(CNSNews.com) – Almost three weeks into October, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) still has not publicly released the number of “encounters” with migrants trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border in September.
When released, that data will provide final figures for the just-ended fiscal year, and show whether the number of apprehensions of illegal migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in FY 2021 sets an all-time record high.
If that is confirmed, then FY 2021 will account for a record high number of apprehensions on the southwest border -- around 1,733,651.
In fact, if the figure for September is any higher than 102,028, then the total for the fiscal year will be the highest recorded to date.
As of the end of August, the number of FY 2021 encounters stood at 1,541,651. The previous record-highest number of southwest border encounters was 1,643,679, in 2000.
CBP data on apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border date back to 1960. It also has apprehension figures going back to 1925, although they apply to nationwide encounters so are somewhat higher than those for the southwest border alone.
Still, between 1925 and 1960 the annual nationwide figures only once exceeded one million (1,028,246, in FY 1954). So the record-highest number of southwest border encounters since 1960 (1,643,679, in 2000) is also the record-highest since 1925.
This calendar year has seen a sharp increase in the number of encounters on the border – from 78,414 in January, to 173,281 in March, to a two-decade monthly high of 213,534 in July.
The CBP figures going back to 1960 show than annual numbers of southwest border encounters exceeded 1.5 million just five times – in 1986, 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
On the lower end of the scale, the number of annual encounters fell below 100,000 nine times – between 1960 and 1968.
From 2007 the number of annual apprehensions of illegal migrant along the U.S.-Mexico border began dropping, a pattern that largely held until 2018. But 2019 saw a sizeable jump – from 396,579 to 851,508 – and then in FY 2020, much of which was affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the number fell back again, to 400,651.
If the September figure of 192,000 apprehensions is confirmed, then the fiscal year total of 1,733,651 will mark a 278 percent increase from FY 2020, and a 77 percent increase from FY 2019.
It’s not clear why CBP has not yet releasing the data for September. In recent months, figures for each month have been made public between the 10th and 16th of the following month.
Queries sent to CBP media relations officials on Monday afternoon had brought no response by late Wednesday.
Earlier this week President Biden’s nominee for commissioner of the CBP, Chris Magnus, conceded during a Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing that the situation on the southwest border was deeply problematic.
“I agree, we have some significant challenges at the border,” Magnus said in response to questioning from ranking member Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).
“The numbers are very high, and it is something that has to be addressed. Clearly we have a broken system,” he said. “So yes, senator, I will commit to enforcing the law.”
Under questioning from Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) Magnus, who is currently police chief in Tucson, Ariz., said “surges” of people crossing the border had been taking place for years.
“We’ve never had a surge like this,” Lankford interjected. “This is the highest number ever in the history of our country.”
“Senator, I understand your concerns and I don’t disagree with you that the numbers are – are very high,” Magnus said. “But the bottom line still remains that, you know, first and foremost we need to enforce the law.”
“And secondly, we need to have a process that’s humane and efficient, so we can deal with those who are coming across the border, whether it be to seek asylum or for other purposes.”
Facebook has agreed to pay a tiny fine to close a federal investigation into alleged organized, persistent, and consistent discrimination against American graduates.
“Token fine, tip of the iceberg,” responded Jay Palmer, a former tech professional who now helps American and foreign white-collar workers file discrimination lawsuits.
“It’s not even a slap on the wrist” for Facebook, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “What the Department of Justice has said, whether they intended to say this or not, is that [anti-American] country of origin discrimination is fine …[because] if you get caught, the penalties assessed are de minimus,” he added.
“Everyone involved … knows that many, probably most employers, game the system to exclude qualified US workers from ever getting a shot at the open position,” tweeted Ron Hira, a professor at Howard University. The small fine and legal settlements do “nothing to fix the widespread scamming of the high-skilled immigration process,” he said.
