MASSIVE UNEMPLOYMENT IN AMERICA AS NANCY PELOSI WORKS FOR AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS

If America Must Be Shut Down, So Must Its Guest Worker Programs

By Dale L. Wilcox

American Thinker

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/if_america_must_be_shut_down_so_must_its_guest_worker_programs_.html

Mass Unemployment in U.S. Once Eased by Immigration Pause

65

Photo: Spencer Platt, Staff / Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

11 Apr 2020232

5:17

The Chinese coronavirus has brought unemployment to about ten million Americans in just three weeks. In past times of unemployment, such depressions have been met with record low legal immigration levels.

United States unemployment may reach 20 percent with 25 million jobs eliminated, JPM

organ economists predict, in the coming months as states issue stay-at-home orders that have forced mass layoffs and business closures.

At the same time, the U.S. has yet to lower legal immigration levels wherein about 1.2 million legal immigrants are awarded green cards every year. At current legal immigration rates, the U.S. will likely issue over a million green cards this year.

Previous times of high unemployment have been met with spiraling legal immigration levels. During the Great Depression throughout the 1930s, when unemployment hit nearly 25 percent, legal immigration shot down dramatically as millions were laid off.

Between 1920 to 1928, legal immigration admissions floated between 300,000 to more than 805,000 annually. In 1929, legal immigration admissions dipped into free fall with less than 280,000 admissions — the lowest annual level of immigration since 1919, when only about 141,000 legal immigrants were admitted to the U.S.

While the Great Depression left millions unemployed, between the late 1920s and through the 1930s, legal immigration levels went from 241,700 admissions in 1930 to century-low of 23,068 admissions in 1933 — the lowest annual level of immigration to the U.S. since 1831, when about 22,000 legal immigrants arrived.

For nearly 15 years, between 1931 and 1945, the U.S. stabilized its legal immigration admissions below 100,000 a year. By 1946, the U.S. had started admitting about 108,000 legal immigrants, and for the next 20 years, from 1947 to 196, annual admissions did not exceed 400,000.

In fact, legal immigration during those 20 years stayed mostly below 330,000 annual admissions and did not tick up to more than 360,000 admissions until 1967 — two years after the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 was signed into law by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Since Johnson Hart-Celler, and President George H.W. Bush’s expansion of immigration in the 1990s, U.S. legal immigration admissions have averaged more than a million a year. Not since 1987 have annual legal immigration admissions dipped below 600,000, and 2013 was the last year annual admissions dropped below a million.

Polls and surveys have exhibited a longing for less immigration. The latest Harvard/Harris Poll found that about five-in-six Americans, or 83 percent, want to end all immigration from Mexico — one of the largest immigration-sending countries.

Rasmussen Reports releases weekly surveys on immigration issues. The latest findings, a survey conducted March 29 to April 2 of 1,250 likely voters, reveals decreasing overall immigration remains more popular among Americans than increasing or keeping immigration levels the same.

For example, a 47 percent plurality of Americans want legal immigration cut — including 32 percent who want less than 500,000 annual admissions. Working class Americans with no college education, those most likely to be forced to compete against foreign workers, are the most supportive of cutting annual legal immigration admissions down to below half a million.

The Rasmussen survey also finds that more than six-in-ten Americans say it is better that businesses raise wages to recruit American workers than to import foreign workers. Another 57 percent of Americans say the country already has enough talented people to take high-salary white-collar jobs and does not need more so-called “high-skilled” foreign workers.

Currently, the State Department has halted routine visa services at its embassies and consulates overseas. The agency, though, has said their goal is to return to standard visa services “as soon as possible,” but are unable to provide a specific date at this time.”

Despite mass unemployment, annual legal immigration admissions are expected to continue hovering around more than a million in 2020, unless President Trump’s administration executively halts most immigration to keep Americans from competing for scarce work against foreign nationals.

In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the president’s control over legal immigration. In Trump v. Hawaii, the court stated that presidents have extraordinarily broad discretion to admit or exclude foreign nationals from the U.S. when they believe doing so is in the national interest.

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

This Pandemic Will Lead to Social Revolutions

Andreas Kluth

,

Bloomberg•April 10, 2020

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The most misleading cliche about the coronavirus is that it treats us all the same. It doesn’t, neither medically nor economically, socially or psychologically. In particular, Covid-19 exacerbates preexisting conditions of inequality wherever it arrives. Before long, this will cause social turmoil, up to and including uprisings and revolutions.

Social unrest had already been increasing around the world before SARS-CoV-2 began its journey. According to one count, there have been about 100 large anti-government protests since 2017, from the gilets jaunes riots in a rich country like France to demonstrations against strongmen in poor countries such as Sudan and Bolivia. About 20 of these uprisings toppled leaders, while several were suppressed by brutal crackdowns and many others went back to simmering until the next outbreak.

