Sunday, January 10, 2021

WILL MEXICO ELECT ALL FUTURE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS?

 GEORGIA IS THE NEXT MEXIFORNIA!


Warnock, Ossoff Boosted in Georgia After Decades of Mass Immigration

Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff (L) and Rev. Raphael Warnock (R) wave to supporters during a "Get Out the Early Vote" drive-in campaign event on October 29, 2020 in Columbus, Georgia. With less than a week to go until Election Day, Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate in Georgia …
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
4:07

Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff received significant boosts in their challenges to Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and David Perdue (R-GA) in Georgia’s runoff elections this month after the state’s foreign-born population ballooned over the last three decades.

Warnock, who beat Loeffler with 51 percent of the vote, won huge majority support from Georgia’s two largest immigrant populations — winning 64 percent of Hispanics and 60 percent of Asian Americans. In contrast, Loeffler won less than 4-in-10 Hispanics and about 40 percent of Asians.

Ossoff pulled off a similar feat, gaining support from 64 percent of Hispanics and nearly 6-in-10 Asians compared to Perdue’s 36 percent with Hispanics and 41 percent with Asians.

According to the New York Times, the Democrat wins are “fueled by the state’s changing demographics” that could “mean that Georgia has finally achieved battleground status,” for which the Democrat Party has long worked. Days before the election, Democrat activists gleefully cheered that the state had become their new California with a “trajectory of change.”

As much of the establishment media has acknowledged, much of the Democrats’ success in Georgia is due to the nation’s annual admission of 1.2 million legal immigrants a year who can eventually become naturalized citizens and sponsor foreign relatives for green cards. The process is known as “chain migration.”

Before President George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, Georgia’s foreign-born population stood at about 2.7 percent of its total population with fewer than 200,000 foreign-born residents in the state.

Today, Georgia is home to nearly 1.1 million foreign-born residents who make up more than 10 percent of the state’s population — a 515 percent increase in three decades. Nearly 3-in-10 of these foreign-born residents are Asian and another almost 4-in-10 are Hispanic.

Most significantly for Democrats, though, is that in 1990, less than 40 percent of foreign-born residents in Georgia were naturalized citizens and thus eligible to vote if they were 18-years-old or older. Today, more than 45 percent, or about 480,000, of the state’s foreign-born residents are naturalized citizens and thus eligible to vote once they hit 18-years-old.

The number of foreign-born voters and their voting-age children in Georgia has boomed by 337 percent since 2000 while the native-born voting-age population in Georgia has increased just 22 percent over that same period.

As has occurred in Virginia, the booming of Georgia’s foreign-born population is making the state increasingly favorable to Democrats. President-Elect Joe Biden won the state by a slim margin of 0.2 percent against President Donald Trump, according to state election officials.

The establishment media has repeatedly noted the impact of immigration on the Democrats’ odds in congressional districts, swing states, and presidential elections.

In 2019, for example, an analysis by the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein revealed that congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average, a little more than 14 percent, have a 90 percent chance of being won by Democrats over Republicans.

“The single biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability is demographics,” Axios reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote in 2019. “The numbers simply do not lie … there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”

At current legal immigration levels, Georgia’s foreign-born population is set to continue expanding. By 2040, research by the Center for Immigration Studies states that the U.S. will have brought 15 million new foreign-born voters to the U.S. — eight million of which will have arrived through chain migration.

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

BIG TECH - WE OWN JOE BIDEN. WE BOUGHT HIM ALONG WITH KAMALA HARRIS AGES AGO. WE GOT THEM ELECTED!

 There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process 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 foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

Big Tech, Corporate America Lines Up as Donors to Fund Joe Biden’s Inauguration

President-elect Joe Biden speaks at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. Biden has called the violent protests on the U.S. Capitol "an assault on the most sacred of American undertakings: the doing of the people's business." (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
2:03

Giant tech conglomerates and multinational corporations are lining up as donors to fund President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration this month.

Biden, who enjoyed a constant flow of campaign donations last year from some of the largest corporations in the United States, is getting a boost from corporate America for his upcoming inauguration.

list of donors for the Biden Inaugural Committee reveals that tech conglomerates such as Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm, as well as multinational telecommunication corporations such as Verizon and Comcast, are donating over $200 to the committee. The exact amount of donors does not have to be disclosed for 90 days.

Also on the donor list is Boeing, one of the federal government’s most lucrative military contractors, which has recently been embroiled in scandal following the crash and grounding of its 737 Max fleet.

The health insurance company Anthem, Inc. is on the donor list along with the Masimo Corporation, which manufactures medical devices.

The Biden Inaugural Committee has banned energy companies from donating, writing in a statement that they do “not accept contributions from fossil fuel companies (i.e., companies whose primary business is the extraction, processing, distribution or sale of oil, gas or coal), their executives, or from PACs organized by them.”

As Breitbart News has reported, Biden’s cabinet nominees have close ties to corporate America, the D.C. beltway, and Big Tech. Most recently it was revealed that Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Alejandro Mayorkas, was a corporate lawyer for tech conglomerates such as Uber and Wall Street firms such as Blackstone.

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

There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process 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 foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

DHS OKs Huge H-1B Visa Reform to Help U.S. Graduates

FILE- In this Jan. 11, 2013 file photo, Infosys Technologies employees move through the headquarters during a break in Bangalore, India. The shares of top Indian IT companies are falling in response to news of proposed U.S. legislation that would require salaries for H-1B visa holders to be doubled to …
Aijaz Rahi/AP Photo
7:01

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is helping U.S. graduates by ending the lottery for H-1B foreign workers that has allowed Fortune 500 CEOs to import mid-skilled, poorly-paid foreign graduates for the starter jobs needed by U.S. graduates.

The new process will allocate the annual supply of 85,000 H-1B visas to corporations that offer the highest pay. The ranking system will end the economic incentive to hire mid-skilled H-1B foreign workers instead of younger American graduates. Currently, companies, universities, and hospitals keep roughly 1 million H-1B non-immigrant contract workers in jobs which sidelined, unemployed, or underpaid American professionals need.

“What this new policy will do is encourage companies to only ask for H-1Bs to fill higher salary jobs,” not to fill the starter and mid-career jobs needed by Americans, said Kevin Lynn, the director of U.S. Tech Workers. “Under her current [lottery] system, we encourage companies to recruit the lower-wage workers,” so denying jobs to new U.S. graduates, he said.

The policy may help employers in lower-cost states, help sidelined American medical graduates get jobs, reduce universities’ ability to get foreign students into U.S. jobs, and also exclude all of the lower-skill, lower-wage foreign workers who got H-1Bs in prior years, according to Greg Siskind, a prominent immigration lawyer who opposes the new rule.

However, the beneficial reform may be trashed before it reshapes the huge H-1B graduate outsourcing program because it faces fierce opposition from Democrat-allied immigration lawyers, as well as many of President-elect Joe Biden’s allies in the Fortune 500, on Wall Street, and in the university sector.

The reform does not cover the 2021 award of 85,000 new visas because it was processed so late in President Donald Trump’s administration.

