US factories in Mexico are
still open. As the coronavirus spreads, workers are dying
Kate Linthicum, Wendy Fry and Gabriela
Minjares | Los Angeles Times
Throughout March, even as
business and manufacturing slowed to a halt across much of the world in an
effort to contain the new coronavirus, work in foreign-owned factories in
northern Mexico carried on as usual.
Hundreds of thousands of
workers continued to toil side by side in Juarez, Tijuana and other border
cities, churning out electronics, medical equipment and auto parts.
Meanwhile, the virus was
spreading.
At a plant owned by
Michigan-based Lear Corp. that makes textiles for automobile seats, workers
began turning up at the on-site infirmary about a month ago with fevers and coughs.
Nurses diagnosed them as
having allergies or colds, gave them painkillers and told them to get back to
work, according to two employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they were not authorized to give interviews.
By late March, it became
clear that the Juarez factory was the center of a major COVID-19 outbreak. A
total of 13 employees at the factory have died from the disease, according to
Mexican health officials.
Among them was
42-year-old Rigoberto Tafoya Maqueda, who had moved to Juarez from the
mountains of central Mexico as a child and had worked for 20 years at the
plant.
“They didn’t give him
anything, not even antibacterial gel,” said his niece, Susana García Tafoya.
“They told him that he was fine … so he kept working.”
Maquiladoras, as the
thousands of foreign-owned factories in northern Mexico are known, are not
accustomed to extended work stoppages.
The factories, which
avoid most tariffs because their finished products are for export only, have
boomed since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, drawing hundreds of
thousands of workers to rapidly industrializing border cities for jobs that
typically pay many times less than similar positions in the United States.
The pandemic has fed off
the drive to keep factories running.
Mexico’s undersecretary
of health, Hugo López-Gatell, warned this week that the devastation from the
virus may be acute in the northern border states in part because some factories
“have continued to operate” despite new social distancing guidelines that call
for nonessential businesses to suspend work.
Lear shut down the Juarez
factory on April 1, while also stopping production at 41 other facilities it
operates across Mexico.
A statement from the
company expressed regret over the deaths of “several” employees but did not
address whether protective measures such as the distribution of masks had been
implemented or whether sick workers had been sent back to the factory floor.
Dozens of other factories
along the border continue to operate — in direct violation of federal orders.
In Juarez, at least 28
factories remain open even though they do not provide essential services, said
Chihuahua state Labor Secretary Ana Luis Herrera Laso.
She said 64 factories
have closed, and 33 that are considered essential are operating as usual.
In the state of Baja
California, home to the twin industrial cities of Tijuana and Mexicali, state
labor officials have been investigating noncompliant factories daily.
State Labor Secretary
Moctezuma Martinez said that this week investigators closed a U.S.-owned
factory that had been operating illegally and which had chains on its doors to
prevent its roughly 800 workers from leaving.
The company, Eaton
Corp.’s Houston-based Cooper Lighting, did not respond to requests for comment.
Baja California is home
to a large number of factories that produce medical supplies — a business
deemed essential by Mexican authorities. Several major suppliers in Tijuana
have helped make Mexico the top source of medical equipment to the United
States.
State authorities have
grown increasingly frustrated with those companies, which are selling their
products to the United States even as Mexico’s public hospitals face a major
shortage of surgical masks, gloves and other protective gear.
Baja California Gov.
Jaime Bonilla warned last week that local doctors are “dropping like flies” and
threatened to shut down a Smiths Medical Inc. factory making ventilator parts
unless it figured out how to bypass free trade rules and supply local clinics.
The company agreed and
says it is in talks with officials in both countries to amend regulations.
Bonilla, who belongs to
the leftist Morena party founded by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has
been an outspoken critic of factory conditions
“The employers don’t want
to stop earning money,” he said at a news conference Friday. “They are
basically looking to sacrifice their employees. … This is the reality.”
Calling on factories to
improve sanitation and social distancing measures, he said: “We want them to
continue working, but we don’t want them to sacrifice the health or the lives
of their workers.”
For those plants along
the border that have closed in recent weeks, the government’s instructions
haven’t been the only factor. The sinking world economy has dramatically
lowered demand for manufactured goods.