The immediate effect of Covid-19 is to dampen most forms of unrest, as both democratic and authoritarian governments force their populations into lockdowns, which keep people from taking to the streets or gathering in groups. But behind the doors of quarantined households, in the lengthening lines of soup kitchens, in prisons and slums and refugee camps — wherever people were hungry, sick and worried even before the outbreak — tragedy and trauma are building up. One way or another, these pressures will erupt.

The coronavirus has thus put a magnifying glass on inequality both between and within countries. In the U.S., there’s been a move by some of the very wealthy to “self-isolate” on their Hamptons estates or swanky yachts — one Hollywood mogul swiftly deleted an Instagram picture of his $590 million boat after a public outcry. Even the merely well-heeled can feel pretty safe working from home via Zoom and Slack.

But countless other Americans don’t have that option. Indeed, the less money you make, the less likely you are to be able to work remotely (see the chart below). Lacking savings and health insurance, these workers in precarious employment have to keep their gigs or blue-collar jobs, if they’re lucky enough still to have any, just to make ends meet. As they do, they risk getting infected and bringing the virus home to their families, which, like poor people everywhere, are already more likely to be sick and less able to navigate complex health-care mazes. And so the coronavirus is coursing fastest through neighborhoods that are cramped, stressful and bleak. Above all, it disproportionately kills black people.

Even in countries without long histories of racial segregation, the virus prefers some zip codes over others. That’s because everything conspires to make each neighborhood its own sociological and epidemiological petri dish — from average incomes and education to apartment size and population density, from nutritional habits to patterns of domestic abuse. In the euro zone, for example, high-income households have on average almost double the living space as those in the bottom decile: 72 square meters (775 square feet) against only 38.

The differences between nations are even bigger. To those living in a shantytown in India or South Africa, there’s no such thing as “social distancing,” because the whole family sleeps in one room. There’s no discussion about whether to wear masks because there aren’t any. More hand-washing is good advice, unless there’s no running water.

And so it goes, wherever SARS-CoV-2 shows up. The International Labor Organization has warned that it will destroy 195 million jobs worldwide, and drastically cut the income of another 1.25 billion people. Most of them were already poor. As their suffering worsens, so do other scourges, from alcoholism and drug addiction to domestic violence and child abuse, leaving whole populations traumatized, perhaps permanently.

In this context, it would be naive to think that, once this medical emergency is over, either individual countries or the world can carry on as before. Anger and bitterness will find new outlets. Early harbingers include millions of Brazilians banging pots and pans from their windows to protest against their government, or Lebanese prisoners rioting in their overcrowded jails.

In time, these passions could become new populist or radical movements, intent on sweeping aside whatever ancien regime they define as the enemy. The great pandemic of 2020 is therefore an ultimatum to those of us who reject populism. It demands that we think harder and more boldly, but still pragmatically, about the underlying problems we confront, including inequality. It’s a wake-up call to all who hope not just to survive the coronavirus, but to survive in a world worth living in.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a member of Bloomberg's editorial board. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the E
conomist.

NANCY, IT WAS ALREADY A DEPRESSION FOR MIDDLE AMERICA!

40% OF CALIFORNIA LIVES BELOW 

THE POVERTY LEVEL. 40% OF CALIFORNIA 

ARE DEM VOTING ILLEGALS!

Pelosi: ‘We Could Have a Depression’

13,494

PAM KEY

10 Apr 20207,627

1:24

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Thursday on CNBC’s “Mad Money” that the United States could slip into a depression as a result of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown’s impact on the economy.

Host Jim Cramer said, “You are a natural optimist. If we can get this additional money, which I think is certainly warranted, and we get some breaks in science, do you think, is it possible to say— I know you don’t want to put a date on it, but we can stay closed—is it possible that maybe enough people in May, enough younger people, enough people who have already had it, enough people who tested, tested, tested, get the country moving? I’m getting worried about not a recession, but a depression.”

Pelosi said, “We could have the depression because so many people are out of work. And that’s why we have to get the system really energized and working. Let’s get out those unemployment checks. Let’s get out those direct payments. Let’s get these loans freed up to let the banks about the friends to the whole system they are this is entrepreneurship like we’ve never seen before because of the challenge to small businesses let’s recognize what that is, that optimism is to America. I don’t think anybody can tell you what date unless you just take it a week at a time. Let’s be hopeful it will be soon.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

If America Must Be Shut Down, So Must Its Guest Worker Programs

By Dale L. Wilcox

America-Firsters were both perplexed and furious for most of last week as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appeared to be going ahead with its early March announcement to expand the H-2B unskilled guest-worker program to over 100,000 slots a year. With unemployment-benefit applications for March coming in at over 10 million, the last time the job market looked this bad—the Great Depression of the 1930s—immigration authorities sought to help, not hinder, the American worker by creating the nation’s first-ever illegal-alien-removal program. 