“The H-1B temporary visa program has been exploited and abused by employers primarily seeking to fill entry-level positions and reduce overall business costs,” said Joseph Edlow, the policy director at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency. He continued:

The current H-1B random selection process makes it difficult for businesses to plan their hiring, fails to leverage the program to compete for the best and brightest international workforce, and has predominately resulted in the annual influx of foreign labor placed in low-wage positions at the expense of U.S. workers.

A USCIS statement added:

The final rule will be effective 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. DHS previously published a notice of proposed rulemaking on Nov. 2, 2020, and carefully considered the public comments received before deciding to publish the proposed regulations as a final rule.

The rule was applauded by Daniel Costa, at the left-wing Economic Policy Institute.

“This rule comes from an admin we all hate,” he tweeted, but “the substance takes a lottery that randomly allocates H-1B visas & instead prioritizes them for the highest-paid workers, which incentivizes better pay for migrants. Someone will have to explain to me why that’s bad.” Notably, Costa did not discuss the possible benefits for American graduates.

The H-1B visa, however, is just one part of a huge pyramid of imported labor that is used by U.S. investors to spike stock values and to corral their control over the technology sector.

The imported labor force exists because Congress allows companies to provide green cards to roughly 70,000 foreign workers each year. As a result, at least 1 million foreign graduates are competing in U.S. workplaces for those green cards or are waiting for promised green cards.

This foreign labor force, which is dubbed the “Green Card Workforce,” is often preferred by executives because the dangled green cards ensure that the foreign workers will work long hours for lower wages. In addition, the workers have no legal protections in the workplace and have no professional authority to disagree with CEOs, who can also gain personally when Wall Street welcomes each outsourcing decision.

Companies also crimp and slow technological domestic competition by hiring visa workers instead of American graduates. In the early 2000s, the federal government broke up an illegal “no-poaching” cartel by tech companies who were trying to prevent their American workers from changing jobs and so sharing their expertise with rival companies. This strategy is legal if the workforce consists of H-1B workers who cannot change jobs without their managers’ permission.

Many U.S. and Indian employees tell Breitbart News that American graduates are excluded from competing from many Fortune 500 jobs so that the jobs can be traded by hiring managers to foreign workers who want to win green cards.

In 2011, for example, a California-based health insurance company fired 40 Americans to hire a larger and more expensive workforce of H-1B workers, according to testimony from a company employee in a subsequent lawsuit. In 2020, Facebook was sued by the federal government for hiring policies that discriminate against American graduates.

The labor pyramid includes H-1Bs hired by the companies and by their subcontracting companies. The categories of workers also include J-1s, TNs, OPTs, B-1/B-2s, and foreign graduates who overstay their visas. Most work for Fortune 500 companies, but they are also prominent in tech firms, universities, and increasingly in the healthcare sector.

This huge imported workforce ensures that executives rarely have to compete for American graduates by offering higher wages, even when profits are growing. A 2020 report by the Federal Reserve said median salaries for U.S. graduates fell by two percent from 2016 to 2019 as blue-collar salaries rose amid President Donald Trump’s border policies.

There is some evidence that the increasing use of visa workers is reducing U.S. technological capability, even as Chinese companies take the lead from investor-driven U.S. companies.

This growing use of this Green Card Workforce is ignored and misunderstood by the largely powerless white-collar reporters in the corporate media. Many media companies — such as the Washington Post — are owned by firms or investors who want to grow the Green Card Workforce. Other white-collar reporters choose to view the visa workers via the lens of progressive immigration politics, even though the H-1B workers are foreign contract workers who replace white-collar Americans and who do not become immigrants until they receive a green card.

U.S. Economy Lost 140,000 Jobs in December, Unemployment Unchanged at 6.7%

TOPSHOT - US President-elect Joe Biden speaks at the Queen Theater on January 6, 2021, in Wilmington, Delaware. - Biden on Wednesday denounced the storming of the US Capitol as an "insurrection" and demanded President Donald Trump go on television to call an end to the violent "siege." (Photo by …
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
4:45

The U.S. economy shed 140,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate held steady at 6.7 percent, according to data released Friday.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had forecast an addition of 50,000 jobs and a slight rise in the unemployment rate to 6.8 percent.

“The decline in payroll employment reflects the recent increase in coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and efforts to contain the pandemic,” the Labor Department said.

Uncertainty about control of the Senate—and, to a lesser extent, the outcome of President Donald Trump’s attempts to continue to contest the presidential election—may also have weighed on the labor market in December. Studies have shown that policy uncertainty can discourage business spending, particularly in less competitive markets. It’s likely that the shutdowns and pandemic have made many areas of the economy less competitive over the past year.

Private sector jobs fell by 95,000 in December. The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.5 percent and the total number of unemployed held steady at 10.7 million, about twice the number of unemployed persons before the pandemic.

Manufacturing added 38,000, far more than expected. Throughout the pandemic, the manufacturing sector has shown a high level of resiliency, a vindication of President Trump’s policy focus on strengthening this part of the economy. Still, the sector now employs over a half-million fewer workers than it did prior to the pandemic.

Construction added 51,000 in December, boosted by the boom in housing that has accompanied the lockdowns and rise in shootings and killings in many U.S. cities.  Employment in specialty residential contractors and residential construction is one of the few sectors of the economy that employ more workers than before the pandemic.

The biggest jobs losses came in leisure and hospitality, where employment declined by 498,000, with three-quarters of the decrease in bars and restaurants. Employment in the amusements, gambling, and recreation industry fell by 92,000 and dropped in the accommodation industry by 24,000. Since February, employment in leisure and hospitality is down by 3.9 million, or 23.2 percent.

Employment in private education decreased by 63,000 in December. Employment in the industry is down by 450,000 since February.

Government employment fell by 45,000 in December thanks to a decline in local and state government employment. Federal government employment grew by 6,000. Outside of education, local government employment fell by 32,000.  State government education lost 20,000 jobs. Since February, total government employment overall is down by 1.3 million.

The economy has added around 12.2 million jobs in the past eight months, a record-breaking pace after the unprecedented collapse in employment as lockdowns took hold in March and April. The increase in the ranks of employed workers shows that companies ramped up hiring as the economy reopened and consumers came back to stores, restaurants, and other businesses that had been shuttered this spring. Despite the gains, total employment in December was lower than its February level, highlighting just how deep the pandemic cut into what had been the strongest jobs markets in decades.

Hiring slowed in November and layoffs picked back up as infections, hospitalizations, and deaths surged. Many state and local governments around the country announced new restrictions on business, travel, dining, and other activities that have once again suppressed demand and discouraged growth in employment. Some businesses that held on through the first wave of shutdowns have not been able to stay in business in the second wave and much of the government aid made available earlier last year was no longer offered in December.

And even throughout the reopening layoffs have been extremely elevated, indicating that the pandemic’s effects are still ravaging the economy. A separate report on Thursday showed that 787,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the prior week and 790,000 in the week before that.  Jobless claims can be volatile week to week so many economists prefer to look at the four-week average. This rose to 818,750, a decrease of 18,750 from the previous week’s upwardly revised level.



H-1B Foreign Workers Begin Lobbying Joe Biden to End Trump’s Reforms

joe biden
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
3:18

Foreign workers in the United States on the H-1B visa are thrilled about President-elect Joe Biden’s coming into office, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as they hope President Donald Trump’s reforms to the program will be thrown out.

