Thursday, May 14, 2020

THE TRUMP DEPRESSION - NOW THE ORANGE BABOON IS BRINGING IN FOREIGN WORKERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED



Powell warns of a possible sustained recession from pandemic

Protesters demonstrate at the state Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., Monday, April 20, 2020, demanding that Gov. Tom Wolf reopen Pennsylvania's economy even as new social-distancing mandates took effect at stores and other commercial buildings. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Matt Rourke/AP Photo

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned of the threat of a prolonged recession resulting from the viral outbreak and urged Congress and the White House to act further to prevent long-lasting economic damage
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday of the threat of a prolonged recession resulting from the viral outbreak and urged Congress and the White House to act further to prevent long-lasting economic damage.
The Fed and Congress have taken far-reaching steps to try to counter what is likely to be a severe downturn resulting from the widespread shutdown of the U.S. economy. But Powell cautioned that numerous bankruptcies among small businesses and extended unemployment for many people remain a serious risk.
“We ought to do what we can to avoid these outcomes,” Powell said.
Additional rescue aid from government spending or tax policies, though costly, would be “worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery,” he said.
Powell spoke a day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, that would direct money to state and local governments, households, and health-care workers. This money would come on top of roughly $3 trillion in earlier financial assistance that the government has provided. The Fed itself has also intervened by and creating numerous emergency lending programs.
Yet Trump administration officials have said they want to first see how previous aid packages affect the economy. And Republican leaders in Congress have expressed skepticism about allowing significant more spending right now. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, to act.
Powell, though, made clear his concern that a recession may last long enough to cause extensive damage to the economy and make a recovery weaker and slower. In such a scenario, unemployed workers would lose skills and their connections in the job market, making it harder for them to find new employment. And with many small businesses bankrupt, fewer companies would be available to hire the jobless.
“Deeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy,” the chairman warned in his prepared remarks before holding an online discussion with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Avoidable household and business insolvencies can weigh on growth for years to come.”
Powell’s sobering warning about the risks facing the economy weighed down Wall Street on Wednesday.
“It was a soothing tone from Powell saying the Fed will do what they need to do, but it was also somber in that basically the Fed can’t do everything,” said Willie Delwiche, investment strategist at Baird.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index was down a sharp 2.4% as of 3 p.m. Eastern time, with the deepest losses hitting stocks that most need a healthy economy for their profits to grow.
Powell said the Fed would “continue to use our tools to their fullest” until the viral outbreak subsides. He gave no hint of what the Fed’s next steps might be.
But Powell shot down the idea of cutting the Fed’s short-term interest rate, which is now near zero, into negative territory, as central banks in Europe and Japan have done. Such a move would require banks to pay interest on cash reserves that they hold at the Fed. That would be intended to encourage them to lend the money instead. Yet negative rates appear to have done little to stimulate the economies of the countries that have adopted them.
President Donald Trump, who has frequently expressed his desire for the Fed to adopt negative rates, tweeted Tuesday that “as long as other countries are receiving the benefits of Negative Rates,” the U.S. should also implement them.
“I know there are fans of the policy,” Powell said. But “this is not something that we’re looking at.”
The chairman argued that negative rates would likely hurt the banking industry, and he noted that all Fed policymakers had expressed opposition to negative rates during their last discussion of them in October — a rare show of unanimity among all 17 officials.
He repeated his previous warnings that the Fed can lend money to solvent companies to help carry them through the crisis but that a longer downturn would likely bankrupt some previously healthy companies without more help from the government.
Powell’s downbeat view contrasted with a speech Monday by Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Evans sketched a more upbeat outlook and suggested that “it’s reasonable to assume a legitimate return to growth in the second half” of this year and into 2021.
And Tom Barkin, head of the Richmond Fed, suggested Tuesday in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the economy has “bottomed” and is likely “headed up.”
Powell, in his remarks Wednesday, underscored some of the painful consequences of the recession. Among people who had been working in February, nearly 40% of households earning less than $40,000 a year lost a job in March, Powell said.
Last week, the government reported that the unemployment rate soared to 14.7% in April, the highest rate since the Great Depression. And there are roughly 30 million Americans out of work.
Powell said the economy could eventually return to where it was before the pandemic, with unemployment at a 50-year low of 3.5%.
“It’ll take some time to get back to where we were.” he said. “I have every reason to think we should get back there.”


