."
The author writes for American Thinker. She has done book reviews and author interviews and has written a number of national security, political, and foreign policy articles.
GOP Rep. Yoder Offers Green-Card Giveaway to 200,000 Foreign College-Grads
Kansas GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder engineered a committee vote in the House which puts 200,000 Indian visa-workers on a fast-track to green cards and citizenship, despite the growing economic impact of visa workers on American college graduates.
Yoder’s Indian-giveaway amendment was approved July 25 even without an on-the-record vote by the GOP-run House appropriations committee, and it is being applauded by tech firms which prefer to hire cheap Indian college-graduate workers instead of young American graduates.
If made law, Yoder’s 2019 budget amendment will widen the Indian pipeline of graduate contract-workers which are already flooding the labor market for U.S. college graduates, said John Miano, an immigration lawyer and former software professional.
Yoder’s amendment will also skew the nation’s immigration system by making it difficult for non-Indian foreigners to get green-cards over the next five years, Miano said. “I don’t think Mr. Yoder has thought through what his amendment does … He has not looked at the big picture,” Miano added.
Current federal immigration law sets “country caps” to spread the distribution of the 140,000 green cards which are allocated to employers. Yoder’s amendment kills those 7 percent country-caps as “national discrimination” and allows the huge backlog of more than 300,000 Indian visa-workers — plus a similar number of family members — to jump to the head of the green-card line. Once the Indians jump to the head of the line, people from other countries are pushed into a wait of at least five years.
“From the Indian perspective, this is wonderful — it transforms the American immigration system into an Indian-first system,” said Miano. “Every [other] ethnic lobbying group will be screaming because only people from India will be getting [employer-sponsored] green cards,” he said.
The removal of the country caps will also lock-in India’s critical role in the U.S. software sector, Miano said. Without the caps, U.S. companies will face a multi-year delay before they can provide green cards for valuable foreign experts who are not Indian. The delay will deter them from trying to create a non-Indian pipeline because few foreign experts will stay with U.S. firms if they cannot quickly migrate into the United States, he said.
Non-Indian visa-workers in the backlog are already protesting their likely exclusion:
We're now visiting @casapuebloorg in #Adjuntas -- a self-sustaining community group that produces coffee, manages local forests, teaches kids & is solar powered. #PuertoRico’s energy future should be renewable! Learn more: casapueblo.org pic.twitter.com/hCq398zwG9
Indians play a central role in the U.S. software sector because the Indian tech industry has created a large pipeline of contractors who are willing to work at low wages in the hope of eventually getting citizenship, said Miano. Their central role is made worse because U.S. CEOs allow the growing number of Indian subcontractors in the United States to quietly exclude Americans from contracts and opportunities sought by Indians, said Miano. “I have personally experienced it and I hear more and more of that is going on,” said Miano. ‘Their [U.S.] clients want cheap foreign workers from overseas,” not Americans, he added.
Yoder, who is chairman of the House’s homeland defense appropriations subcommittee, did not try to trade his giveaway to business for reforms which could help Americans, such as curbs on visa-worker outsourcing or reforms to asylum laws. No Republican on the committee spoke against Yoder’s giveaway, but a Democratic leader said they would oppose the giveaway because it did not also include a “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.
In the same markup meeting, Yoder also helped pass amendments to triple the inflow of H-2B blue-collar visa-workers, to increase the number of H-2A visa-workers for farmers, and also to revive President Barack Obama’s catch-and-release rules on the Mexican border, all of which help to suppress wages for blue-collar Americans.
GOP opposition to Yoder’s amendments was muted partly because he can use his chairmanship of the homeland defense subcommittee to quietly punish other GOP legislators who publicly oppose his priorities.
Yoder’s office did not answer questions from Breitbart News about the green card plan.
Yoder’s visa-worker giveaway is being applauded by Indian lobby groups and by the huge employers who are hiring Indian college-graduates for professional-track jobs at Americans’ hospitals and universities, as well as software, insurance, banking and business-consulting firms. Yoder’s amendment was applauded by Amazon, Microsoft, and FWD.us, an advocacy group of tech-industry investors who want cheaper foreign white-collar labor.