Last year, Trump implemented a series of reforms to the H-1B visa program — which often replaces American workers with imported foreign workers in white-collar U.S. jobs — that requires the visas to be allotted based on employers offering the highest salaries and mandates federal agencies review if the program is outsourcing U.S. jobs.

Attorneys representing H-1B foreign visa workers told Quartz that their clients are excited for a Biden presidency as they hope he will throw out the reforms:

H-1B applicants are hopeful that an administration led by Biden and Kamala Harris will take a gentler and less haphazard approach.

“All of our clients are now breathing a tremendous sigh of relief as it can only get better moving forward knowing that Biden-Harris are pro-immigration,” said New York-based immigration lawyer Neil A Weinrib.

“Under the current administration, H-1B denials and requests for evidence (RFEs) skyrocketed, making it difficult for employers to hire foreign workers,” said Richard Burke, CEO at immigration firm Envoy Global. “H-1B hopefuls and employers alike are looking for a decrease in RFEs under a president-elect Biden administration.”

In November, huge majorities of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California said they fully expect Biden to end Trump’s reforms and increase the number of foreign workers that multinational corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft can import at the expense of qualified Americans.

About 74 percent said they believe Biden will end Trump’s executive orders protecting U.S. jobs for American workers while 64 percent said Biden will increase white-collar U.S. job outsourcing. Another 66 percent said Biden will “loosen restrictions” on immigration to make it easier for corporations to outsource to foreign workers.

Quickly after the 2020 presidential election, the business lobby began asking Biden to end Trump’s reforms to the H-1B visa program in the hopes they can maximize profits by outsourcing labor.

There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process 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 foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

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


Time to defeat Big Tech's 'jamming' of conservative communications

Over the evening and morning of 8 and 9 January 2021, these were some of the article headlines on TheGatewayPundit's home page:

...Twitter Bans President Donald Trump — PERMANENTLY

...Trump Campaign Banned From EMAILING Supporters After Being Suspended By Mail Service Provider

...YouTube Terminates Steve Bannon's War Room Podcast — One of Top Podcasts in US — Thousands were Watching at the Time!

...Google Removes Parler from App Store Amid Reports That Trump is Joining the Platform

...Big Tech Launches Massive Coordinated Cyber Attack on 74,000,000 Trump Voters — GOP SILENT

...Parler Goes Down After Trump Joins Social Media Platform — Apple Threatens to Remove Parler Unless it Enacts Draconian Censorship Policies

Similar past actions by Big Tech media-providers have been challenged as a violation of the free speech rights of conservative Americans who use these services.  This argument takes defenders of free speech down a legal obstacle course of pitfalls as they try to defend a conservative's right to use media services provided by private corporations.   To no avail, on October 28, 2020 Congress even held hearings with the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Google to discuss legal actions that may be brought against these companies if they continue to restrict speech.   As Congress fiddles, the country continues its descent.

There is a military art known as Electronic Warfare (E.W.), which in simple terms is the ability to use an electromagnetic spectrum capability (communication, infrared and radar systems) to conduct military operations while simultaneously preventing an enemy from using those same capabilities to maneuver his forces.  Military intelligence personnel of the various service branches are typically the ones employing E.W. systems in support of operations worldwide.   To understand the basic tenets of E.W. takes many months of classroom and field training in highly classified settings.  However, one E.W. tactic is easily understood: jamming.  

In simple terms, an example of jamming is using an electronic system to broadcast a signal much stronger than the signals put out by an enemy's voice radio systems.  Then all enemy radios receive your overpowering signal (such as a screeching tone over the radio), and enemy commanders can't use those radios to communicate with their forces and maneuver them on the battlefield.   End result: You are using the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate while denying the enemy that ability.

With this concept in mind, re-read the headlines noted at the beginning of this article.  These acts by the Big Tech media providers to deny conservatives a voice are a classic case of jamming — a military E.W. tactic.  Instead of going down the free speech obstacle course defending why conservatives have a right to use Twitter, Facebook, and other media services, the better question to ask your congressional representatives is why Big Tech media incorporated in the U.S. are being permitted to conduct electronic warfare operations against U.S. citizens.  What is the difference between Big Tech conducting these E.W. operations against American citizens and, say, China, Russia, or Iran hacking U.S. cell phone or email systems to shut down and deny these services for your use?  Both are hostile acts and in some cases would be called acts of war.  Both are wrong.

Over the coming days and weeks, if such Big Tech actions are permitted to continue, all you will hear in the media is the screeching of leftist talking points as conservative viewpoints continue to be jammed.

Given that our congressional representatives have failed to protect American citizens from such acts, we must do what old soldiers do when they hear the sound of jamming on platoon and squad radios.  They don't argue their rights to use the electromagnetic spectrum.  They twist the channel knob and use alternate radio frequencies, or they use other ways to communicate and thereby win the current battle.

Fighting the free speech question is a strategic battle that will take a long time (if ever) to accomplish.  Win the current battle first by closing Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts now and use alternatives in Parler, Rumble, and other services that don't suppress conservative voices.  That is a tactical strategy that conservatives can take to negate the effect of enemy jamming.  Change the frequency and move on to communicate with fellow conservatives.  To quote that time-honored statement made by soldiers before a battle, "I will see you on the high ground" — or, in this case, anywhere but Facebook, Twitter, and Google applications.

J. Michael is the pen name of an old soldier with decades of experience in Electronic Warfare operations. 

JOE BIDEN - WE DO NOT HAVE BORDERS WITH OUR 'CHEAP' LABOR INVADERS FROM SOUTH OF THE NON-BORDER

 

Joe Biden Vows ‘Thorough Investigation’ into Trump Officials for Border Policy

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE - JANUARY 08: U.S. President-elect Joe Biden delivers remarks after he announced cabinet nominees that will round out his economic team, including secretaries of commerce and labor, at The Queen theater on January 08, 2021 in Wilmington, Delaware. Biden announced he is nominating Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo …
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
2:49

President-Elect Joe Biden said he will ensure there is a “thorough investigation” by the Justice Department into officials of President Donald Trump’s administration who crafted and carried out the “Zero Tolerance” policy at the United States-Mexico border to deter illegal immigration.

During a press conference on January 8, Biden committed to having the Justice Department open an investigation into Trump officials who carried out the Zero Tolerance policy through which adult border crossers entered separate custody from the children they arrived at the southern border with.

The practice, as Breitbart News noted, has been employed since before 2001, though the Trump administration ended the effort in June 2018.

“I’ll commit that our Justice Department, our investigative arms, will make judgments about who is responsible … and whether or not the conduct is criminal across the board,” Biden said. “But as I said yesterday, I am not going to tell the Justice Department who they should prosecute and who they should not.”

“There will be a thorough, thorough investigation of who is responsible and whether or not their responsibility is criminal, and if that is the [conclusion], the Attorney General will make that judgment,” Biden continued.

The Obama administration, for which Biden served as vice president, often used fencing barriers in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facilities to house child migrants.