The alleged discrimination was conducted while Facebook executives were hiring foreign visa workers for 2,600 permanent jobs that would provide them with green cards. If the Americans had won the jobs, many of Facebook’s foreign visa workers would have been sent back to their home countries.
A statement from the Department of Justice said:
The lawsuit alleged that, in contrast to its standard recruitment practices, Facebook used recruiting methods designed to deter U.S. workers from applying to certain positions, such as requiring applications to be submitted by mail only; refused to consider U.S. workers who applied to the positions; and hired only temporary visa holders.
The agency statement described the minor penalties to be paid by Facebook:
Facebook will pay a civil penalty of $4.75 million to the United States, pay up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of Facebook’s alleged discrimination, and train its employees on the anti-discrimination requirements of the [immigration law]. In addition, Facebook will be required to conduct more expansive advertising and recruitment for its job opportunities for all [visa worker] positions, accept electronic resumes or applications from all U.S. workers who apply, and take other steps to ensure that its recruitment for [visa worker] positions closely matches its standard recruitment practices.
The fine is a very small slice of the company’s value, and the lawsuit covered only cases from January 2018 to February 2019 — which is a very small share of jobs held by foreign workers at Facebook.
The penalty is one-tenth of the fine imposed on auto-developer Tesla for allowing racial discrimination against one of its employees.
And the federal agencies will not expand the investigation: “Other than the provisions included in this Agreement, IER shall not seek on behalf of the United States or any individuals any additional funds, injunctive, or other relief from Facebook based on the underlying allegations in the complaint.”
Facebook did not even have to admit legal wrongdoing. “This Agreement does not constitute and shall not be construed as an admission by Facebook of any act in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1324b or guilt or liability for any violation,” the settlement said.
The company will “continue our focus on hiring the best builders from both the US and around the world, and supporting our internal community of highly skilled visa holders who are seeking permanent residence,” a Facebook flack told media outlets.
The lawsuit was filed by President Donald Trump’s deputies amid the public pressure to live up to his pro-American campaign rhetoric.
Fortune 500 companies — and their many, many subcontractors — now employ more than 1 million imported contract workers in salaried jobs and in a pyramid of subcontractor jobs throughout the United States.
“This isn’t a few workers here or there,” Hira tweeted. “The scale and scope of harm to US workers is massive.”
“What we saw with Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “There is a broader push to foreignize all higher-skill jobs, so that companies can hire any foreigner they want, at any wage they want,” he said.
The discrimination is made possible by the federal government’s vast network of visa worker programs, including the H-1B, L-1, B-1/B-2, and Optional Practical Training programs. Those visa-worker programs allow U.S. companies and their subcontractors to hire foreign graduates with dangled promises of very valuable green cards.
These foreign contract workers are not immigrants. But the dangled cards are a huge incentive for them because they want to become immigrants, and to bring their families — and all of their future children — out of their home countries.
The executives are very eager to pay their workers with green cards, which are provided by government agencies. This outside payment allows the executives to cut payroll costs and inflate their Wall Street values by $25 billion for every $1 billion not paid to American graduates.
The resulting “green card workforce” is a labor force of indentured workers that is competing for jobs against the free-market population of American graduates. That must be an unfair fight because the Americans must be paid in dollars that would otherwise inflate the companies’ stock values, while the green-card workers are being paid in cheap legal documents provided by the federal government.
Many of those foreign workers are erroneously touted as “high-skilled.” But the vast majority are only mid-skilled workers from lower-grade colleges hired by software-sweatshops for routine software upkeep jobs in place of skilled, free-speaking American graduates. Very few of these imported workers hold O-1 “genius visas.”
Foreign-born-workers are a “green card workforce” and labor force of indentured workers competing for jobs against the free-market population of American graduates. (AFP)
“My experience with the people from [India] is that they have no basic [information technology] knowledge,” said Mary from central New Jersey, an immigrant software expert. “They will say they have all this experience [to get hired] and then try to learn on the job. If you ask them a question, they can’t answer you. So what is happening is that we’re training them … [even though] we have our jobs — and their jobs — to do.”