In some places, the
failure of factories to take precautions against the virus has sparked protests
from workers demanding that they be sent home or better safety measures put in
place. Videos have circulated on social media showing angry workers walking off
the job and yelling at managers for not providing protection.
Trade groups that
represent factory owners say a majority of companies are responding responsibly
to new social distancing guidelines and that most workers who have been sent
home because factories have closed are receiving partial pay.
Mexico has 6,875
confirmed coronavirus cases and 546 deaths, including 84 in states along the
northern border.
The real numbers are
almost certainly much higher, because Mexico has conducted fewer than 50,000
tests, compared with 3.2 million in the U.S. Top health officials have
acknowledged there may be over 56,000 infections.
Here and across the
globe, governments and businesses are weighing the economic costs of shutting
down life as usual against the risk of the coronavirus spreading.
That question is
particularly consequential in Mexico, where the economy was suffering even
before the coronavirus hit.
Alfredo Coutiño, Latin
America director for Moody’s Analytics, predicts that Mexico’s economy will
contract 6.5% in 2020 and the country will enter into a recession “deeper than
that during the 2009 financial crisis.”
Driving the downturn are
losses in remittances, a decline in tourism, and — significantly for a country
whose economy relies on exports for nearly a fifth of its gross domestic
product — a major contraction of the export market.
Nearly one in five
Mexican taxpayers is employed in the maquiladora industry, and cities such as
Juarez and Tijuana depend almost entirely on factory jobs, where workers build
everything from Whirlpool washing machines to Bombardier jets
There are growing
concerns that some factories that are closed now might never reopen. Some worry
that widespread unemployment could lead to more crime in border cities that
have long struggled with violence. Killings soared in Juarez after nearly
one-third of factory jobs were eliminated during the 2008 global recession.
Jesús Manuel Salayandía,
a factory owner who is the director of a trade group called Canacintra Juarez,
said his business is operating at partial capacity because only some of what he
produces is considered essential.
Those changes, as well as
modifications to production lines to put more space in between workers, have
cost him, he said. He hopes to still be in business after
Times staff writer
Linthicum reported from Mexico City, staff writer Fry from Tijuana and special
correspondent Minjares from Juarez.
Support for an immigration moratorium is rising among conservative leaders and the American people as a whole.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one.
Jeff Sessions Doesn’t Have Trump’s Support, But His Immigration Moratorium Should
What Makes a “Healthy” Economy?
In Immigration Debate, Trump Says We Don’t Have Enough American Workers to Fill Skilled Labor Jobs
Watch: ICE Lure and Sting Indian Illegal Labor 'OPT' Traffickers
Walmart Outsources Accounting, Office Jobs to Indian H-1Bs
Rasmussen Shows 2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration
Ivanka Trump: Executives Must Train Americans Before Immigrants
Video shows climbers surmounting border wall Trump claimed 'impossible to climb'
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS MEX OWNED AND SUBSTANTIALLY NOTHING BUT A MOUTHPIECE FOR LA RAZA 'The Race'
Jared Kushner Fails Up, Again
Support for an immigration moratorium is rising among conservative leaders and the American people as a whole.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one.
Jeff Sessions Doesn’t Have Trump’s Support, But His Immigration Moratorium Should
Whether or not former Attorney General Jeff Sessions wins back his old Senate seat, President Donald Trump and Congress must seriously consider his proposal to halt immigration until unemployment returns to pre-Coronavirus levels.
While most politicians are arguing over how to reopen the economy, only Sessions is addressing the impact legal immigration has on jobs. On Thursday, he announced a plan to establish a “moratorium on employment-based immigration.”
The moratorium would last until the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, where it was before the coronavirus crisis hit the US.
The run-off Republican primary race for US Senate in Alabama was supposed to be over last month. Former Alabama University football coach Tommy Tuberville, boasting an endorsement from Trump himself, led Sessions by double digits in a poll weeks before the initially scheduled election date of March 31.
Now that the election is reset for July 14, due to COVID-19 precautions, new life is breathed into the race. In addition to the Chinese virus, two more pandemics will be top issues: job loss and legal immigration.
Over 22 million Americans lost their jobs in the last month, “nearly wiping out all the job gains since the Great Recession,” CNBC reported Thursday.