Likewise, Biden hinted at his push to quickly pass an amnesty for the majority of 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. and revoke a number of executive orders issued by Trump to reform the nation’s legal immigration system that admits 1.2 million green card holders every year.

“I will introduce an immigration bill immediately and have it sent to the appropriate committees to begin movement,” Biden said. “I will in fact countermand executive orders that the president has in fact initiated that are contrary to what I think is either his authority and/or even if it’s his authority, contrary to the interests of the United States on environmental issues and a range of other things.”

Critics have said Biden is looking to restart a “Hunger Games” migration policy at the southern border in which border crossers are encouraged to carry out a dangerous, and sometimes deadly, journey through Central America and Mexico in order to make their way to the U.S. and be freed into the interior of the country while awaiting their asylum and immigration hearings.

Biden and his advisers have said they plan to tear down the legal wall that Trump has erected to close loopholes and eliminate fraud for the purpose of reducing illegal immigration.

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



Joe Biden’s DHS Nominee Raked in Millions from Big Tech, Wall Street

President-elect Joe Biden's Homeland Security Secretary nominee Alejandro Mayorkas speaks at The Queen theater, Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
2:43

President-Elect Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Alejandro Mayorkas, raked in millions over the last two years representing multinational corporations in Big Tech and on Wall Street as a corporate lawyer, financial disclosure reports reveal.

Since 2019, Mayorkas made more than $3.3 million as a corporate lawyer for a series of multinational corporations, financial disclosure reports show, including the tech firms Airbnb, Uber, and Cisco Systems, along with the Wall Street firm Blackstone.

Mayorkas also represented T-Mobile, Intuit, the aerospace corporation Northrop Grumman, Clorox, MGM Resorts International, and the engineering company Leidos.

Specifically while representing Uber, Mayorkas helped ensure that the tech giant was complying with federal immigration laws when it packs foreign workers into its driving jobs. While representing T-Mobile, Mayorkas advised the telecommunications corporation as they merged with Sprint to dominate more market power as a super conglomerate.

Mayorkas’ financial disclosure reports are the latest from Biden cabinet nominees, all showing their close ties to big business, Wall Street, and the Washington, DC beltway.

Biden’s Treasury Department Secretary nominee Janet Yellen, for instance, has raked in more than $7.2 million from Wall Street and corporations for “speaking fees.” In one case, Yellen took nearly $1 million to give nine speeches to Citibank, one of the largest banks in the United States.

Likewise, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, previously advised as a consultant to tech corporations like Facebook, Uber, and LinkedIn, as well as Wall Street firms like Bank of America and Blackstone.

The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has criticized Biden’s “corporate revolving door” of Washington, DC insiders and executives with close ties to big business and special interests.

“This is not just a revolving door of private industry, but it’s a revolving door of just the same people for the last 10, 20, 30 years … [there is] just an extreme disdain for this moneyed, political establishment that just rules Washington, DC no matter who you seem to elect.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has previously said of Biden’s transition team.

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

Critics: Joe Biden Is Restarting ‘Hunger Games’ Migration Policy

migrant arrivals
AP Photo/Gregory Bull
27:59

President-elect Joe Biden is promising to aid Central American countries — but he is also promising to extract more of their valuable young workers and consumers for exploitation inside the United States via the semi-official “Hunger Games” obstacle course between migrants’ homes and U.S. jobs.

Biden’s promises to aid Central America obscure the damage and political risks of the Democrats’ extraction policies, which are extremely unpopular.

But Biden’s promises are just the latest stage in the multi-decade campaign by allied progressives and Wall Street investors to overcome the public’s migration preferences.

That long campaign has fractured and loopholed what once was expected by the public to be an orderly legal immigration system for legal migrants from south of the U.S. border.

What is left is a de facto obstacle course migration system for blue-collar migrants — a chaotic Hunger Games trail of loanscoyotescartelsrapedesertsweatherborder lawsbarriersrescuerstransportjudges, and cheap-labor employers.

The progressives’ Hunger Games also cripple the economies of migrant-sending countries because they are extracting workers, consumers, investments, political pressures, and expectations of growth. “The departure of people of working age reduces the labor force and weakens the growth of the home country, and this effect is likely to be strongest for countries facing a brain drain,” said a 2017 report by the International Monetary Fund.

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said:

The [progressives’] goal is increasing the number of people moving here. If that means that it has to be done in a way that is inconvenient and sometimes even cruel for the migrants, that’s okay because the objective is increased immigration at essentially any cost — even the cost to the migrants themselves.

“It is an obstacle course, a deadly obstacle course,” said John Miano, an immigration lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

The chaos has become the immigration system because Congress has proven unable to restore order, said Miano. “Congress is involved in so many things now; it can’t deal with the things that it is supposed to do … Each time Congress touches immigration now, they make things worse. What we have done is set up a system of incentives for people to come here illegally.”

President Donald Trump essentially blocked southern migration in 2020 — three years after his inauguration — by making the obstacle course almost impossible to get through. But that win only came after he declared a national emergency and imposed an incomplete but wide variety of border reforms.

But the next wave of blue-collar contestants is rising, partly because they can catch watch a video from January 2020 of Biden welcoming many more migrants: “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people is cannot absorb people who are in desperate need … is absolutely bizarre.”

Biden is now offering to reopen the obstacle course, with some “humane” sections, even as he also promises to steer more aid and investment to Central America.

Meanwhile, most young white-collar immigrants enter via a years-long “pay-for-play” system of lotteriesemployer abusepayoffs to universitieskickbacks to managers, and years of bonded labor.

Biden’s Promises

President-elect Joe Biden said December 22:

We’re going to work purposely diligently and responsibly to roll back Trump’s [migration] restrictions starting on day one. We will institute humane and orderly responses. That means rebuilding the [legal] capacity we need to safely and quickly process asylum seekers without creating near term crisis in the midst of this deadly pandemic.

Biden was silent on many critical details. For example, he did not say how migrants would be judged as welcome for life in the United States — even though at least 150 million people want that prize. He was silent about how rejected migrants would be deterred from entering the obstacle course, and how they would be sent home — even though 11 million resident illegals are already refusing to leave the United States.

He also declined to offer assurance to Americans who are worried about their jobs and investment, even though millions of his fellow Americans are unemployed, and even though wages have been flat for decades– aside from a brief spike in Trump’s 2019.

Unsurprisingly, Biden declined to explain how his chaotic extraction of yet more workers and consumers from Central America could not contradict his promised economic development in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. His campaign platform declared:

As president, Joe Biden will renew a robust commitment to U.S. leadership in the region and pursue a comprehensive strategy for Central America by: Developing a comprehensive four-year, $4 billion regional strategy to address factors driving migration from Central America; Mobilizing private investment in the region; Improving security and rule of law; Addressing endemic corruption; Prioritizing poverty reduction and economic development.

The Hunger Games

The costs and the randomness – the carrots and the sticks, of progressives’ Hunger Games policy – were painfully exposed in a December 22 article by USAToday, headlined: “A Guatemalan father brought his 10-year-old daughter to the US-Mexican border and regrets it.”

The article showed how Francisco Sical and his wife, Maria Elvira Ramos, mortgaged their Guatemalan home and redirected the $3,000 microcredit loan from promised construction to a coyote.