The structural discrimination against Americans occurs in many professional careers, not just in software.
For example, the Department of Justice launched its case when Facebook tried to discriminate against Americans seeking an arts director job at the huge company. Similarly, many Americans who want to work in banks, or as scientists, doctors or nurses, or as teachers and academics, lose their careers and wealth to the imported visa workers from China and different regions of India.
The discrimination is multi-level, and includes much ethnic or regional favoritism by imported Indian and Chinese hiring managers. For example, immigrant managers can hire many co-nationals once they get post-graduate degrees from U.S. universities, regardless of fraud or inferior academic records.
Similarly, the pipeline of foreign workers into U.S. companies encourages taxpayer-funded U.S. universities to help train and win jobs for fee-paying foreign graduates, rather to promising young people in their home state.
Moreover, foreign-born managers in Fortune 500 companies can fire Americans so they can privately sell the jobs to co-ethnics via transactions in their home country’s economy. Indian hiring managers will sell jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, one Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,” he said.
“Once you’ve created an Asian or an Indian [workplace] culture, American college students no longer have a chance of getting jobs in these companies,” said Palmer.
Indian high tech workers provide a ready and willing workforce for the U.S. market (AP)
The discrimination has a larger impact on black Americans and on women, many of who are ostracized in workplaces dominated by Indian and Chinese managers and workers. “They’re very clannish. … They will push Americans out and make a group of their own,” Mary said. “When they’re talking in their Indian language, I have to ask them, ‘Can you speak English?’” she said. “I’m an outsider to them,” she added.
The discrimination has compressed salaries for many American graduates, partly because rejected Americans flood back into other careers. This shift spikes the wage-cutting competition for the non-technical jobs sought by many other American graduates.
Dice.com collects data on technology workers’ salaries. In 2019, the site showed that U.S. tech workers’ wages had dropped in value from 2009 to 2018 because inflation had exceeded the wage gains. The salaries had risen from $78,845 in 2009 to $93,244 in 2018, slightly below the inflation rate.
The discrimination is economically damaging because it gives the top executives far more control over their workforces. For example, after many companies were caught operating an anti-employee cartel hiring system in the early 2000s, the executives decided to hire more of the compliant and no-rights foreign workers. This hiring shift was welcomed by executives because the foreign workers will not leave the company until they get their green cards after several years.
“This is calculated,” said Palmer, who works with possible plaintiffs for the Consumer Awareness Group. “This is all planned in boardrooms, authored by managers … This is designed to break the back of the professional class.”
“They don’t have power over American professionals — but they do have power over the H-1Bs,” Palmer said.
“It is class warfare,” said Lynn: “The goal is to displace Americans that corporate executives view as expensive and undeserving, and easily replaceable with foreign workers that are more pliant and less expensive.”
That C-suite warfare against graduates is damaging the United States, Lynn said, because “American professionals are the ones that bring the innovation, and they’re being pushed out of the workplace.”
This subservient foreign workforce reduces professional-style competition within each company, and technology competition within each industry sector. Armondo from Texas told Breitbart that Indian-managed workplaces destroy U.S. professionalism:
That’s the way they operate — they will go over your head and start sabotaging you. They are trying to do everything they can to keep their job. … They are under a lot of pressure and are limited on what jobs they can get because of the visa. … The Indian managers know they have inexperienced people who can’t do crap, but they don’t fire them … An Indian manager does not fire them even because he knows this guy has a family and is married and they are not going to throw an Indian on the street.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” an American professional told Breitbart. However, the rules are different in an office run by Indian managers, he said:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
“I saw this over and over at Intel,” he said. “God help you if you make the mistake of questioning somebody[‘s judgment in an Indian-run office] … everybody else rallies around [the person] and [claims to] fix the issue. So it’s like, it’s effing unbelievable. It’s the most frustrating thing.”