Trump’s Deputies Extend Work Permits for 1,000s of Foreign Workers

H1-B Visa Workers
MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty Images
11:55
Fortune 500 companies are rushing a federal agency to extend work permits for thousands of H-1B visa workers as President Donald Trump and his deputies argue over visa curbs that would help Americans regain jobs lost in the coronavirus crash.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook asked and got “continuing approval” extensions for 611 of its H-1B visa-workers from the staff at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.
Each visa extension allows a foreign H-1B worker to stay another three years.
Tim Cook’s Apple got 647 extensions, Bill Gates’ Microsoft snagged 903 extensions, and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon got 1,245 extensions from the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Just 62 of these 3,497 requests for foreign workers were denied by USCIS, according to data displayed by the agency’s ‘H-1B Employer Data Hub.’
The denial rate of just 1.8 percent closed off 3,435 jobs needed by the growing number of unemployed American professionals.
The USCIS data only shows visa extensions and denials from October to May. Many more extensions will likely be sought before the fiscal year ends in September. The site also shows company requests for new visas, but it does not show how many new visas will be awarded to each company.
Each year, the 435 members of the House, the 100 members of the Senate, and the President allow companies, universities, and hospitals to import roughly 100,000 H-1B workers.
The H-1Bs are not immigrants, but the resident population of H-1Bs is huge because they are allowed to extend their visas, often indefinitely.

The coronavirus crash has decisively shifted the public's ambivalent priorities on immigration:
Away from politely welcoming migrants, and towards loudly demanding more jobs for American grads & blue-collars.
Business & investors are fighting back ... https://bit.ly/3bSziTC 



For years, officials have refused to reveal how many H-1Bs hold jobs in the United States. But in 2017, the total was shown to be 680,000 by a DHS inspector general report.
The total has since climbed further because the Department of Labor does not prevent companies from packing many H-1Bs into the line for green cards, where Congress allows them to get endless three-year renewals while they labor as bonded workers.
The army of roughly 800,000 H-1Bs holds jobs alongside an additional 700,000 other foreign workers who get their work permits via the L-1, H4EAD, OPT, CPT, J-1, and TN programs. Many additional B-1 visa holders work illegally.
Overall, U.S. companies employ roughly 1.5 million white collar visa workers in place of American graduates.
Just half of that population holds the jobs needed by each of the approximately 800,000 diverse Americans who will graduate in 2020 from four-year colleges. The 800,000 Americans will be denied the jobs even though they have spent four years earning skilled degrees in healthcare, business, software, architecture, accounting, engineering, science, math, or software.
Other websites provide more government data about the H-1B workers and emloyers.
For example, H1BData.info shows Apple asked to extend the visas of foreigners working as an “HR business partner,” market research analyst, software development engineer, and “radio frequency test engineer.” The jobs also included “data scientist,” “producer manager,” engineering project manager, professional services consultant, as well as producer and creative writer.
Many H-1Bs are also being hired by universities and by small American firms that would otherwise employ American graduates for starter jobs in academia, design, architecture, fashion, and other skilled careers. The USCIS data, for example, shows that architecture companies have extended visas for at least 75 foreign workers.
The H-1B program is also being used to import foreign journalists, usually for Chinese media firms, according to the MyVisaJobs.com site.
Overall, Indians comprise roughly 1 million of the 1.5 million visa workers, and China provides at least 270,000 graduates in the 1.5 million workers.
This huge imported workforce cuts the salaries of American graduates, such as academics, so boosting investors’ stock values.
Fortune 500 companies hire many of the Indian or Chinese visa workers. Yet many of these companies proudly declare themselves to be equal-opportunity workplaces, and to be supporters of transgender rights.
For example, the agency got 727 extensions requests from the Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and American Express’ travel division, plus 104 extensions requests by the Aetna and Cigna insurance companies.
Despite the political importance of anti-discrimination laws, Justice Department officials rarely enforce the popular laws against the Fortune 500 companies that hire blocs of Indian and Chinese men via the H-1B program. This refusal to enforce anti-discrimination laws sidelines many minorities, women, disabled, men, and Americans.
Progressives rarely complain about the skewed H-1B hiring, even though many of the American victims are swing-voting graduates who would vote for politicians who protect their interests.
Indian men comprise at least 80 percent of the estimated 800,000-strong H-1B workforce. The result is that many offices at the Fortune 500 companies consist almost entirely of Indian software-maintenance workers overseen by Indian managers, while sidelined Americans are forced to file years-long lawsuits.
The bloc hiring of visa workers also excludes tens of thousands of innovative American graduates from starter jobs. This reduces the number of experienced American professionals who can get on a career track to develop the next generation of new technology. For example, the agency rejected just 16 of the 487 requests for visa extensions by Cisco Systems and Qualcomm, who are now losing the race against China to develop 5G telecommunications gear.
The Fortune 500 get most of their Indian visa workers via networks of many large and small “body shop” staffing companies. USCIS officials tried to protect American graduates from these staffing companies. But Trump’s GOP-establishment deputies barred the agency from issuing regulations, and the Indian companies recently persuaded a judge to gut the protections.
Bloomberg reported:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has reopened and approved at least 53 petitions for high-skilled guestworker visas after a recent court ruling that the agency’s criteria were unlawful.
The agency from May 8 to May 10 reversed its initial denial of dozens of separate H-1B petitions for IT staffing companies requesting guestworkers for employment at third-party work sites, according to Bradley Banias, an attorney representing the companies petitioning for H-1B workers.