Years before, Sical had been allowed into the United States as President George W. Bush pushed his “Any Willing Worker” cheap labor policy:

From 2003 to 2008, Sical had worked in Anaheim, California; Tampa, Florida; Washington, D.C.; and many places in between, laying tile and driving trucks for $12 an hour as part of a vast undocumented labor force that fueled the U.S. economic expansion of the mid-2000s.

But intermittently tighter rules unluckily blocked his attempted returns in 2013. And in 2018, President Trump’s consistent crackdown gave him 30 days for his felony re-entry.

In the summer of 2019, Sical told his wife that he could use one of their three under-18 children to get through Trump’s border like her brother and nephew had done shortly before. The brother and his child walked through a 2015 loophole created by a California judge who had ordered border agencies to release migrants with children after 20 days into the U.S. job market. USAToday reported:

“I told her, ‘Listen, lately the U.S. government is giving children priority.’” Ramos’ brother had reached the USA with a son a few months before. “Immigration visits him twice a week,” Sical said. “But they let him work in peace!”

But Sical was too slow.

Despite protests by progressives and the many businesses, Trump closed the 2015 loophole by creating the “Return to Mexico” program. The program stops migrants from getting U.S. jobs as they wait for asylum hearings, and Sical was one of the slower — or unluckier — migrants who were sent back to Mexico and then Guatemala.

The article also shows the sticks that pressure Latin Americans to head north.

Sical sees himself as a failure compared to his peers who got through the obstacle course to win jobs in the United States:

For Sical, the USA is always on his mind – “and in my heart.” But, he said, “you’re left with feelings of resentment. The families who have someone in the United States, every eight days, they go to the bank for the remittance. And us just watching, because there is nothing else we can do.”

Sical’s unpaid loan is a stick that pushes Sical to try again once Biden takes control of the border. USAToday reported Sical is trying to pay down the $3,000 construction loan “at $128 a month … [as he] struggled to bring home even $220 a month.”

Many progressives deny their cheap-labor migration has any harmful impact on Americans’ wages and rents —  and then insist that the public’s deep opposition to wage-cutting migration is bigotry and can be blamed for the Hunger Games.

The solution to Sical’s problem is more work permits for U.S. jobs, said Andrew Selee, the well-paid president of the pro-migration Migration Policy Institute, “The best way of dealing with irregular migration is not building walls but creating labor opportunities for people to work for periods of time in the United States,” he told USAToday. “Americans don’t want those jobs,” he insisted, without mentioning employers’ pay offers or the coronavirus crash.

“There’s no broad recognition of [migration-caused wage cuts] at all,” Tom Jawatz, the vice president of immigration policy at American Progress, a leading progressive advocacy group, told Breitbart News on December 28.

Yet decades of data and experiences have persuaded the vast majority of Americans — and many elite economists, lobbyists, and legislators — that migration moves money out of employees’ pockets and into the stock-market wealth of investors and their progressive supporters. The recognition comes amid perpetual insistence from business lobbies — and reporters — that supply and demand in the labor market are unrelated.

Progressives also insist they can select deserving Central American migrants with such care and justice that rejected migrants will somehow give up their illegal efforts to get themselves into U.S. jobs and their children into U.S. schools. For example, Biden’s 2020 platform says “Trump’s policies are actually encouraging people to cross irregularly, rather than applying in a legal, safe, and orderly manner at the ports,” and continues:

… each [asylum] case should be reviewed fairly and in full accordance with the law. Migrants who qualify for an asylum claim will be admitted to the country through an orderly process and connected with resources that will help them care for themselves. Migrants who do not qualify will have the opportunity to make their claim before an immigration judge, but if they are unable to satisfy the court, the government will help facilitate their successful reintegration into their home countries.

But that pablum promise sets no limit on the number of eligible migrants and is no deterrent for migrants who rationally — and decently — hope to walk, climb, talk, and lie their way into good jobs for themselves and good schools for their children.

Biden’s promise of a “safe and orderly” process at the border will just invite a repeat and an escalation of 2019, warned Mark Morgan, the acting chief of the Customs and Border Patrol agency said January 5:

If your strategy consists of releasing you into the interior of the United States once you’ve illegally entered and have been apprehended, protecting you from local deportation, and providing substantial rewards such as free health care, you have just created a complete system of incentives. Who wouldn’t try to enter with “Release, Protect, and Reward” being the new open border strategy?

In 2019, almost 1 million rational people entered the Hunger Games in the hope of winning the huge prize of U.S. residency.

The risk was rational. DHS data shows that roughly 8 percent of 2014-2019 contestants have won the first prize of legal residency. Roughly half of all contestants have won the second-ranking prize of at-least temporary residency, jobs, and wages.

The Damage to Central America

Progressives pretend remittances from migrants repair the damage done by the Hunger Games to the home countries.

But the migration-caused economic damage is widely recognized by left-wingers outside the progressive parish in Washington D.C.

“One of the effects of emigration is erosion of human capital, which can have a negative impact on the economic and social development of the countries of origin,” said a 2005 report by the United Nations. A 2020 report by a reporter for the Guardian for the Texas Public Policy Foundation spotlighted one example:

Alonso Benítez was considered a model farmer, growing organic coffee in Honduras’ western highlands. In recent years, he had switched to organic methods, planted timber-producing trees to diversify his income, and worked with a cooperative to earn a premium on the world price. Benítez also had a large extended family in the area, who pitched in with harvests and lowered his labor costs.

But Benítez vanished one day in April 2019 with his 17-year-old son, leaving an elder, 18-year-old son to oversee the farm. He paid a coyote 170,000 lempiras ($7,300) to take him and his son to the U.S. border, according to the elder son, Jordi Benítez. After spending four days in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the pair were released and went to Houston—where Benítez found work in a gravel pit.

All told, more than three million people from Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala have moved into the United States, not counting the almost 1 million migrants who were counted crossing in 2019. Only half of the 3.5 million migrants who entered from 2014 to 2019 have been sent home.

The loss of skilled migrants “can compromise the ability of origin countries to develop their own human capital, especially when it involves teachers and health workers, or undermines development prospects as a result of the departure of persons trained in technical, engineering and scientific areas, crucial to domestic technological progress,” said a 2011 report by the Organization of American States and the OECD.

Despite “decades of agrarian reform, state-led development programs, and billions of dollars of foreign aid spent on international development schemes, remitted wages from people working in the United States have become the most important source of income for many rural communities,’ said a 2o13 report by Selee’s Migration Policy Institute. The report continued:

A new social order has emerged across Honduras. Many of the markers of status that defined life before the migration boom — such as land ownership, advanced age, education, and political connections—are being replaced by knowledge of how to migrate successfully to the United States and remit earnings to family members in Honduras. Migrants and returnees have become the very models of success for young people in rural areas. At the same time, new forms of social differentiation are emerging. The meaning and value of education, lawful citizenship, and family responsibility have been redefined in the context of the migration phenomenon.