Support for an immigration moratorium is rising among conservative leaders and the American people as a whole.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one. Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA and Students for Trump, recently reversed his position of “stapling green cards to diplomas” of foreign nationals. He now calls for a “total and complete moratorium on all visas.”
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one. Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA and Students for Trump, recently reversed his position of “stapling green cards to diplomas” of foreign nationals. He now calls for a “total and complete moratorium on all visas.”
A recent Ipsos poll found 79 percent of Americans support a temporary pause on all immigration. Currently, over 1 million legal immigrants are added to the country every year. BLOG: THEY REALLY HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY BORDER JUMPERS IN UP IN OUR JOBS.
Sessions’ opponent, however, recently lamented that 400,000 workers in India were unable to “be Americans.” In a muddled explanation, Tuberville blamed illegal immigrants for taking the places of these Indians, while also supporting a program to bring illegals “out of the shadows.”
Where Trump stands on immigration should be clear. Unfortunately, Sessions lost the president’s support after failing as his attorney general, abdicating his role in the Russiagate investigation. Trump is endorsing Tuberville for personal reasons, not policy.
Despite being hawkish on immigration for 20 years in the Senate, and despite being the first sitting US senator to endorse Trump in February 2016, Sessions is now struggling to convince Alabamians that he’s the Trumpist candidate.
“We don’t need to be bringing in immigrants now, in any kind of numbers, that are going to take jobs from Americans,” Sessions told the Alabama Federation of Republican Women on Wednesday night, Yellow Hammer News reported.
Whether it’s Tuberville or Sessions running against incumbent Democrat Senator Doug Jones in November remains to be seen, but the American people should not have to wait that long for substantive immigration policy in this crucial moment.
Congress reopens in May. One of the first legislative acts should be to pass a moratorium like the one Sessions is proposing. The corporate donor class wouldn’t be pleased, but the country would love it.
In its latest weekly immigration poll, Rasmussen Reports found the American people consistently support a national e-Verify system and reject claims by businesses that say they can’t find Americans to fill jobs. Raise the pay, even if it means higher prices, because it’s keeping Americans working, 60 percent said.
Needless to say, Trump won the White House because of sentiments like those. Right now could not be a better time for him to pressure Congress to reform immigration policy.
A moratorium is a great place to start. A comprehensive bill that permanently ends chain migration and birthright citizenship in exchange for a points-based merit system, while restricting asylum protection to the internationally recognized definition, and which tracks non-immigrant visitors via biometric entry/exit systems should be debated on the House and Senate floors.
Natural supporters in the Senate for these policies include Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, David Perdue of Georgia, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who support the RAISE Act, which cuts legal immigration.
Whereas most Republican senators support big business interests in maintaining a large labor pool that lowers wages, there may be a few who would move further right under current circumstances.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky once proposed a “trade-off” where no new legal immigrants would be accepted “while we’re assimilating the ones who are here.”
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas told Numbers USA that legal immigration should be scaled down to traditional levels of 250,000 per year when he was a candidate in 2012.
With three months of campaigning left to go, Sessions reported a campaign account balance of over $749,000, and Tuberville reportedly has campaign cash totaling nearly $459,000. Of course, much more money will be spent on the race by outside political action committees, especially under an economic lockdown confining many voters to TV and computer screens.
Much of that money could be wisely spent communicating a message that reflects the decades-long plea of Americans to put America first.
Tuberville may have the most recent photos smiling alongside Trump, but so far, Sessions is bringing the substance. Come 2021, whoever the next Alabama senator is, they should be voting on an immigration moratorium bill if one has not already passed.
What Makes a “Healthy” Economy?
The coronavirus pandemic shows that we don’t have one.
April 16, 2020
Last week, Janet Yellin, former chair of the Federal Reserve, gave an upbeat assessment of the pre-pandemic U.S. economy. “Very fortunately we started with an economy that was healthy before this hit,” she told the PBS NewsHour. “The banks were in good shape, the financial system was sound, Americans at least overall on average had relatively low debt burdens.”
But how “healthy” was that economy, really? How healthy is an economy whose workers have so little savings that they can’t make the rent after missing just a couple of paychecks? How healthy is an economy whose small businesses have so little cushion that they face almost instant obliteration when their cash flow is disrupted? How healthy is an economy where hourly employees performing many essential services earn so little that they have to go to work sick to keep their jobs? And how healthy is an economy whose housing costs force millions to cram into overcrowded homes in polluted slums replete with high stress, malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, heart problems, and other chronic disease?