Late last week, however, due in part to activist pressures, DHS’s interim secretary, Chad Wolf, announced the increase would be paused “due to present economic circumstances.” It was a minor bit of respite for working Americans who were already struggling going into this crippling downturn. 

The H-2B guest-worker visa was created in 1986 as part of a congressional law that provided amnesty to over 3 million illegal aliens. Because that law also included a promise to finally put an end to illegal-alien hiring, businesses complaining of impending “worker shortages” were able to secure the right to import temporary foreign workers for a slew of low-skilled industries, including cattle farming, landscaping and hospitality. Agribusiness got its separate, far larger “H-2A” program for farmworkers. Nearly 35 years on, however, the problem of illegal labor is bigger than ever, and H-2B-using businesses still complain about worker shortages. 

The H-2B is one area where anti-borders groups and pro-American worker groups like mine actually come together on. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Economic Policy Institute, and the AFL-CIO all rightly criticize the program for being a modified version of colonial-era bonded servitude, due to workers’ visas being tied to their employers, their inability to unionize, and their wages and benefits being well below normal market expectations. 

It is certainly not outlandish to call programs like the H-2B, the H-2A, and its Big Tech cousin, the H-1B, throwbacks to the time when European peasants came here as indentured laborers. America has devolved back to its pre-independence days of immigrant-serf labor before. 

According to venerable U.S. historians Charles and Mary Beard, in their 1930 book The Rise of American Civilization, the Immigration Act of 1864 was “an extraordinary law which gave federal authorization to the importation of working people under terms of contract analogous to the indentured servitude of colonial times.”  

Key to their assessment was a section of the law in which emigrants first had to pledge up to a year of their wages to pay for their transportation, in effect, bonding them to their employer. Due to the public’s outrage (even Russia had abolished its serf system by this point), it was repealed four years later. However, the practice still went on for many decades, say the Beards, with “companies [being] organized to supply employers with European labor in any quantity, anywhere, at any time.” 

When it was initially announced as part of the Republican Party’s platform four years earlier (when Lincoln won the party ticket), the Beards described members both in- and outside the party as being in total shock. Pushing a policy that took the country back to the days of British colonial-era serfdom was only made possible, say the Beards, by a D.C. institution that was just then coming into its own: corporate lobbying. 

As they describe in their book, in this period there “evolved a reasoned scheme of political action” through which “the capitalists of the Northeast demanded from Congress a liberal immigration policy to assure an abundance of cheap labor.” This was part of “a heroic program which its sponsors could only realize by securing the possession of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.” 

Particularly big sponsors of the Act were Northern mill owners who feared that free farmland out West would lure away local workers. “As a counter stroke, the danger of higher wages… [was] partially averted by the [Act]”, the Beards write. It was all part of the newfound “positive advantages… won by capitalists in the halls of Congress.” 

Created alongside the immigration lobby was another D.C. institution we still live with today: the cheap-labor, public-affairs industry. This wasn’t a coincidence. In order to mute the public outrage over the new law, the Beards describe how big business had to supplement its economic arguments with a moralizing narrative to be publicized by “orators”: 

And orators, applauded by these mighty friends, were fond of portraying America as the asylum for the oppressed of the world suffering from wars, revolts, pogroms, and persecutions of every kind. Seldom has economic gain and loft idealism coincided with such mechanical precision. 

Economic threats about “shortages” coupled with moral intimidation is, of course, a fixture of today’s immigration policy discourse. Even critics of guest-worker programs, like those mentioned above, frequently employ scare terms like ‘hateful’, ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’ to intimidate critics of mass amnesty and mass immigration.

As the Beards recount, later that century, the small immigration victories achieved by organized labor were particularly "hard-fought battles,” “for by this time the doctrine of ‘the asylum for the oppressed of every land’ had become intrenched in popular psychology.” ‘Intrenched’ it still is, and hard-fought battles must keep being waged if American workers are to gain the respect and dignity they deserve. 

In 1925 Calvin Coolidge famously said that “the business of America is business.” That is still true today, but what is best for business must be balanced with what is best for American citizens. When our nation is back to full employment, we can have a national debate about the wisdom of bringing in large numbers of foreign workers. Until then, this crisis demands the prioritization of the millions uprooted from their livelihoods and their health.  

Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to 

India Press: Government Links Hydro Medicine Delivery to Trump’s Support of India’s H-1B Visa Workers

6

AP Photo/Manish Swarup

NEIL MUNRO

11 Apr 202059

8:32

India’s president is linking the delivery of U.S.-purchased hydroxychloroquine medicine to his demand that President Donald Trump help India’s outsourcing workers stay past the expiration of their work visas, says a report in one of India’s leading newspapers.