“The remittances [from migrants] are not sufficient for compensating the negative impacts that emigration has on human development in the societies of origin, for example, the loss of the most entrepreneurial individuals,” said a 2012 report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

“Migration, in many ways, underpins Central American economies and provides an escape valve for these countries,” said the 2020 report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which added:

Remittances sent from the United States prop up households, provide stability to national economies, and spur consumption. Migration has provided some ambitious Central Americans with an escape from poverty. But it has also enabled elites, who see no need to slow migration, as it is a status quo which works for them—and they are content to keep it intact.

As a Guatemalan think tank analyst said ruefully after President Trump demanded Guatemala sign an asylum cooperation agreement: “We continue doing everything except taking responsibility. …We’re not the victims and we need to assume our responsibilities because the United States is no longer going to cover the cost of Guatemala’s shortcomings.”

The Hunger Games migration is emptying many towns in Central America. On April 21, the Wall Street Journal reported:

COLOTENANGO, Guatemala—Gloria Velásquez is used to saying goodbye. Four of her six siblings have migrated to the U.S. and she, too, is thinking about heading north with her 9-year-old daughter.
[…]

Ms. Velásquez said her four siblings in the U.S. are encouraging her to join them. Her daughter Helen Ixchel likes to teach language and mathematics to fellow children. She wants to learn English and become a teacher.

“I’m a bit scared [about going to the U.S.] after hearing all the news about the suffering of migrants at the border. But it’s my daughter’s greatest dream,” Ms. Velásquez said.

“Exporting People: How Central America Encourages Mass Migration: The three Northern Triangle nations spend preciously little on the poor and then reap the financial benefits when they flee,” said a Bloomberg headline in 2019:

“Migration is part of the model,” said Seynabou Sakho, the World Bank’s director for Central America. “A country may not have a big deficit, but at the same time, the needs of its people aren’t being met.”

In a few countries, the remittances paper over the economic damage imposed by the progressives’ Hunger Games. “For Central American countries, the negative effects of emigration seem to be broadly (or more than) offset by gains from their higher remittance receipts,” the IOM reported in 2012.

Those remittances are huge: “Remittances sent to Guatemala represented 11 percent of GDP and 46 percent of household income in 2017 … [I El Salvador] Remittances reached $5.47 billion in 2018, amounting to roughly 20 percent of the country’s GDP,” said a 2020 report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Who gains?

Those remittances consist of wages taken from the hands of blue-collar American workers, including many black and Latino hands. Illegal migrant workers rationally take jobs at low U.S. wages, so exempting U.S. employers from the wage-raising pressure to make fair bargains with the tens of millions of Americans who are disabled, parenting, drugged, isolated, or unemployed.

Wealthy Americans also gain from the extraction of foreign labor and consumer demand, said a 2013 article titled “Dollars, ‘Free Trade,’ and Migration: The Combined Forces of Alienation in Postwar El Salvador.” It argued that “capitalists in the destination countries capture surplus labor and value from migrants by paying substandard wages, [as] capitalists in El Salvador also profit both directly and indirectly, from remittances.”

The deportation of migrants from the United States would shift wealth back to lower-skilled Americans, said a 2018 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute. “The trade compression caused by deportations [of lower skill migrants] suggests that the U.S. may experience losses of higher-paying export jobs. Based on the aims of the current U.S. administration, these potential losses must be compared with potential gains in jobs with lower skill levels,” said the report, which was validated by the blue-collar wage gains for Americans in 2018 and 2019. after 40 years of flat wages for men.

One example of the progressives’ harm to Americans is their quiet support for the flow of child laborers into the blue-collar jobs needed by lower-skilled Americans. In November 2o20, ProPublica reported:

“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” said Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a national organization that advocates for immigrant children in court. “They want to help their parents.”

But whether they stayed in a shelter in Florida or California or Illinois, the teens heard similar warnings from the staff: They had to enroll in school and stay out of trouble. The immigration judges who would decide their cases, they were told, didn’t want to hear that they were working.

“They would ask you: ‘Who are you going to live with? Is he going to support you financially?’” said one 19-year-old who spent nearly six months at a shelter in New York before a family friend in Bensenville agreed to take him in. “And you say yes. ‘Are they going to be responsible for you?’ And you say yes. ‘Are they going to take you to school?’ And you say yes.”

The child laborers can bypass part of the obstacle course because of a law passed unanimously in 2008. The law allowed the inflow of at least 315,000 Central American children and youths since 2013, who have reduced pressure on employers to offer higher wages or buy labor-saving machinery:

Around Urbana-Champaign, the home of the University of Illinois, school district officials say children and adolescents lay shingles, wash dishes and paint off-campus university apartments. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, an indigenous Guatemalan labor leader has heard complaints from adult workers in the fish-packing industry who say they’re losing their jobs to 14-year-olds. In Ohio, teenagers work in dangerous chicken plants.

ProPublica interviewed 15 teenagers and young adults in Bensenville alone who said they work or have worked as minors inside more than two dozen factories, warehouses and food processing facilities in the Chicago suburbs, usually through temporary staffing agencies, and nearly all in situations where federal and state child labor laws would explicitly prohibit their employment.

Though most of the teens interviewed for this story are now 18, they agreed to speak on the condition that they not be fully identified and that their employers not be named because they feared losing their jobs, harming their immigration cases or facing criminal penalties.

Some began to work when they were just 13 or 14, packing the candy you find by the supermarket register, cutting the slabs of raw meat that end up in your freezer and baking, in industrial ovens, the pastries you eat with your coffee. Garcia, who is 18 now, was 15 when he got his first job at an automotive parts factory.

But it must be the GOP’s Fault!

In their reports, tweets, and statements, Democrats progressives and executives recognize the obstacle course — but blame everyone else for the human cost of their worldwide invite.

Trump created “a horrifying ecosystem of violence and exploitation,” says Biden’s 2020 platform:

It is a moral failing and a national shame when a father and his baby daughter drown seeking our shores. When children are locked away in overcrowded detention centers … When President Trump uses family separation as a weapon against desperate mothers, fathers, and children seeking safety and a better life …  When children die while in custody due to lack of adequate care.

“In our own little ways—whether as employers, consumers, or homeowners—each of us has long counted on, and effectively encouraged, the development of this extralegal immigration system,” Jawetz testified in 2019. “At the risk of being provocative, the truth is that our arcane immigration system is so broken that it long ago abandoned the right to expect and deserve compliance and respect.”

“Plenty of people on ‘my side’ [of the labor and migration debate] lament the fact that the lack of adequate pathways to channel immigration through the system rather than around it has predictably led to immigration outside the law,” Jawetz told Breitbart News December 29. “The solution is better tailored and more realistic pathways.”

Biden, Jawetz, and other progressives disregard the public’s demand for jobs, decent wages, and Americans’ right to their own national labor market. Jawetz testified in 2019:

So, what would such an immigration system look like? For starters, it would have realistic, evidence-based avenues for legal immigration … [where migrant] Workers would be able to find legal pathways into the country to fill needed positions.

The contradiction between migration and development is not a problem for progressives, said Kirkorian. “Ideological libertarians and leftists look at it this way: That any way of getting here, under any circumstances, is better [for migrants] than staying where they are,” he said. The development damage done to the home countries is waved away as “brain gain or circulation or something like that,” he added.