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” said Fed chairman Jerome Powell in March. It was “resilient,” he said in February. Yellin concurred, citing the old good news in her hope that the “economy will recover much more speedily than it did from any past downturn.”
Recover for whom? The experts look at conventional measurements, which painted a picture of prosperity before COVID-19. The unemployment rate last September hit a fifty-year low, at 3.5 percent, and the rate for people without a high school diploma dropped to a new low of 4.8 percent. The GDP had been growing within the range considered ideal—two to three percent—and Powell reported a rising willingness of employers to hire low-skilled workers and train them.
But alongside the bright figures on unemployment and job creation, consider a competing set of numbers from before the pandemic: The poverty-level wages for those who harvest our vegetables, cut our Christmas trees, wash our cars, cook and serve our food in restaurants, deliver groceries to our doors, clean our offices, and even drive our ambulances. The 14.3 million households (11.1 percent) uncertain that they could afford enough food, and the 5.6 million families (4.3 percent) where at least one person has had to cut back on eating during the year. The 14.3 percent of black children with asthma, double the rate in the population overall. The 20 percent of children living in crowded homes shared with other families or three generations of their own, and the 50 percent of urban children who have lived in those conditions by age nine.
A pernicious dynamic of financial stress is the unexpected link between housing costs and malnutrition. For many low-wage families without access to such government subsidies as Section 8 vouchers or affordable housing, rent can soak up 40 to 60 percent of income, which can leave too little for other necessities. You have to pay the rent. You have to pay the electricity, phone, and fuel bills. If you need a car to get to work, which the vast majority of employees do, you have to make the car payments. Those are not optional. The category that can be squeezed is for food, and that’s what many poor families have to do.
A result is childhood malnutrition. It sometimes manifests itself in obesity resulting from cheap, bad food, which in turn can promote diabetes. It compromises the immune system. Even more seriously, deprivation of nutrients such as iron during key periods of brain development, both before and after birth, can lead to lifelong cognitive impairment. Studies show that children who suffered iron deficiency as infants, even if they’re fed properly later, still suffer as adolescents, scoring lower in math, written expression, and selective recall. Their teachers see them displaying “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems,” according to a National Academy of Sciences report.
So when federal and state governments are stingy with housing subsidies, as they always are, they are effectively, perhaps unwittingly, damaging children’s brain development and life opportunities.
The booming economy since the Great Recession
of 2008, amplified by Republican tax cuts that
gave corporations huge benefits, has begun to
raise hourly wages, but not significantly.
If median hourly wages in certain jobs are put next to the official poverty line—currently $25,750 a year for a family of four—it’s clear why so many people are in desperate trouble so soon after the economy’s lockdown. Most poor families have only one wage earner, so assuming a full-time, 40-hour week, that person would have to be paid $12.38 an hour just to reach the poverty line. As of May 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly wage for ambulance drivers and assistants was just $12.45; for workers in retail sails, $11.37 to $12.14; for building cleaners, $12.68; for parking attendants, $12.11; and for fast-food and restaurant cooks and servers (some of whom also get tips), $11.00 to $12.45.
The lesson is to look beyond the unemployment rate and number of new jobs and examine how well those jobs pay. The “healthy” economy did little to narrow the wealth gap. The most recent Federal Reserve figures, from before the pandemic, showed the top 10 percent of households with a median net worth of $2,387,500 and the bottom 10 percent with minus $962—that is, they owed more than they owned.
Adding assets and subtracting liabilities as of the fourth quarter of 2019, the wealthiest 10 percent had 70 percent ($78.5 trillion) of the country’s total household net worth, and the bottom 50 percent had just 1.5 percent ($1.7 trillion). The top had miniscule debt, and the bottom half had miniscule financial assets alongside huge mortgage and consumer debt.
So, Janet Yellin was only partially right when she said that Americans had low debt burdens. Consumer debt reached a record high in 2019 of more than $14 trillion, according to Experian, the credit agency. But it was lower as a portion of income. And defaults and late payments were low enough to drive the average FICO score—a person’s credit rating—to a high of 703, up from 689 in 2010 at the end of the Great Recession. (A perfect score is 850.) Given the high credit card and other debt among the unwealthy, however, delinquency rates can now be expected to soar, pushing credit ratings down.