The Hindustan Times reported on April 10:

The Indian government has asked the US to extend the validity of visas, including H-1B and other types of visas, held by Indian nationals who have been hit by the Covid-19-related economic slump, people familiar with developments said on Friday.

Foreign secretary Harsh Shringla took up the matter during his telephone conversation with US deputy secretary of state Stephen Biegun on Wednesday, when the two sides also discussed ways to enhance cooperation to counter the pandemic and ensure the availability of essential medicines [hydroxychloroquine] and equipment.

“We have been in touch with the US government, requesting them to extend the validity of visas of Indian nationals – H-1B and other types of visas – who are stranded in the US due to the pandemic,” said one of the people cited above, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are closely monitoring related developments,” the person added, without giving details.

The demand is a tough sell for Trump, who has yet to implement his March 2016 promise to end the H-1B visa’s role as a cheap-labor program for many Fortune 500 companies in the United States.

But India’s government and economy rely on the wealth earned by “Non-Resident Indians” in the United States — and the coronavirus crash is sending hundreds of thousands back home during the next several months.

Still, the departure of hundreds of thousands of India’s college graduate visa workers would be a huge gain for many swing-voting, middle class American voters in 2020 — and for the politicians who needed their votes.

U.S. visa worker rules include a superstructure of many clever and complex exceptions and loopholes, all of which are designed to help U.S.investors and CEOs freely hire and fire large blocs of cheap, male, Indian visa workers. The set of complex rules also allows executives to bypass the many workplace rules and anti-discrimination laws that Congress adopted to help all American professionals win the jobs and careers needed for a middle class life.

But the system-wide, virus-induced, sudden economic crash has overwhelmed the clever complexity by causing a semi-hidden avalanche of layoffs, and pay cuts — and the underlying laws and regulations say that laid off visa workers must go home in 60 days and prevent companies from keeping a reserve army of visa workers on reduced pay or reduced hours.

The joint U.S.-Indian outsourcing group, NASSCOM, has already asked the Department of Labor to help U.S. and Indian companies rewrite the basic wage and job promises made to hundreds of thousands of visa workers, including about 900,000 resident H-1B workers:

Neil Munro

✔@NeilMunroDC

Govt data shows 1 million Indian contract-workers get white-collar jobs in tech, banking, health etc.
The Indian hiring ignores many EEOC laws & is expanding amid gov't & media silence.
It is a huge economic & career loss for US college grads.#S368 #H1B http://bit.ly/2Sy3uw6 

CEOs Keep 1 Million Indian Graduates in U.S. Jobs, Legally

Employers have quietly converted an imported army of 451,000 Indian temporary workers into permanent U.S.-based workers.

breitbart.com

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Also, India’s Congress is demanding that Indian President Narendra Modi use his control over the hydroxychloroquine supply to protect the nation’s huge population of well-paid visa workers in the United States.

On April 10, India’s Economic Times reported:

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said after compromising the “India First” policy in the HCQ drug climb-down, the government is again failing to secure the safety and livelihood of Indians in the US.

“Time for the prime minister to ensure that our soft power of ‘Namaste Trump’ converts into fair treatment of H-1B visa holders in the US,” Surjewala said, noting that the US has put Americans on a temporary paid leave or allowed them to work for reduced hours in the wake of the pandemic.

But “the sword of H-1B visa job terminations” looms large over an estimated 75,000 Indians, with the United States giving them only a 60-day period to find a new job in case of a lay off, he said.

Trump called Modi on April 4 after India announced an export ban on the pills. “I called Prime Minister Modi of India this morning … and I said I’d appreciate it if they would release the amounts that we ordered,” Trump told reporters on April 4, adding:

They make large amounts of hydroxychloroquine — very large amounts, frankly.  They had a hold [on exports], because, you know, they have 1.5. billion people, and they think a lot of it.  And I said I’d appreciate it if they would release the amounts that we ordered

…

But we have already 29 million [dosesin stock].  That’s a big number.  Twenty-nine million doses.  And we’ve got millions of doses that are being made here and many millions of doses that are made elsewhere that are being shipped here, and it will be arriving…

But there’s a lot of very positive things happening with that.  That’s a game changer if that’s the case.  Obviously, we continue to work on the vaccines, but the vaccines have to be down the road by probably 14, 15, 16 months.

Two days later, Modi approved the export of many hydroxychloroquine pills.

On April 8, Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla linked the offer of pills — “the availability of essential medicines” — to the H-1B visa issue, according to the Hindustan Times.