In turn, the reduced competition reduces innovation in many sectors where China’s government-backed companies — and their U.S.-trained workers — are making progress, for example, in 5G wireless gear, in artificial intelligence, and in quantum computing.
The reduced competition also ensures more consolidation among politically powerful companies. That consolidation can drive up prices, profits and stock values — so diverting potential wealth from other sectors of the economy or from heartland regions to the coastal states.
This political consolidation also reduces competition as upstart innovative companies can be quietly forced to sell out to the major companies.
It also gives the companies more political power in D.C. to pass laws that will enable more discrimination.
The foreign workers also create their own political lobbies — usually with cooperation from diplomats from their home country — to grow their numbers at the expense of American graduates.
The existence of the visa workers also gives federal and state government — and company CEOs — an excuse to avoid recognizing painful flaws in the education and training sectors.
Similarly, the flood of imported workers allows investors, CEOs, and legislators to ignore productivity problems in the healthcare sector and in the science sector. These lobbying groups have repeatedly stymied popular reforms of the visa worker laws, and a now pushing to expand the outsourcing process in the pending reconciliation bill.
The Fortune 500’s hiring strategy increasingly leaves the United States dependent on imported workers for core tasks, said Krikorian, adding:
It’s even worse than dependence on foreign sources of energy because we can always dig another hole and find more energy … Once [critical careers are built on foreign labor], you almost have to start from scratch to develop a domestic workforce in these technical and scientific fields … [and] what large scale immigration does is take away the incentive for business and educators and society in general to do what’s necessary to develop the staff for core jobs like this.
The economic damage will be difficult to stop, say advocates.
Multiple private lawsuits are raising the cost of discriminating against American graduates.
President Donald Trump promoted deep reforms of the green card workforce — but only in the last year of his presidency. Most — but not all — of those changes were quickly dropped by President Joe Biden’s deputies.
“It requires both some changes to the law that Congress has to do, as well as serious enforcement by the executive agencies, which we almost never see,” said Krikorian. “Do our leadership classes actually care about protecting American jobs, or is that something that, at most, they pay lip service to?”
But the media buries the problem because “most reporters do not understand that the issue is between the executives and the professionals,” said Palmer.
The fight is not primarily about immigration, he said. “This is a labor issue — this is about basically locking out college graduates, locking out the middle class.”
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
JOHN BINDER
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan administration takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election, Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks.
There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to be surprising to progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the agency review teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America. Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities
Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
Biden’s Chief of Staff Worked on Behalf of Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas
JOHN BINDER
Democrat Joe Biden has chosen Ronald Klain to be his chief of staff should he enter the White House in January. Klain worked on behalf of Silicon Valley executives and their interests, which include providing tech corporations with an endless supply of H-1B foreign visa workers and more free trade.
Klain, who was made Biden’s incoming chief of staff this week, served on the executive council of TechNet — a firm that promotes the interests of Silicon Valley’s tech corporations in Washington, D.C. Klain served on the council alongside executives from the Oracle Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Google, Visa, Apple, and Microsoft.
TechNet, most recently, joined a lawsuit against President Trump’s reforms to the H-1B visa program that sought to prioritize unemployed Americans for jobs rather than allowing businesses to continue importing foreign workers.
TechNet is one of the groups that has filed an amicus brief to oppose the new regulations on H-1B visas. https://t.co/ofY4GJ2sVR
— U.S. Tech Workers (@USTechWorkers) November 12, 2020
Trump’s seeking to force businesses to hire Americans over importing foreign visa workers is an affront to Silicon Valley’s tech corporations, those represented by TechNet, who advocate for an endless flow of H-1B foreign visa workers.
There are about 650,000 H-1B visa workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.
TechNet’s listed immigration goals include allowing corporations to dictate the annual level of legal immigration to the United States and the elimination of per-country caps that would effectively let India and China monopolize the U.S. green card system.
The group’s goals on trade are in direct opposition to President Trump’s economic nationalist agenda that has imposed tariffs on foreign imports from China, Canada, Europe, and other parts of the globe.