In that prospering economy, then, the glass was either half full or half empty, depending on whether you were looking from the top or from the bottom. There was no need to exaggerate the hardships at the bottom, as some Democratic candidates did with one misstated statistic.
BLOG: INTERESTINGLY HARRIS, WARREN AND SANDERS ALL WANT AMNESTY SO 40 MILLION ILLEGALS CAN BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO. NOW DO THE MATH ON JOBS, HOUSING AND THE HOMELESS CRISIS
Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all said last year that 40 percent of Americans could not come up with the money to pay a $400 emergency expense. In fact, the contrary was the case, according to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.”
Asked to check all the ways they could pay for a $400 emergency, only 12 percent said they could not pay right now, 45 percent checked “with the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash,” and 33 percent said they’d use a credit card and pay it off entirely at the next statement. To a follow-up question, 85 percent said that making the unexpected payment would not prevent their paying other bills.
On the other hand, 25 percent told the Federal Reserve that they were just getting by or finding it difficult to get by. That number is troubling enough, one bound to spike as stay-at-home orders continue. The economy was not “healthy” for those folks in the first place, and will not be so for many more.
Improvements will come not from the stalemate of left and right, or from their manipulating statistics, but from a new ideology of practical realism that honors the complex facts, without distortion. The free-market system is the one we have, and it can work for virtually everyone if everyone in government and business works for everyone. Too idealistic? Naïve? Probably.
Support for an immigration moratorium is rising among conservative leaders and the American people as a whole.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one.
In Immigration Debate, Trump Says We Don’t Have Enough American Workers to Fill Skilled Labor Jobs
President Donald Trump told Fox News TV host Laura Ingraham on Friday his 2021 plans to welcome more foreign graduates will not flood the labor market for U.S. college graduates.
“I have so many companies coming into this country, you’re not going to have to worry about it,” Trump said in the interview, adding, “It is always going to be a shortage … We have so many companies coming in, from Japan … [and] China now is going to start building a lot of things.”
Trump and Ingraham did not find common ground, likely because they were talking about different parts of the immigration problem. Also, neither mentioned Ivanka Trump’s campaign to prod companies to train their own American employees for high-tech jobs.
Ingraham began the exchange by noting American graduates’ salaries have been suppressed by the flood of foreign graduates:
We don’t have a tight labor market. If we had a tight labor market, we would be seeing real increases in wages. I hear that your team is planning on advocating more foreign workers coming in for some of these high-tech companies.
Ingraham rejected business claims of shortages: “We’re seeing a plateauing of wages … There’s a never-ending appetite on the part of corporate America to bring in as much cheap labor as possible to drive down wages.”
“I’m not talking about cheap — I’m talking about brainpower,” Trump responded. “They want to hire smart people. And those people are thrown out of the country — we can’t do that,” he said, referring to foreign graduates of U.S. colleges.
Trump seems to want to help companies import a relatively small number of very clever people, such as Ivy League valedictorians. In contrast, Ingraham is trying to block companies’ effort to cut payrolls by replacing well-paid American professionals with cheap foreign graduates who have just enough skills to get the job done, regardless of quality.
“We have to allow smart people to stay in our country — if you graduate number one in your class at Harvard, [if] you graduate from the Wharton School of Finance,” Trump said. “If we tell smart people to get the hell out, that’s not America first.”
“Yes, that’s a small percentage of what [ccompanies] want,” said Ingraham.
” No, it’s not. It’s a lot,” said Trump.
But business has hired very few valedictorians among the pool of roughly 1.5 million visa workers who now hold jobs sought by American graduates.
In fact, the government does not require U.S companies to hire Americans first, and it does not screen out unskilled foreign workers. The government does not cap foreign hires and does not enforce the loopholed rules which supposedly require foreign workers to be skilled and to be paid market-level wages. Nor does the government even try to curb the large scale nepotism that allows foreign born managers in the United States to import huge numbers of foreign workers who will kick back some of their salaries to their bosses.
For example, the “Optional Practical Training” program was expanded by President G. Bush and President Barack Obama to provide employers with an extra stream of foreign graduates. Foreigners get these OPT work permits by simply enrolling in U.S. colleges, ranging from the elite Stanford University down to the so-called “visa-mill” colleges where many students can speak little English and may do very little study.