Trump cemented the deal by publicly thanking Modi on April 8, likely after the meeting between Shringla and Trump’s deputy, Biegun:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Extraordinary times require even closer cooperation between friends. Thank you India and the Indian people for the decision on HCQ. Will not be forgotten! Thank you Prime Minister @NarendraModi for your strong leadership in helping not just India, but humanity, in this fight!

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Officials have not said if Trump will help the Indian visa workers before America’s college graduates vote in November — or if he will take minor steps to provide a face-saving excuse for Modi.

But a growing network of U.S. graduate groups is pressuring Trump to implement his campaign promise to protect graduates from the outsourcing business. In March 2016, after much zig-zagging, Trump declared:

The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.

The groups include the American Workers Coalition, U.S. TechWorkers, ProUSworkers, White Collar Workers of America, and the TechsUnite.US site.

The establishment media have ignored the visa worker issue for years — and throughout the many long press conferences that Trump is holding at the White House.

Breitbart News has extensively covered the impact of the outsourcing program on American graduates:

Neil Munro

✔@NeilMunroDC

Census data shows how huge numbers of American software graduates have been replaced by Indian & Chinese visa-workers in N.J., California, N.C., Georgia, N.Y., Texas, Virginia, Florida, and other states. Next: Healthcare professionals. @S386 http://bit.ly/2o0X4cp 

Census: Indian Visa Workers Drive Americans Out of Middle-Class Jobs

Census data shows that one-in-seven software developers in Hudson County, NJ, were born in the U.S., down from a six-in-seven share in 1980.

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This population of visa workers includes roughly one million Indians and roughly 270,000 Chinese graduates.

Many of the foreign workers are delivered in compliant blocs by Indian-run staffing companies. The deliveries are made via expensive contracts signed by many complacent U.S. business executives and by progressive H.R. managers who prefer not to hire free-speaking American professionals via individual interviews.

Many Americans are denied jobs by foreign hiring managers who expect secret cash kickbacks from often-unqualified fellow nationals, while U.S. managers and civil-rights officials look away.

Many foreign workers get hired because U.S. managers know they will work in exchange for the government-funded deferred bonus of green cards and citizenship, while American candidates need to be paid in dollars that reduce profit margins.

U.S. innovation declines as American professionals get isolated and replaced by ethnic coalitions of visa workers who are helping each extract as much money as they can before returning home.

This underground economy is made possible by Congress, corporations, and the establishment media, all of which ignore the routine violation of workplace laws, including the anti-discrimination laws that are designed to give diverse Americans fairness in hiring:

Neil Munro

✔@NeilMunroDC

Health insurance execs discriminated against Americans by hiring more-costly Indian H-1Bs, says lawsuit.
The case spotlights the tech sector's preference for compliant Indian contractors over indep. US professionals.
So more H-1Bs = less tech innovationhttp://bit.ly/2vIHAOp 

Lawsuit: Managers Violated Americans' Civil Rights by Hiring H-1B Workers

A group of Americans will present evidence to a jury that their employer discriminated against them by hiring expensive Indian H-1B workers.

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

“Job losses now underway far exceed anything the country has seen before.”

Jobs melting away fast as coronavirus wreaks havoc on economy

by Jay Heflin

The coronavirus pandemic is killing businesses and jobs faster than anything in living memory.

Layoffs have skyrocketed, nearly half of all U.S. companies expect to announce furloughs, and 37% have begun a hiring freeze as the virus reaches into every nook and cranny of commercial life.

Gap on Monday announced that it was shutting its doors across North America and Europe on April 1 and would furlough their workers. The company will halt wages but pay “applicable benefits” until stores reopen, it said.

Other prominent retailers announced massive layoffs in recent days. Macy’s and Kohl’s announced Monday that they furloughed staff and closed their doors.

They're unlikely to open again until late spring or until the virus is checked. It has already infected more than 184,180 people in the United States and killed at least 3,720, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, said Tuesday that the expected peak of infection and death is still some two weeks away.

The White House recommended that everyone practice social distancing for another month, and stay home if possible. More and more states are issuing stay-at-home orders and extending them further into the future, meaning that all nonessential businesses will remain closed.

A gallon of regular gasoline is selling for less than $1 in some states, slaughtering jobs in the oil industry. Houston's Halliburton Co. has furloughed 3,500 workers. More than a million jobs in the oilfield service sector could be cut this year as the coronavirus slashes projected sales, according to a report by Rystad Energy.

Job losses now underway far exceed anything the country has seen before.

More than 47 million people could be laid off, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated, and the unemployment rate could exceed 30%.

Such losses would far exceed the worst numbers of the 2008 financial crisis and eclipse those of the Great Depression.

Forecasters expect new jobless claims to be released Thursday by the Labor Department will be higher than the record 3.2 million reported last week.