The short-lived protections may explain the high number of extensions that USCIS has denied to major Indian companies who supply H-1B workers for the U.S-India Outsourcing Economy.
The USCIS data shows the agency denied 1,437 of 5,792 requests for visa extensions submitted by India-tied companies, such as Genpact, HCL America, Wipro, Cognizant, Tata, and Tech Mahindra.
This denial rate of 25 percent is likely to be reduced because Trump’s deputies refused to convert the protections into regulations.
Many brand-name U.S. companies quietly hire visa workers through the back door, often to hide the massive scale of outsourcing from employees. In general, the unions do not object to the outsourcing of jobs not held by the unions’ members.
For example, the USCIS data shows that Ford, Fiat-Chrysler, and General Motors only sought 241 H-1B visa extensions, of which only four were denied. But outside reformers were able to use 2017 data to expose the large number of visa workers employed at Fortune 500 worksites.
Since then, the USCIS and the Labor Department have refused to release H-1Bs’ worksite addresses.
The establishment media ignores the systematic discrimination in the H-1B program against Americans and hides the total number of foreign workers.
Yet the media also present the visa workforce as a vital and vibrant contribution to the economy — even though the vast majority of the foreign workers hold jobs that were once used by young U.S. graduates to launch their careers and middle-class lives. The established media also often blocks public comments on their articles about visa workers.
Many U.S. companies, and especially immigrant managers, strongly favor hiring the H-1B workers over Americans, according to evidence from lawsuits and statements by U.S. and Indian workers.
The Fortune 500 Indian managers prefer to hire Indian H-1Bs because Americans do not want to work repetitive tasks for long hours over many years, one former H-1B worker told Breitbart News. He continued:
As a manager, you want Indian guys because you are able to produce more. You have a [workforce of] compliant, amenable, never-complaining Indian guys with an H-1B. And you are basically getting the big bonuses as a vice-president because you’re able to produce more because you’re able to meet more deadlines. Of course, you don’t care about the quality of life for the employees — that’s a different game.
The visa workers will labor for 60 hours per week, at lower wages, and without complaint, for many years, because almost any job in the United States is better than a job in India or China. Moreover, many H-1B workers hope to get hugely valuable green cards after getting approvals from their employers.

Why American grads get excluded from tech jobs: "As a manager, you want Indian guys ... compliant, amenable, never-complaining Indian guys with an H-1B. And [then] you are basically getting the big bonuses as a vice-president."https://bit.ly/362Z4Ti 



However, many H-1Bs are in the process of losing their jobs amid the coronavirus crash.
Many Internet sites include reports from H-1B workers who say they are being fired by Fortune 500 companies and staffing companies.
Many also report that their employers are violating their “Labor Condition Applications’ by reducing their hours, cutting their wages, or changing their workplaces. Once the LCA is violated, the visa worker is required by law to go home in 60 days.
The Fortune 500 companies and the Indian companies are lobbying DHS, the State Department, and the labor department to quietly suspend the visa worker regulations. If agencies ignore the expanding number of H-1B violations, the companies will be able to put their Indian and Chinese workers back into the recovered jobs that would otherwise go to the American graduates who will vote in the 2020 election.
In 2019, many companies pushed Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 bill to put Indian H-1B workers on a fast track to green cards and citizenship.
By offering more green cards, the Utah plan would have dramatically increased the incentive for Indian graduates to take many more jobs from American graduates by getting work permits from the uncapped Optional Practical Training and H-1B programs.