DHS posts videos of Indian migrants buying fake documents from ICE's Farmington U. sting operation.
The #OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if #S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh
The #OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if #S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh
Watch: ICE Lure and Sting Indian Illegal Labor 'OPT' Traffickers
In 2017, for example, federal data shows Northeastern University provided OPT work permits to 4,359 foreign graduates– or far more than the number of valedictorians. Harvard sold access to the OPT work permits to 1,875 foreigners, and Columbia University sold access to 5.59o work permits.
But even more work permits were sold to foreign students by many little known colleges. For example, in 2017, Northwestern Polytechnic University sold access to 6,060 work permits, Silicon Valley University sold 3,127 work permits, and the Illinois Institute of Technology sold 2,678.
Nationwide, universities earned roughly $30 billion a year from this labor-trafficking business, so they have little incentive to exclude low-quality migrants.
New 2018 data provided to Breitbart News by the Department of Homeland Security shows that universities provided 215,000 OPT work permits in 2018. This total consisted of 145,586 one-year OPT work permits and 69,650 three-year OPT-STEM work permits in 2018.
In 2017, the matching “Curricular Practical Training” program provided one-year work permits to roughly 100,000 foreign students at U.S. colleges — including colleges that require little or no attendance.
DHS officials have recently changed how they count the OPT and CPT work permits, so the estimated workforce now ranges from 400,000 to roughly 300,000. The older 2017 methodology was used to produce this DHS chart:
Many of these OPT graduates are hired by prestigious U.S. firms, — and by foreign managers in those elite firms — so demoting skilled U.S. graduates in lower-tier jobs, in lower-tier cities, at lower-tier wages.
The other major visa-worker program is the H-1B program. This program keeps roughly 750,000 foreign workers in U.S. college-graduate jobs. These foreign workers will often accept very low wages for these jobs — and will underbid American graduates — partly because they are hoping their employers will sponsor them for the hugely valuable prize of a green card.
Federal agencies have never released a full count of the resident H-1B workforce, but federal data shows that a huge percentage are not valedictorians and that many come from no-name universities in India.
The federal data for 2017, for example, shows that 39 percent of the H-1Bs sought by New York employers were rated as “entry-level” workers, similar to U.S. graduates. Another 26 percent were rated as just “qualified,” and only 6 percent were rated “competent.” These cheap workers have pushed hundreds of thousands of American professionals out of jobs.
This is the visa worker program which is used by companies to replace many Americans graduates. In 2016, for example, Disney outsourced Americans’ jobs to an Indian company that imported low-wage H-1B workers to do the Americans’ jobs. The American graduates were forced to train the Indians, torpedoing the claims of a shortage of skilled U.S. workers.
Ingraham reminded Trump of the Disney H-1B scandal. “You ran on people training their foreign replacements, that you ran against that. It’s humiliating for an American worker who works for a company for 30 years … to train your replacement,” Ingraham said.
“No, no, that’s different, I would never do that,” said Trump.
“Why shouldn’t we have American graduates of colleges and universities taking those jobs? Ingraham said.
“We do,” answered Trump. “But we don’t have enough of them … and we have to be competitive with the rest of the world too.”
But Trump’s deputies have done little to shrink the H-1B program. In fact, his deputies are defending the OPT program in court. Officials have also blocked a DHS plan to end the “H4 EAD” program that Obama created to persuade temporary H-1B workers to stay in U.S. jobs. The result is that many Americans are still being forced to train their workers, for example, at an AT&T finance office in North Carolina.
Yes, this is Walmart. See http://bit.ly/2ZoVQJB https://twitter.com/S1S1B1/status/1109459333023174656 …
Walmart Outsources Accounting, Office Jobs to Indian H-1Bs
Polls show the public strongly prefers rules which require companies to hire Americans before importing more workers.
A Rasmussen survey shows likely voters by 2:1 want Congress to make companies hire & train US grads & workers instead of importing more foreign workers.
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE
Rasmussen Shows 2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration
Some of Trump’s supporters say his comments are demoralizing. “I gotta say just put myself through one hell of a three year period,” said one Twitter user, titled “Presto.” “Going to school for IT, working a fulltime meat cutting job all cause of the hope Donald Trump gave me. This clip kinda hurt a bit. This hurt me worse than any hit piece. Give me a spot in the middle class.”