Pictet Wealth Management projected that new claims could exceed 6 million for the week ending March 28, meaning 9 million people in total will have applied for unemployment insurance benefits in just the past two weeks. Other projections are not so dire; Goldman Sachs estimates job losses at 5.2 million, and Citigroup forecasts 4 million. The median projection is 3.5 million lost jobs, according to Bloomberg.

Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, expects the unemployment rate to at least double for March, from the historic low of 3.5% in February.

“Based on last week’s increase in claims [of 3.2 million], we’re probably about at 5.3% as of last week. If we see a similar jump this week, then we’ll be a little over 7% or 7.2%,” she told the Washington Examiner. "So, I would not be surprised if we are at least at 7% and potentially much higher, as high as 9%."

The monthly unemployment rate has not been 7% or higher since October of 2013, according to the Labor Department.

Wells Fargo projects that the spread of the virus will increase the jobless rate to 3.8% for the first quarter and 7.3% in the second quarter. The unemployment rate then would drop below 7% through 2021.

The $2.3 trillion relief bill signed by President Trump last week includes many hundreds of billions of dollars in loans and grants designed to help businesses keep employees on their payrolls even as they face, in many cases, a total loss of income.

In recognition of the fact that millions will have lost jobs almost immediately, and indeed that officials want to see many workers staying at home rather than venturing to workplaces where they could spread the virus, the bill also contains aid to people who have been laid off or furloughed, meant to tide them over.

The bill provides an additional $600 a week on top of normal state unemployment benefits. It also provides tax rebates of $1,200 an adult.

Bullard Says Unemployment Could Rise to 30%

 

JOHN CARNEY

 

The unemployment rate in the U.S. could hit 30 percent, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said in Bloomberg News interview.

“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter. The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole,” Bullard said. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”

That would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression.

Bullard said he expects economic growth to plunge 50 percent in the second quarter but for the economy to bounce back later in the year, so long as the appropriate measures are taken by the fiscal and monetary authorities.

“I would see the third quarter as a transitional quarter,” Bullard said. The next six months, however, could be very strong. “Those quarters might be boom quarters,” he said.

Bullard also said the Fed was far from being “out of bullets,” as some Fed watchers have claimed.

“There is more that we can do if necessary,” he said. “There is probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to go.”

Jobless Claims Soar to 3,283,000, Biggest Jump Ever

JOHN CARNEY

 

Jobless claims rose to 3,283,000 last week, reflecting only the first round of mass layoffs due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Jobless claims are considered the closest thing we have to a real-time indicator of economic conditions, reflecting claims from the prior week. Many pieces of economic data come out with lags of a month or more, which makes it had to rely upon them when the economy experiences a sudden shock.

The three million claims surge easily tops the 1982 record of 695,000.

Claims jumped in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Nine states reporting increases of at least 100,000 from the prior week.

The largest number of claims came from Pennsylvania, with 378,900.

A New York Labor Department office in Manhattan, New York City, on March 6, 2015. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

ECONOMY

Think Tank Estimates 14 Million Jobs Lost by Summer

BY TOM OZIMEK

As policymakers and investors anxiously eye the Labor Department’s jobless claims report, due for release Thursday, a Washington-based think tank has made a dire forecast of 14 million jobs lost by summertime.

“Our best guess at this point is that the national economy could lose 14 million jobs by summer 2020,” said The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in a note that blamed the COVID-19 outbreak for the dismal figures.

“These estimates assume $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus—in other words, even with $1 trillion in stimulus, the job losses will be enormous,” the EPI wrote on March 25.

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The 14-million forecast is an upwards revision over figures it published last week.

“Sadly, our predictions were likely too optimistic,” the think tank said in a report published March 25. The EPI noted that job loss estimates are “rapidly evolving, with new forecasts from different macroeconomic analysts being released on an almost daily basis.”

Bianca Medici (L), a corporate recruiter for CDM Media, speaks with job applicants during a National Career Fairs job fair in Chicago on April 22, 2015. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

EPI broke down their unemployment estimates by state. Percentage-wise, Nevada is projected to lose 14.2 percent of total private-sector employment. The state’s leisure, hospitality, and retail sectors account for over 40 percent of all private-sector jobs.

By absolute numbers of jobs lost, California is projected to have the most, at over 1.6 million. As a share of total private-sector employment, this number translates into 10.9 percent.

The think tank called for “at least $2.1 trillion in federal stimulus through 2020 to restore the country to reasonable economic health.”

Negotiators said Wednesday that U.S. senators and Trump administration officials reached an agreement on the massive economic stimulus bill.

The Senate will vote on the $2 trillion package later in the day and the House of Representatives is expected to follow suit soon after.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said Wednesday the package includes checks to help Americans pay bills during job layoffs related to the outbreak, expanded unemployment insurance, and emergency loans to small businesses.