Amazon applauds @KevinYoder on the passage of his amendment to the @DHSgov appropriations bill, H.R. 392, that would remove the per-country limit on green cards. This is an important step towards green card reform, and Amazonians thank you for your leadership on this issue.
Thank you @RepKevinYoder for being a champion of #HR392. Your amendment to the FY19 Homeland Security @HouseAppropsGOP bill is an important step forward to fixing the green card backlog.
The lobby groups formed by the Indian visa-workers also applauded Yoder’s giveaway:
On the ground as #HR392 was added to the DHS Appropriations bill —> facebook.com/ImmigrationVoi…
Indian workers are a bargain for U.S. companies because they accept low wages and work long hours in the hope of getting a hugely valuable deferred bonus — the federal government’s offer of citizenship to them, their spouses and children, their parents, and their chain-migration in-laws. In contrast, American graduates must get all of their pay in company dollars that are also wanted by company CEOs and investors, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The vast majority of Indians get into the United States — and onto the green card backlog — via the outsourcing programs for visa-workers.
The visa-worker programs include the H-1B program, the little-known L-1 program, the Optional Practical Training program, the E-1 visa, the TN visa and the J-1 visa. Overall, these laws are outsourcing roughly 1.5 million jobs to a resident population of roughly 1.5 million foreign college-grad workers. This huge population of foreign workers is helping to suppress American graduates’ salary growth even below the slow growth in blue-collar wages. The resulting profits spike higher stock values on Wall Street.
These programs deliver foreign workers into many professions in academia and software, engineering and health, in every state. In 2017, for example, Kansas employers asked the federal government for 951 H-1B visa workers, according to MyVisaJobs.com. The employers wanted H-1B visa-workers to fill 25 physician jobs, 16 financial-analyst jobs, 15 biochemist jobs, and 28 engineering jobs, even though Kansas produces many skilled graduates each year. The employers wanted foreign workers for 399 jobs in Yoder’s district around Overland Park — including 80 jobs at three Indian-owned companies.
In 2000, Congress allowed these visa workers to extend their temporary stay by applying for employer-sponsored green-cards, so converting the visa program into multi-step immigration programs.
In general, Indians dominate the software sector, while Chinese postgraduate students are hired into the nation’s science laboratories. This reliance means a very large number of Indian and Chinese nationals apply for the employer green cards. The country caps limit the number of Indians and Chinese who get the cards, so there is a huge and growing backlog of former visa workers from India and China who are working in the United States while waiting for green cards.
The backlog hurts Americans graduates because it effectively smuggles roughly 400,000 additional Indian and Chinese college-graduates into the U.S. labor market. The problem could be ended if agencies simply established a regulation saying additional applications would be rejected once the waiting list has reached past five years, said Miano.
The backlog now includes 306,000 Indian workers, plus their 325,000 spouses and children. These migrants have a huge incentive to lobby for the removal of the country cap because the change would vault them to the head of the line — and also allow them to sponsor their parents and in-laws to arrive in the United States.
Indian advocates fighting the country cap say the wives of the Indian visa-workers have proved to be the most persuasive, partly because U.S. politicians do not want to be seen as rejecting their pleas. For example, Yoder has repeatedly showcased the Indian wife of an H-1B worker murdered in Olathe, Kansas, February 2017. During the July 25 appropriations committee markup, Yoder mentioned Sunayana Dumala repeatedly, saying:
She has become an inspiration as an outspoken advocate for this legislation. We’re so proud to have her here today.