But Trump’s focus on a relatively few valedictorians is a much lesser threat to Americans than the bipartisan push by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to pass his pending S.386 bill.
The bill would offer foreign OPT and H-1B workers a fast-track to a new status, dubbed “Early Adjustment,” once they can persuade — or pay — their employers to sponsor them for green cards. There is no limit on the number of OPT, CPT, or H-1Bs that can be awarded each year, nor any limit on the number of foreign graduates who can be sponsored for green cards by their employers. The lack of limits ensures that Lee’s bill would allow an unlimited flood of foreign college-graduates into the jobs needed by “Presto” and other Americans to get into or to stay in the middle-class.
Notably, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, has dismissed employers’ demands for more workers and insists they step up their training programs.
“I love what’s happening because it’s forcing employers to get creative,” Trump told Gary Shapiro, the longtime CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, during a January 7 interview at its annual meeting in Las Vegas. She added:
When I hear employers [who] would come to me and they’d say, ‘We need more skilled workers, we need more skilled workers,’ and then I’d read about them laying off segments of their workforce because they were investing in productivity, and not having spent the time — when they had known three years prior they’d be making that investment and upgrading those systems — not taking the time to take those workers and reskill and then retrain them into their job vacancies, well, I have very little sympathy for that.
Her push seems to be working.
Many U.S. companies are upgrading their training programs, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently showcased a company that uses software to identify and hire ordinary Americans — including truckers — who may have the intellectual skills to succeed in the software business.
Ivanka tells CEOs to train Americans before asking for more immigrants.
She stood up for unemployed, ex-cons, old ppl, blacks, disabled, & non-grads.
But she was diplomatic & pleasant, so many journos simply missed her decent & strong populist message. http://bit.ly/2T6BwbI
She stood up for unemployed, ex-cons, old ppl, blacks, disabled, & non-grads.
But she was diplomatic & pleasant, so many journos simply missed her decent & strong populist message. http://bit.ly/2T6BwbI
Ivanka Trump: Executives Must Train Americans Before Immigrants
Before serving as President, Trump was an employer, and he has repeatedly shown his sympathy for fellow employers who complain about supposed labor shortages that would force them to compete for employees by offering higher wages. But he was elected on a pro-American promise — and he has raised Americans’ wages by repeatedly rejecting business demands for more, and yet more, imported workers.
Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers helps them force down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs, wages are going to go up.”
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people who share his MAGA vision?
Video shows climbers surmounting border wall Trump claimed 'impossible to climb'
A popular video clip shows two climbers using a ladder and rope to successfully cross a border wall President Trump claimed was "impossible to climb."
In a visit to the southern border in September, Trump claimed that portions of newly built wall along the U.S.-Mexico border near Tijuana were reinforced and even "championship mountain climbers" were unable to cross them. A video posted by photojournalist J. Omar Ornelas, however, shows two individuals using a ladder and other tools to cross the border successfully.
The president also noted the recent throttle in immigration numbers and credited the newly built wall. "People aren't even coming up," Trump said. "You see the numbers are going way down, and we're not doing a catch and release anymore."
The video of the climbers was widely shared as critics of Trump's border wall policy championed the effort of the migrant climbers to disprove the president's claim. Several hundred miles of border wall are currently under construction at the southern border, though no new fencing has been completed since Trump took office.
While the "impossible to climb" claim was disproven, the Department of Homeland Security claims the wall's efficacy cannot be understated. "When it comes to stopping drugs and illegal aliens from crossing our borders, border walls have proven to be extremely effective," a statement said. "Border security relies on a combination of border infrastructure, technology, personnel and partnerships with law enforcement at the state, local, tribal, and federal level. For example, when we installed a border wall in the Yuma Sector, we have seen border apprehensions decrease by 90 percent."
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS MEX OWNED AND SUBSTANTIALLY NOTHING BUT A MOUTHPIECE FOR LA RAZA 'The Race'
Jared Kushner Fails Up, Again
Having solved the Middle East, the president’s son-in-law tackles the border wall.