And, of course, once the U.S. economy is flooded with rent-raising, wage-cutting legal (or illegal) immigrants, then blue-collar Americans are denied the right to a tight labor market where employees and employers can bargain as equals as they trade work for wages. Jawetz and other progressives would join with CEOs to steal that bargaining power and decide which jobs need to be filled by low-wage, compliant, and grateful migrants instead of well-paid, free-speaking, indepndent American citizens.

“I don’t think [progressives] feel a moral duty to fellow Americans,” said Rosemary Jenks, the policy director at NumbersUSA:

They are globalists … [They think] their duty is to focus on [poor foreigners], not focus on their fellow countrymen or on making this country better. They have no sense of what an average American’s life is like, but they can say, “Oh, I’m a good person because I’m helping these [foreign] people, you know, by bringing up illegal aliens from Central America, I’m reuniting families.”

Their migration strategy is “cruelty to ordinary Americans too,’ she added.

The fundamental problem is that Biden and his progressives see large-scale, wage-cutting migration as a “core value… the highest values of our nation” — and they view migration as far more important than economic development in Central America, Africa, Latin America — or in central Los Angeles, central Detroit, or anywhere else in Americans’ home country.

Biden’s campaign document says:

Joe Biden understands that [immigration] is an irrefutable source of our strength. Generations of immigrants have come to this country with little more than the clothes on their backs, the hope in their heart, and a desire to claim their own piece of the American Dream. It’s the reason we have constantly been able to renew ourselves, to grow better and stronger as a nation, and to meet new challenges. Immigration is essential to who we are as a nation, our core values, and our aspirations for our future. Under a Biden Administration, we will never turn our backs on who we are or that which makes us uniquely and proudly American. The United States deserves an immigration policy that reflects our highest values as a nation.

As long as Americans oppose the inflow of migrants into their jobs, communities, and futures, then progressives will cheerlead as millions more Central Americans — plus tens of millions of Africans, Indians, Latin Americans, and Asians — risk their lives and wealth in the progressives’ Hunger Games.

“Immigration [policy] requires making choices,” said Miano, “and because these progressives don’t want to make the choices, they let the coyotes and the desert make the choices for them.”


U.S. Economy Lost 140,000 Jobs in December, Unemployment Unchanged at 6.7%

TOPSHOT - US President-elect Joe Biden speaks at the Queen Theater on January 6, 2021, in Wilmington, Delaware. - Biden on Wednesday denounced the storming of the US Capitol as an "insurrection" and demanded President Donald Trump go on television to call an end to the violent "siege." (Photo by …
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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The U.S. economy shed 140,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate held steady at 6.7 percent, according to data released Friday.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had forecast an addition of 50,000 jobs and a slight rise in the unemployment rate to 6.8 percent.

“The decline in payroll employment reflects the recent increase in coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and efforts to contain the pandemic,” the Labor Department said.

Uncertainty about control of the Senate—and, to a lesser extent, the outcome of President Donald Trump’s attempts to continue to contest the presidential election—may also have weighed on the labor market in December. Studies have shown that policy uncertainty can discourage business spending, particularly in less competitive markets. It’s likely that the shutdowns and pandemic have made many areas of the economy less competitive over the past year.

Private sector jobs fell by 95,000 in December. The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.5 percent and the total number of unemployed held steady at 10.7 million, about twice the number of unemployed persons before the pandemic.

Manufacturing added 38,000, far more than expected. Throughout the pandemic, the manufacturing sector has shown a high level of resiliency, a vindication of President Trump’s policy focus on strengthening this part of the economy. Still, the sector now employs over a half-million fewer workers than it did prior to the pandemic.

Construction added 51,000 in December, boosted by the boom in housing that has accompanied the lockdowns and rise in shootings and killings in many U.S. cities.  Employment in specialty residential contractors and residential construction is one of the few sectors of the economy that employ more workers than before the pandemic.

The biggest jobs losses came in leisure and hospitality, where employment declined by 498,000, with three-quarters of the decrease in bars and restaurants. Employment in the amusements, gambling, and recreation industry fell by 92,000 and dropped in the accommodation industry by 24,000. Since February, employment in leisure and hospitality is down by 3.9 million, or 23.2 percent.

Employment in private education decreased by 63,000 in December. Employment in the industry is down by 450,000 since February.

Government employment fell by 45,000 in December thanks to a decline in local and state government employment. Federal government employment grew by 6,000. Outside of education, local government employment fell by 32,000.  State government education lost 20,000 jobs. Since February, total government employment overall is down by 1.3 million.

The economy has added around 12.2 million jobs in the past eight months, a record-breaking pace after the unprecedented collapse in employment as lockdowns took hold in March and April. The increase in the ranks of employed workers shows that companies ramped up hiring as the economy reopened and consumers came back to stores, restaurants, and other businesses that had been shuttered this spring. Despite the gains, total employment in December was lower than its February level, highlighting just how deep the pandemic cut into what had been the strongest jobs markets in decades.

Hiring slowed in November and layoffs picked back up as infections, hospitalizations, and deaths surged. Many state and local governments around the country announced new restrictions on business, travel, dining, and other activities that have once again suppressed demand and discouraged growth in employment. Some businesses that held on through the first wave of shutdowns have not been able to stay in business in the second wave and much of the government aid made available earlier last year was no longer offered in December.

And even throughout the reopening layoffs have been extremely elevated, indicating that the pandemic’s effects are still ravaging the economy. A separate report on Thursday showed that 787,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the prior week and 790,000 in the week before that.  Jobless claims can be volatile week to week so many economists prefer to look at the four-week average. This rose to 818,750, a decrease of 18,750 from the previous week’s upwardly revised level.


New DHS Report Paints Picture of Biden’s Immigration Challenges

Lax immigration enforcement under Biden could bring about a new border crisis

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U.S. southern border
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New data from the Department of Homeland Security capture the changing face of illegal immigration, revealing dramatic shifts that will shape President-elect Joe Biden's hopes for comprehensive immigration reform.

The report from the Office of Immigration Statistics captures a transition as the share of lone adults, particularly from Mexico, declined, replaced by children and adults traveling with them from the "northern triangle" countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. That change in turn has led to a dramatic decline in the number of individuals reported, as members of the latter group rely on more accommodative legal protections to remain in the country far longer than the former.

The report also shows that individuals who were not detained after apprehension are much more likely to still be in the country. That's a sign, acting deputy homeland security director Ken Cuccinelli wrote, that "catch and release" policies do not work.

That such policies, including an expansion of the use of "alternatives to detention," are top of the Biden immigration agenda augurs poorly for the incoming president. The challenges that changing migration patterns posed to the Obama and Trump administrations are unlikely to go away under Biden, teeing up yet another border crisis and ensuing political meltdown.

The report combines data from myriad sources to track the "lifecycle" of would-be entrants apprehended over the past five years at the southwestern border, providing information on the immigration status of some 3.5 million apprehensions. Its coverage bookends two major migrant crises: a surge of unaccompanied minors in 2014, and a much larger surge of both families and unaccompanied kids in late 2018 and early 2019.