'Madness!'
'A bluff'
'Bad for Diversity!'
That's establishment's reax to WSJ report that Trump will regain jobs for Americans by ending work permits held by up to 1.8 million+ cheap white & blue-collar visa workers in Fortune 500 & US Chamber coys.https://bit.ly/2LgT3c6 



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


2.98 Million U.S. Weekly Jobless Claims, Higher Than Expected

TOPSHOT - The US Flag illuminates a street in Times Square amid the Covid-19 pandemic on April 30, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Johannes EISELE / AFP) (Photo by JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
Photo by JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
1:48
New claims for unemployment benefits fell to 2.98 million last week, data from the Department of Labor showed Thursday.
That brings new unemployment claims, a proxy for layoffs, since the coronavirus pandemic began to claim jobs eight weeks ago to around 36.5 million.
Economists had been expecting 2.7 million for weekly claims. The prior week was initially reported at 3.169 million and was revised up by 7,000 in this week’s report.
Claims hit a record 6.87 million for the week of March 28. Each subsequent week has seen claims decline. The higher than expected number of claims, however, may point toward a new surge in job losses as shutdowns, social distancing, and stay-at-home orders have hurt businesses and weighed on demand for workers.
Continuing claims, those made after an initial application, rose to 22.8 million for the week ended May 2, an increase of 456,000 from the previous week. Those are reported with a one-week lag.
The federal government has been shipping in an extra $600 a week to state unemployment benefits, making the program much more generous. Many workers can now earn more on unemployment than they did when they had a job. These super-sized benefits, however, are set to run out in July.
Last week the government said the U.S. unemployment rate soared to 14.7 percent, the highest since the Great Depression.
The new claims numbers may be undercounting the toll the coronavirus and lockdowns have exacted on the U.S. labor market. Many states have ha problems processing the large amount of claims.

Washington, DC (May, 14, 2020) - A new analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that both native-born and immigrants (legal and illegal) suffered massive increases in unemployment in April. The new analysis breaks the unemployment numbers down by education level, job, and immigration status.

The Center's Director of Research and co-author of the analysis, Dr. Steven Camarota, said,  "The continued admission of new permanent residents and guestworkers based on the idea that there is a  labor shortage totally lacks validity.” He continued, “With 18.2 million natives and 4.3 million immigrants unemployed, and millions more having given up even looking for work, it is impossible to justify high levels of foreign workers in the United States.”
Overall findings:
  • The unemployment rate for native-born Americans jumped to 14 percent in April 2020, up from 3.8 percent in February before Covid-19 hit. Among immigrants, the rate was 16.4 percent in April, up from 3.6 percent in February. 
  • There were 18.2 million unemployed natives and 4.3 million unemployed immigrants in April, a 250 percent increase for the native-born and 320 percent increase for immigrants since February. 
  • In addition to the unemployed, there were 49.8 million working-age (16-64) native-born and 10.4 million working-age immigrants entirely out of the labor force — neither working nor looking for work. This represents an increase of 5.7 million for the native-born and a 1.8 million increase for immigrants since February. 
  • We estimate the unemployment rate for illegal immigrants in April of 2020 was roughly 19.3 percent, compared to roughly 15.6 percent for legal immigrants and 14 percent for the native-born. Estimates by legal status are approximations only.
Among the less-educated:
  • The unemployment rate for the native-born (ages 25-plus) without a bachelor's degree was 15.7 percent in April, compared to 7.8 percent for those with at least a bachelor's. Among immigrants (ages 25-plus), 19.6 percent without a bachelor's degree were unemployed compared to 10.2 percent with a bachelor's. 
  • The unemployment rate for natives in many jobs typically performed by the less-educated is now high. 
    • 42.0 percent for food preparers and servers
    • 21.5 percent for janitors
    • 19.1 percent for landscapers, trimmers, and groundskeepers
    • 24.0 percent for construction laborers
    • 8.7 percent for medical technologists, technicians, and licensed practical nurses
    • 7.0 percent for health care aides and nursing assistants
    • 8.9 percent for butchers and food processing workers
  • The Covid-19 shutdown has exacerbated the long-term decline in the labor force participation rate (share working or looking for work) of the less-educated. In April 2020, only 64 percent of working-age (16-64) natives without a bachelor's degree were in the labor force, down from 71 percent in 2007 and 74 percent in 2000. 

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