‘Astronomical Increase’

The U.S. Department of Labor figures due Thursday are expected to shatter the old record for the greatest number of new unemployment claims filed in a single week.

Some economists project that the United States could see around 3 million new unemployment insurance claims when figures are released for the week of March 15-21. That would be around 12 times as many as the previous week and would triple the all-time record of 695,000 set in 1982.

“It’s going to be an astronomical increase,” said Constance Hunter, president of the National Association for Business Economists and chief economist at the accounting firm KPMG. “We don’t have any recorded history of anything like this.”

Trump’s DHS Starts to Import 85,000 H-1B Graduate Gig Workers

NEIL MUNRO

President Donald Trump’s deputies announced Friday that they had begun the process of importing 85,000 H-1B gig workers to take white-collar jobs that will be needed after October by the millions of American graduates who are now losing jobs in the coronavirus crash.

“This is just an unspeakable action,” said Marie Larson, a co-founder of the American Workers Coalition, which opposes the many visa worker programs that have transferred at least one million white-collar jobs to foreign workers. “I don’t believe President Trump ordered this — the swamp went ahead with this,” she said.

“If the H-1B program is just for filling jobs that Americans cannot fill amid for labor shortages, then this would not be happening,” said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Reform Institute. “But it is not a labor-shortage program — it is a cheap labor program to displace Americans,” he said.

The 2020 lottery “is in your face that that is the purpose of the program.”

The agency announced Friday that it had received enough corporate requests to snatch up all of the 2020 supply of H-1B visas.

This annual supply includes 20,000 visas for foreigners who pay for graduate degrees at American colleges, plus 65,000 visas for graduates who are directly imported from India, China, and other countries. Non-profits — such as hospitals and universities — are allowed to also import an unlimited number of “cap-exempt” H-1Bs for white-collar jobs.

Roughly 100,000 new H-1B workers arrive each year. But they are allowed to stay for many years, so companies have gradually built up a resident workforce of roughly 900,000 H-1B workers, alongside several hundred thousand additional white-collar workers carrying L-1, OPT, CPT, E-3, B-1, TN, H4EAD documents.

The annual application and lottery process are managed by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS] agency, which announced Friday afternoon:

USCIS has received enough electronic registrations during the initial period to reach the FY 2021 H-1B numerical allocations (H-1B cap). We randomly selected from among the registrations properly submitted. We intend to notify petitioners with selected registrations no later than March 31, 2020, that they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition for the beneficiary named in the applicable selected registration.

The work visas will not be sent to the lottery winners for several weeks after the companies submit petition packages with justifications for each visa. The deadline for submitting the petitions is June 30.

Those justifications include a so-called “Labor Condition Application” document approved by the Department of Labor. The LCAs describe the intended job for each H-1B worker. Business advocates use the LCA process to claim that imported workers do not displace Americans.

But the LCA process does not require the companies to show that Americans cannot be hired for the job. Also, the LCA documents are rubber-stamped by the department. A department spokesman told Breitbart News:

Under current law, “[t]he Secretary of Labor shall review such an [LCA] application only for completeness and obvious inaccuracies” and, unless the application is incomplete or obviously inaccurate, the Department must certify the LCA within seven days of receiving the employer’s application. [Emphasis added.]

Neil Munro

✔@NeilMunroDC

Govt data shows 1 million Indian contract-workers get white-collar jobs in tech, banking, health etc.
The Indian hiring ignores many EEOC laws & is expanding amid gov't & media silence.
It is a huge economic & career loss for US college grads.#S368 #H1B http://bit.ly/2Sy3uw6 

CEOs Keep 1 Million Indian Graduates in U.S. Jobs, Legally

Employers have quietly converted an imported army of 451,000 Indian temporary workers into permanent U.S.-based workers.

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Trump’s deputies now know which companies asked for 2020 visas and how many visas they won in the lottery, said Larson.

Those companies can tell Americans why they are hiring foreign workers when so many American graduates are jobless amid the coronavirus crash, she said:

We want USCIS to name the companies that have won the lottery to bring in foreign workers for American jobs. What specific specific skills do these people have that American workers supposedly do not have?

All Americans must demand that these companies make public why they need these people and why they could not hire American workers. We need the media to question each and every one of these companies to ask them why they could not hire Americans for these jobs. We need Americans to stand up during this massive unemployment — which is unprecedented even under the Great Depression and we have not hit the peak. This is a time for everyone to rise up.

It is incumbent on President Trump to ensure that he keeps his [2016] campaign promise to put American workers first. One way he can do that is to ensure the American public gets the answer it deserves on why Americans are not getting these jobs.