TechNet’s trade goals include reducing “tariff and non-tariff barriers to information, communications, and advanced energy technology products, services, and investments” as well as “protections for the free flow of data across borders…”
While Biden has vowed to flood the U.S. labor
market with more foreign workers to compete
against Americans for jobs, he has shied away
from questions on whether he will eliminate
tariffs on foreign imports that were imposed
by Trump. Such elimination of tariffs would be
a boon to multinational corporations that
offshore their production and jobs overseas
only to import their products back into the
U.S. market, often with no penalties for doing
so.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
THE STAGGERING COST OF THE WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE BUILT BORDER to OPEN BORDER’
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/10/spencer-p-morrison-devastating-cost-of.html
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s 2017 report, illegal immigrants, and their children, cost American taxpayers a net $116 billion annually -- roughly $7,000 per alien annually. While high, this number is not an outlier: a recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that low-skilled immigrants (including those here illegally) cost Americans trillions over the course of their lifetimes, and a study from the National Economics Editorial found that illegal
JOE BIDEN’S OPEN BORDERS: HOUSTON NATION’S BIGGEST MEX SEX TRAFFICKING CAPITAL
What's causing the supply chain crisis? | Fox News Rundown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SqV0DkxGsA
Jim Banks Reveals the ‘Mind-Blowingly Corrupt’ Carveouts in $3.5 Trillion Infrastructure Bill
SEAN MORAN
Rep. Jim Banks (R-SC), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), detailed many of the most radical aspects of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill.
Biden has gambled his legislative majority on passing two infrastructure bills, the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation infrastructure bill, otherwise known as the Build Back Better Act.
Democrats hope to pass their mammoth, $3.5 trillion legislation through reconciliation, which allows the Senate to pass legislation with only a simple majority.
Although Democrats have not agreed to the final tenets of the legislation, Americans can see the tentative details of the Democrats’ marquee legislation.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), released an exhaustive list of some of the most radical aspects of the Democrats’ “socialist takeover bill.”
Banks’ press release hopes to serve as messaging House Republicans can use to rally against Biden’s marquee bill.
The RSC contended in a press release Tuesday that Democrats plans to hide the bill text to prevent Americans from knowing how radical the bill is.
“They’ve played ‘hide the ball’ with the bill text so as not to tip off the public as to what they’re putting in their bills. Then, they bring it to the floor and tout some poll numbers and scare their members into voting for it,” the RSC wrote.
The RSC noted the bill would:
1. Perpetuates labor shortage: Continues welfare benefits without work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents at a time where there are 10.1 million job openings—more openings than there are people looking for work.
2. Commissions a climate police: Democrats stuffed $8 billion into the bill to commission a cabal of federally funded climate police called the Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) who will conduct progressive activism on taxpayers’ dime (pages 8, 21, and 926).
3. Pushes Green New Deal in our public schools: Requires funding for school construction be used largely on enrollment diversity and Green New Deal agenda items (page 55).
4. Pushes Green New Deal in our universities: Democrats include a $10 billion “environmental justice” higher education slush fund to indoctrinate college students and advance Green New Deal policies (page 1,935).
5. Forces faith-based child care providers out: The bill blocks the ability of many faith-based providers from participating in the childcare system and will lead to many of their closures (page 280).
6. Hurts small and in-home daycares: Requires pre-K staff to have a college degree. (page 303)
7. Includes new incentives for illegal immigration: Illegal immigrants will be eligible to take advantage of Democrats’ new ‘free’ college entitlement (page 92) as well be eligible for additional student aid (page 147) and the enhanced child tax credit (page 1,946).
8. Includes legislative hull for Biden’s vaccine mandate: Increases OSHA penalties on businesses that fail to implement the mandate up to $700,000 per violation and includes $2.6 billion in funding for the Department of Labor to increase enforcement of these penalties (page 168).