Opinion Columnist
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who, reports say, has been given the job of overseeing construction of a wall between Mexico and the United States.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
Jared Kushner just got a promotion. Another one. At least I think we can call it that, and it’s a deliciously perfect assignment. The pallid princeling is now responsible for speeding construction of the border wall. In other words, a make-believe fixer will oversee a fairy-tale fix.
Josh Dawsey and Nick Miroff of The Washington Post broke the news, and when I read it, I realized that I hadn’t heard much about Jared — or, for that matter, Ivanka — in a good long while. They’re front and center when the administration is announcing some ostensibly sensible initiative or claiming a pittance of progress. But when its corruption is being exposed and the drizzle of subpoenas becomes a downpour, they vanish, cuddling for warmth under the gilded umbrella of their hallucinatory virtue.
We can pretty much chart the weather of the administration by the relative visibility of Donald Jr., so loud and hirsute, and Jared, so smooth-cheeked and mute. Donald Jr. thrives when it’s nastiest, stomping gleefully through the muck. Jared comes out only if his suit won’t get dirty or his hair wet.
During the impeachment inquiry, we’ve seen a lot of Donald Jr. That’s partly because he has been hawking his new book, copies of which the Republican National Committee spent nearly $100,000 on. But it’s also because he’s such a ready, eager conduit for his father’s wrath, with a talent for exaggeration and misdirection that’s clearly chromosomal.
Jared and Ivanka have been strategically scarce, though Ivanka did flutter into view, in a fashion, when President Trump boasted two weeks ago that she had created 14 million jobs since the inauguration. “Fourteen million and going up!” he clarified, lest anyone get the misimpression that she thought her work was done. Never! On behalf of the American people, Ivanka is tireless. There’s no rest for the weary, and there’s even less of it for those who live at the crossroads of self-infatuation and delusion.
In an interview last month on Fox Business, Ivanka said that she and Dad were “fighting every day for the American worker” and that she was determined to “drive hard every single day to make an impact.”
“Your time and service — our time here — is finite,” she mused, and while I’d love to believe that she was prophesying her and her father’s imminent eviction from the White House, I think she was referring, in her deeply spiritual way, to the span of a human life. “It’s sand through an hourglass.” As Ivanka serves us, she never forgets the sand.
Democrats believe that the Trump administration’s void of ethics will sour American voters on the president. But those voters are likelier to abandon him for the administration’s vacuum of competence — for his nonsensical managerial style, captured in his magical thinking about Jared.
He tasked Jared with reinventing the federal government. Unless constant rash firings, unfilled jobs and shakedowns of foreign governments constitute reinvention, this remains on Jared’s infinite to-do list. The president put Jared in charge of brokering a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Insert punch line here. He followed Jared’s counsel that faith be placed in Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. We know how that worked out.
The president somehow looked at that track record and decided that the dynamo he should entrust with his central campaign promise — a secure barrier between the United States and Mexico — was … Jared! And so we have the trillionth gorgeous example of his investment in fiction.
Nearly three years into Trump’s presidency, the border wall barely exists. Subtract the upgrading of fencing and such that was already there and Trump has, by some recent estimates,
constructed fewer than 25 miles of actually new barrier. The southwestern border is nearly 2,000 miles long.
But Jared is on the case! According to The Post, he “convenes biweekly meetings in the West Wing, where he questions an array of government officials about progress” and “explains the president’s wishes.” Huh. Those wishes are hardly cryptic, and how complicated can this questioning be? Already, The Post reported, there’s grumbling that Jared is just an annoyance.
That belittles his symbolic significance. Many journalists, including me, have tried to settle on the perfect mascot for the Trump administration. There are choices galore. The greedy, vainglorious Scott Pruitt, who did his best to decimate the Environmental Protection Agency, fit the bill, but he’s long gone. Mike Pompeo embodies the Faustian arc of so many of the president’s aides and allies, from principle-driven dismissal of Trump during the 2016 campaign to reputation-torching submission when he dangled a ticket to the big time.
But for naked opportunism and situational scruples, Jared’s my guy. Remember how he and Ivanka were going to contain the president’s ego, blunt his cruelty, whisper sweet moderation in his ear? That was then. Now he’s devoting himself to an exorbitant, unnecessary monument to Trump’s nativism and xenophobia.
There’s an upside, though. With Jared in the saddle, this horse won’t go far.
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