Trump’s failure to set curbs on the H-1B program has angered many of the swing-voting university graduates who supported him in 2016. In March 2016, after much zig-zagging, Trump declared:

The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.

“The people surrounding President Trump don’t have his back — they are not helping him keep his campaign promise,” Larson said.

In February 2020, a U.S. judge struck down the token H-1B curbs set by USCIS managers since Trump’s election.

The current head of DHS, Chad Wolf, formerly served as a lobbyist for the NASSCOM outsourcing industry, which imports most of the H-1B gig workers. The group’s mix of Indian and U.S. companies use the H-1B program to extract salaries and wealth from the American college graduate class, and they split the gains among both countries’ executives and investors, plus the visa workers and India’s government.

Neil Munro

✔@NeilMunroDC

The public & GOP blocked the business push in Congress to keep 100K+ visa workers in US jobs.
Next, biz asks agencies for the labor giveaway, with deceptive op-eds & earnest pleas from elite professional trade associations.
OK, so who lobbies back?#H1Bhttps://bit.ly/3bsaaTk 

Companies Lobby Trump's DHS to Preserve Huge Foreign Workforce

Immigration lawyers are urging President Donald Trump's deputies to extend the expiring work permits for an army of foreign contract workers.

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6:16 PM - Mar 25, 2020

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Some of the H-1B workers are experts hired by elite software and banking companies.

But many of the H-1B visa workers are hired by Indian-run staffing companies to quickly fill open slots in a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies. For example, many of the contract jobs are in technology, accounting, health care, design, banking, finance, engineering, science, teaching, and insurance, and even in the fashion industry. The companies include Tata, Infosys, HCL, and Tech Mahindra.

The little-publicized outsourcing industry boosts investors’ stock prices by cutting salaries for millions of American graduates. It also pushes many older American professionals out of jobs and prevents millions of American graduates from getting on the first rung of their career ladders.

The H-1Bs and staffing companies are often used by American executives and hiring managers out of sheer laziness, insiders tell Breitbart News.

The gig workers provided by the staffing companies are often unskilled, unproductive, and expensive, said a former executive assistant at a banking company who helped managers replace many American professionals with Indian H-1Bs. But they are compliant because the jobs pay far more than Indian or Chinese jobs and because they hope to win green cards, she said.

American executives do not want to go to the trouble of hiring and managing independent and innovative American professionals — but do want to promise short-term cost savings during their periodic calls with Wall Street investors, she said. “It was not about [workers’] skills, not about anything else, it was about money,” she said. “They want credit for saving the company money, so they won’t look at anything that goes against the [cost saving] narrative.”

Multiple lawsuits and testimony from Americans show how the H-1B program undermines professionalism, innovation, and Americans’ careers.

The 2020 lottery was applauded by immigration lawyers who import H-1B workers for business groups.

“I’ll keep you posted on when I start seeing updates for my registrations!” an immigration lawyer told her clients. “Yes, we had a substantial increase in submissions compared to last year,” she told one questioner.

“NewsFlash! H1B Registration Cap Hit, USCIS to Post Results by March 31st,” said a post by the Murthy Law Firm, which has offices in Indian, Seattle, and Maryland.

Murthy Law Firm@murthylawfirm

NewsFlash! H1B Registration Cap Hit, USCIS to Post Results by March 31st https://bit.ly/mdc39pIqNJ 

NewsFlash! H1B Registration Cap Hit, USCIS to Post Results by March 31st - Murthy Law Firm | U.S...

This afternoon, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that enough initial registrations were submitted to the fiscal year 2021 (FY21) H1B cap. By March 31, 2020, the online...

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11:55 AM - Mar 27, 2020

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American professionals have organized to lobby against the H-1B program via several groups, including the American Workers Coalition, U.S. TechWorkers, and ProUSworkers, and White Collar Workers of America.

The new TechsUnite.US site was created to help U.S. graduates anonymously collaborate.

In turn, these groups are backed up by a few sites that track the scale and location of the outsourcing industry in each legislator’s district. “The scope of this thing is really unbelievable,” said one researcher.

Other sites document the conflicts created by diverse foreign business practices in the United States. The non-political MyVisaJobs.com site also provides much information about H-1B outsourcing and green card rewards in multiple industries.

Neil Munro

✔@NeilMunroDC

DoJ/EEOC do nothing as US & Indian execs trade US jobs to Indian #H1B workers, cutting Americans out of careers, homes & families.
This trade choked innovation in Silicon-V, slammed insurance & banking. #SenMikeLee & #S386 will expand it to healthcare http://bit.ly/2vIHAOp 

Lawsuit: Managers Violated Americans' Civil Rights by Hiring H-1B Workers

A group of Americans will present evidence to a jury that their employer discriminated against them by hiring expensive Indian H-1B workers.

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