9. Gives unions near-total control: The bill includes insane prohibitions that would bind employers’ hands in union disputes and dangerously tilt the balance of power, subjecting employers to penalties that exempt union bosses and officials… among other things this bill would prevent employers from permanently replacing striking workers (page 175). It coerces businesses to meet union boss demands by increasing Fair Labor Standards Act penalties by an astronomical 900% (page 168).
10. Makes unions bigger and more powerful: The bill would subsidize union dues that would only serve to strengthen the influence of union bosses and not American workers (page 2323).
11. Pushes Democrats’ wasteful and confusing school lunch agenda: $643 million for, among other things, “procuring…culturally appropriate foods” (page 333).
12. Furthers radical abortion agenda: Does not include the Hyde amendment and would mandate taxpayers pay for abortions (page 198) & (page 336).
13. Drives up costs on Americans’ utility bills: Issues a punitive methane tax (page 367) and includes a tax on natural gas up to $1,500 per ton that could cost the American economy up to $9.1 billion and cost 90,000 Americans their jobs (page 368).
14. Includes dangerous & deadly green energy mandate: Effectively forces Americans to get 40% of their energy from wind, solar and other unreliable forms of energy within 8 years (page 392). Reliance on these energy sources has proven deadly.
15. Includes kickbacks for the Left’s green energy special interest network: $5 billion for “environmental and climate justice block grants” (page 377) and another $100 billion in green energy special interest subsidies, loans and other carve outs.
16. Gives wealthy Americans tax credits: $222 billion in “green energy” tax credits will be given to those who can afford expensive electric vehicles and other “green” innovative products (page 1832).
17. Furthers Democrats’ social justice agenda: Includes “equity” initiatives throughout the bill and, in one instance, Democrats inserted “equity” language into a title which should have been focusing on the maintenance of the United States’ cyber security efforts (page 897).
18. Grants amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants: House Democrats have included in their reconciliation bill a plan to grant amnesty to around 8 million illegal immigrants at a cost of around $100 billion over ten years that would largely be spent on welfare and other entitlements (page 901). Trillions more would be spent long term on their Social Security and Medicare.
19. Opens border even wider: The bill would waive many grounds for immigration inadmissibility, including infection or lack of vaccination status during a Pandemic, failure to attend removal proceedings in previous immigration cases, and the previous renouncement of American citizenship. DHS may also waive previous convictions for human trafficking, narcotics violations, and illegal voting (page 903).
20. Increases visa limit: At least 226,000 family-preference visas would be administered each year (page 905).
21. Grants fast-tracked green cards for those seeking middle-class careers in America: Language included in the bill exempts certain aliens from the annual green card statutory limits and has been described as a “hidden pipeline for U.S. employers to flood more cheap foreign graduates into millions of middle-class careers needed by American graduates” (page 910).
22. Includes pork for Nancy Pelosi: $200 million is earmarked for the Presidio Trust in Speaker Pelosi’s congressional district (page 933).
23. Increases energy dependence on OPEC, Russia and China: The bill prohibits several mineral and energy withdrawals (page 979). It overturns provisions included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorized energy production in the Arctic that will result in 130,000 Americans losing their jobs and $440 billion in lost federal revenue (page 983) and the mineral withdrawals it prohibits would, ironically, include minerals necessary for renewable energy sources (pages 934, 940, 943).
24. Exacerbates the chip shortage: The bill would mandate the conversion of the entire federal vehicle fleet from internal combustion engines to electric engines at a time when there is a global microchip shortage and crippled supply chains (page 1,043).
25. Democrats’ feckless China bill is included: Concepts from the insanely weak Endless Frontier Act included, including $11 billion in research funding that will likely result in American intellectual property going to China (page 1079 – 1081).
26. Chases green energy pipe dreams: $264 million to the EPA to conduct research with left-wing environmental justice groups on how to transition away from fossil fuels (page 1063).