To pass his amendment, Yoder emotionally painted the country caps as unfair discrimination against Dumala, while he ignored the impact of cheap visa-workers on the young Americans in his Kansas district:
Without this fix, Sunayana will very likely never become an American citizen …. Her backlog may make it so that she never become a United States citizen. Yet someone born today in almost any other country around the world, save for China or India, someone born today can go through school, go through higher education, can come to America, 30, 40 50 years from now on a high skilled H-1B visa and still get in line before Sunayana Dumala because she happens to be from India.Mr. Chairman, that is discriminatory, it is wrong, it is unjust, and we have a chance here today in this committee in a bipartisan way to put a stop to that, to make this a first-come, first served basis and to quit this horrible discriminatory practice and to stand up for the Sunayana Dumalas of this country
Yoder also invited Sunayana Dumala to the 2018 State of the Union speech. He told a newspaper for Indians in the United States that:
“It was my idea—I’ve gotten to know Sunayana very well over the last year after the tragedy –the murder of her husband in a hate crime,” he said. “She’s become a very powerful symbol against some of the hate in this country directed toward minorities, with her response of love and kindness and trying to bring this country together that has been so inspirational. I thought a lot about it this week even and it really speaks to Dr. Martin Luther King’s message that it’s only love and light that can drive out the darkness and hate. And, she is the walking embodiment of that and so, I have a lot of respect for her and her struggle and her courage. So, we thought it would be fitting to have her as my guest at the State of the Union.”
In 2017, Yoder explained his reasons for supporting the country-caps bill to Forbes magazine:
We have a strong and vibrant Indian community in my district. They’ve been kind enough to invite me into their community, I’ve been able to participate in many of their cultural events – I’ve even taken a stab at playing a game of cricket. Many of them have brought this issue to my attention and when Representative Chaffetz retired and the bill needed a new lead sponsor, I was eager to jump at the opportunity. I’ve heard their personal stories and the discrimination they face and uncertainty and fear they live with. Many of these immigrants are my neighbors and friends and they need a voice to stand up for them in Congress, to tell their story.
Advocates with the main advocacy group, Immigrant Voice, celebrated after the vote:
Outside Appropriations Committee room in the US Capitol, as congressman @KevinYoder & widow of the Austin’s bar shooting, Sunayana Dumala, celebrate passage of amendment to adopt #HR392 (what she advocated for as Yoder’s guest for state of the union). Photo from Yoder team
The Kansas City Star newspaper posted an interview with Dumala and reported:
She flew from Johnson County to Washington Wednesday morning. Her travel was funded by the advocacy group Immigration Voice, a move intended to hold the Johnson County Republican to his promise to deliver the legislation to the president’s desk in the near future.After the vote, Yoder emerged in the hall to cheers and high fives from the widow and other Indian immigrants from Kansas who had traveled to Washington for the vote. “Hey, hey,” he said spreading his arms wide. Then he enfolded a tearful Dumala into a hug.“It’s a powerful moment,” said Yoder. “We’ve been working a long time to get to this moment.”
“Congress does not work for Americans …. they don’t do a thing for Americans,” Miano said.
Many Indian visa-workers will get their green cards in the next few years even if Yoder’s change is rejected, so his amendment benefits the roughly 200,000 Indian workers — and their 200,000 family members — who now have to wait for more than five years to get a green card.
Government data shows the biggest backlog among Indians are those with a Master’s degree, partly because many Indians earn Masters degrees at U.S. universities to get into the H-1B program:
To suppress Americans’ growing opposition to the outsourcing programs, pro-migration advocates accuse critics of discrimination against foreign nationals, despite the widespread discrimination against Americans. Leon Fresco, a lobbyist for the Indian visa-workers, tweeted:
Fresco, an immigration lawyer and a former official in President Brack Obama’s administration, also argued that Yoder giveaway is good for Americans because its means Indians will not serve as cheap indentured workers for many years before they can get green cards.
(1/4) simple 4 part lesson for HR392 opponents to understand using only facts—no country caps exist for student visas. India sends less than 15 percent of all foreign students. travel.state.gov/content/dam/vi…
Fresco’s “indentured servant” argument is logical — but Miano argues that Yoder’s offer of fast-track green cards will encourage even more Indians to become visa-workers via the H-1B program and the uncapped L-1 and OPT visa-worker programs. Any greater supply of visa-workers shrinks salaries for American graduates, and make it difficult for blue-collar parents to help their children get into white-collar jobs, he said.