27. Fixes “racist” roads and bridges: Adds a nearly $4 billion slush fund that would help left-wing grassroots organizations that, among other things, want to tear down and rebuild or otherwise alter infrastructure deemed “racist” (page 1183).
28. Punishes red states for failing to adopt Green New Deal provisions: Mandates “consequences” for conservative states that don’t meet the radical Left’s “green” climate standards while at the same time adding nearly $4 billion for “Community Climate Incentive Grants” for cooperating states (page 1179).
29. Includes new massive, bankrupting entitlement: The new paid leave entitlement would mandate workers get 12 weeks of paid leave and would cost $500 billion over ten years according to the CBO (page 1245). It would apply to those making up to half a million dollars a year (page 1254).
30. Advances a totalitarian and paternalistic view of the federal government: Includes grants for organizations to treat individuals suffering from “loneliness” and “social isolation.”
31. Further detaches individuals from employment and more reliant on government handouts: The bill spends $835 billion on welfare through manipulating the tax code [not including the expansions of Obamacare subsidies] (page 1943).
32. Tax benefits for the top 1%: The bill will possibly lift the SALT deduction cap meaning many of the top 1% wealthiest Americans would pay less in taxes.
33. Tax credit for wealthy donors who give to woke universities: The bill creates a new tax credit program that gives tax credits worth 40% of cash contribution that are made to university research programs (page 2094).
34. Expands worst parts of Obamacare: Obamacare’s job-killing employer mandate will become more severe by adjusting the definition of “affordable coverage” to mean coverage that costs no more than 8.5 percent of income rather than current law’s 9.5 percent of income (page 2041).
35. Increases taxes on Americans at every income level: $2 trillion in tax hikes will fall on those making under $400,000 per year, contrary to what the White House says. Individuals at all income levels will be affected (Ways and Means GOP).
36. Lowers wages for working families: The corporate tax rate will increase by 5.5%, meaning American companies will face one of the highest tax burdens in the world. According to analysis, two-thirds of this tax hike will fall on lower- and middle-income taxpayers (page 2110).
37. Penalizes marriage: The bill would permanently double the EITC’s marriage penalty on childless worker benefits (page 2036).
38. Imposes crushing taxes on small business: Guts the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act small business deductions that reduced pass-through entity taxes to keep them comparable to taxes imposed on corporations (page 2235) as well as hammer small businesses that file as individual tax earners with the 39.6% rate (page 2221) and Obamacare’s 3.8% tax on net investment income.
39. Crushes family businesses and farms: The bill would impose a 25% capital gains rate (page 2226) and makes alterations to the Death Tax including cutting the Death Tax exemption in half (page 2240).
40. Violates Americans’ financial privacy: $80 billion slush fund to hire an 87,000-IRS-agent army to carry out the Biden administration’s plan to review every account above a $600 balance or with more than $600 of transactions in a year. (page 2283).
41. Increases out of pocket costs for those who rely on prescription drugs: The bill repeals the Trump-era Rebate Rule which passes through rebates directly to consumers at the point of sale (page 2465).
42. Imports policies from countries with socialized medicine: The bill includes healthcare policies imported from systems in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom—all countries that have government-run healthcare systems (page 2349).
The bill also has other lesser-known provisions, including:
· $5 million per year for the Small Business Administration for an entrepreneurial program for formerly incarcerated individuals.
· $2.5 billion for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to award competitive grants or contracts to local governments, community-based organizations, and other groups to support “intervention strategies” to reduce community violence.
“Each of these 42 bullets is enough to vote against the bill. Taken together—it’s mind-blowingly corrupt. We need to loudly oppose it,” Banks charged in the release.
He added, “Democrats are scattered. The Biden agenda is in question. It’s the perfect opportunity to build public sentiment against this bill. The American people need us to be the vanguard against the Left’s radical plans.”
“It’s not an understatement to say this bill, if passed, will fundamentally change our country forever—Americans will wake up in a few years and wonder what happened to their freedom. We can’t let that happen,“ Banks concluded.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
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