Fresco also defended the Yoder amendment by saying it does not create additional H-1B visas:
(5/4) Once no country cap, green cards will become MORE diversified, no less. will look like the distribution of student visas (where India is less than 15 percent). Claims of “cheap labor” make no sense here because not even 1 additional GC or H-1B visa is part of HR392. #facts
But Fresco’s statement does not mention the L-1 visa-worker program — and there is no limit on the number of L-1 visas which Indian workers can use to get on Yoder’s fast-track to citizenship.
In 2013, Fresco served as the top immigration aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer during the “Gang of Eight” controversy. That bill allowed an unlimited number of foreign college-graduates to get jobs in the United States, Fresco told this reporter in 2013.
Yoder’s amendment was backed by Amazon. According to MyVisaJobs.com, Amazon has asked for 1,441 green cards for visa-workers since 2015. Half of those workers are from India, and one-seventh are from China.
Amazon also asks for hundreds of H-1B visas each year:
Amazon does not use L-1 workers, but many Indian subcontracting firms use large numbers of L-1 visa workers. The total number is hidden from the public because the Department of Homeland Security does not release the number of L-1B workers who are imported via “blanket petitions.”
Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions. Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because investment flows towards the large immigrant populations living in the coastal states.
Got any tips about the H-1B, L-1 and OPT programs? Email Neil Munro here or at NMunro@Breitbart.com.
Number of foreign college graduates staying in U.S. to work climbed again in 2017, but growth has slowed
A record number of foreign graduates of U.S. colleges and universities obtained temporary authorization to work in the United States through the Optional Practical Training (OPT)program in 2017, but growth in the once-booming program has slowed dramatically, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
In recent years, the OPT program has surpassed the H-1B visa program as the nation’s largest source of new temporary high-skilled immigrant workers. In 2017, a record 276,500 foreign graduates received work permits under the OPT program, up from 257,100 in 2016, according to data obtained from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement through a public records request. However, growth has slowed considerably: The number of enrollees grew by 8% in 2017, compared with 34% in 2016. That’s the largest decline in the annual growth rate since 2004, the first year for which data on all foreign students are available. The slowed growth also follows a longer period of rapid expansion for the program. From 2014 to 2016, the number of enrollees nearly doubled in size, growing by 93%.
Declining growth of the OPT program is due in part to a smaller increase last year in the program’s foreign graduates who majored in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields. In 2017, enrollment of STEM graduates in OPT grew by 13% over the previous year, compared with 48% annual growth in 2016. This slowdown happened despite the maximum length of employment increasing from 12 to 36 months in 2016 for foreign graduates with STEM degrees. (By contrast, an extension for STEM degree holders in 2008 did contribute to a large increase in OPT approvals.) The decline in 2017 also coincided with low unemployment rates for U.S. workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The Trump administration has tightened regulations that govern the OPT program. Under U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rules posted online in January, foreign graduates working under OPT must now work at the employer’s place of business. (Previously, foreign workers could work at a third-party site, such as at a client’s office.) In addition, the administration has announced plans to roll back the 2016 employment extension for STEM graduates, though this change had not been implemented as of July 2018.
OPT enrollment growth slowed substantially in 2017 among foreign students from India and China, the program’s two largest countries of origin. In fact, only France, Nepal and Nigeria saw their annual growth rates increase in 2017 (among nations with 10,000 or more foreign students enrolled in OPT from 2004 to 2017).
Growth in the number of foreign graduates under OPT slowed in 2017 across all degree levels, but the trend was most pronounced among master’s degree holders. About 188,600 foreign students held master’s degrees in 2017, a 9% increase over the previous year – far lower than the 45% annual increase seen in 2016. This slowdown follows a period of rapid growth: From 2014 to 2015, the number of foreign students with master’s degrees jumped by 57%, the highest annual increase of any degree level since 2004.
Note: The full methodology for this analysis can be found here. Also, see where foreign student graduates worked in the U.S. between 2004 and 2016 in our interactive.
- Neil G. Ruiz is associate director of global migration and demography at Pew Research Center.
- Abby Budiman is a research assistant focusing on global migration at Pew Research Center.
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