These two crises are part of the changing face of migration. Whereas in the period of 2000 to 2004, 97 percent of all those apprehended were Mexicans—many of them lone adults seeking work—by 2019 that share had dropped to just 24 percent. By contrast, arrivals from the "northern triangle" countries rose from 44 percent of apprehensions in 2014 to 64 percent in 2019, amid the second crisis. Many of these individuals were children, often quite young, and adults traveling with them, claiming to be their family members.

Those demographic differences strongly determine what happens to an individual after he or she is apprehended. Single adults are quickly deported, with 78 percent of those apprehended over the preceding five years repatriated by Q2 2020. But family arrivals and children are not—just 32 percent of the latter, and only 11 percent of the former, had their cases resolved as of Q2 2020.

Such migration is likely to rise under Biden, who has promised to substantially reduce immigration enforcement and intends to pursue an amnesty, both of which could incentivize further arrivals. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that apprehensions at the border rose year-on-year in the immediate lead-up to and aftermath of Biden's election, which may indicate a rising tide of migrants eager to take advantage of a more lax immigration regime.

Those arrivals will enjoy the same preexisting immigration challenges that the Center for Immigration Studies' Andrew Arthur identified as driving the low number of deportations for families and children. "Loopholes" in federal immigration law incentivize the bringing of children from noncontiguous countries and delay almost indefinitely their immigration court process.

In particular, abuse of the asylum system, and of provisions which require the release from detention of minors and their guardians, results in large populations who arrive, are released, and never show up for subsequent immigration processing. According to the report, just 1 percent of those detained had unexecuted removal orders, while 55 percent of those released were still listed as unresolved.

The reason for this dynamic is not that those who arrive at the southwestern border have reasonable claims to be asylees: Just 14 percent of initial applicants are eventually granted asylum. Similarly, among those cases resolved, roughly 13.6 percent were granted some relief, while the rest were summarily deported.

In other words, the report indicates a large and persistent challenge to the U.S. immigration system, with an ever-growing pool of illegal entrants and an ever-expanding backlog of immigration court cases jamming up the process of legal immigration and the limited resources of DHS.

That dynamic is likely to continue, and even expand, under the Biden DHS. Biden's promised undoing of many of President Donald Trump's tougher enforcement tools, including the "Remain in Mexico" policy and the limitation of "reasonable fear" asylum claims, could exacerbate the inflow of people driven by the "loopholes" Arthur and Cuccinelli identify. So too could the deployment of "alternatives to detention," which Cuccinelli specifically singled out as problematic.

The Biden team, likely spooked by the surging apprehension numbers, has signaled that it will slow-roll the undoing of Trump's immigration agenda. But it has not promised any of the "targeted legislative fixes" endorsed by Cuccinelli in his letter, leaving in place the adverse incentives. That could lead to another humanitarian crisis at the southwestern border—a ticking time bomb Biden's team has evinced little interest in defusing.

New weekly jobless claims at 797,000 amid signs of US economic slowdown

New first-time claims for unemployment benefits remained at historically high levels last week following the passage by Congress of a temporary $300 weekly addition to state jobless benefits and an absurdly inadequate one-time $600 stimulus payment.

There were 787,000 new claims for unemployment benefits for the week ending January 2, only a slight drop from the previous week and still an extremely high number by previous standards. It demonstrates the continuing hardship and suffering for millions of American workers as hospitals are overcrowded with COVID cases and the pandemic death toll rises.

Hundreds of people wait in line for bags of groceries at a food pantry at St. Mary’s Church in Waltham, Mass. earlier this year. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Only a few states have started distributing the additional $300 unemployment payments, while others, such as Ohio, say they are waiting for additional “guidance.” The supplement will only last for 11 weeks, ending in March, long before the COVID-19 pandemic will be contained.

The number of continuing claims for unemployment assistance fell 125,000 to 5.1 million last week. And there was also a decline in the number receiving extended unemployment benefits. However, the drop was likely related to the lapsing of the previous federal unemployment extension on December 26.

For a similar reason new applications for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) fell as well to around 160,000 from 310,000 the previous week. The program provides assistance to those not normally covered by regular unemployment benefits such as self-employed and independent contractors. It followed a nearly week-long lapse in benefits as Trump and Congress engaged in parliamentary theatrics. As a result there was evident confusion among potential claimants over whether or not they were eligible.

The result was a further blow at millions of workers already behind on rent and other critical payments. A number of states, such as Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Wyoming, did not report any new claim data for the PUA program at all during the week ending January 2.

A US Labor Department report due out Friday is expected to show the unemployment rate increased to 6.8 percent after months of declines. However that number is itself a gross understatement. It does not include workers employed part time who want full time work and doesn’t include “discouraged workers” who have dropped out of the labor market altogether. According to Thomas Barkin, president of the Richmond Federal Reserve, some 4 million workers employed before the pandemic have left the labor force. If those were counted, the actual unemployment rate would be 9.5 percent.

The biggest employment declines in December were in businesses such as restaurants, hotels and retail stores that depend on face-to-face interaction with customers. These businesses are not likely to recover until after the pandemic ends.

Since March, when the pandemic forced widespread lockdowns, new weekly unemployment claims have been running at historically unprecedented levels. Over 73 million new claims for benefits have been filed during this period. The threat of eviction looms for millions, while 50 million face food insecurity.

The hunger crisis is being exacerbated by a global rise in food prices, which have gone up 18 percent since May even as incomes decline. Federal data analyzed by Northwestern University found that overall food insecurity has doubled, and child food insecurity has tripled during the pandemic. Nationwide, seven percent of families reported receiving free food in the previous week.

Regardless, the stock market surge continued on Thursday despite record deaths due to COVID and the storming of the US Capitol by fascist supporters of President Donald Trump. Tech stocks climbed to record highs led by electric vehicle maker Tesla, which was up five percent. Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, is now the richest man in the world based on his company’s stock rise, with a net worth of $187 billion, edging out Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Tesla’s huge stock valuation is largely based on speculation, given that the carmaker delivered less than 500,000 vehicles in 2020.

After months of increased hiring the US economy is showing signs of a slowdown. The private payroll processor ADP reported that the private sector cut 123,000 jobs in December. It was the first monthly decline since April 2020. Consumer spending also declined in November for the first time in seven months as well as household income. According to JP Morgan Chase credit card and debit card purchases were down 6 percent in December from last year compared to down two percent year on year in October.

Some states reported a significant spike in new unemployment claims. New filings in Michigan rose to near 29,033, up from 19,818 the prior week. Due to cuts enacted by the state legislature those filing after January 1 will only be eligible for 20 weeks of unemployment benefits, not 26 as previously was the case. Another 6,000 in Michigan filed for PUA benefits the week ending January 2 and 304,080 Michigan workers remained on PUA benefits through December 19.

A number of other states showed increases of more than 10,000 new unemployment claims, including Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Virginia and Texas.

In spite of unprecedented economic hardship, California is suspending unemployment payments on 1.4 million claims due to allegations of fraud. This comes at a time when the state has failed to process and pay out benefits. There were a reported 777,760 unemployment claims in California for the week ending December 30. That was a 32,124 increase over the previous week’s total.

According to a report in the Guardian, nearly every US state has failed to meet federal standards that require getting unemployment benefits to claimants within three weeks. It cites the horror story of Eugene Williams of Daytona Beach, Florida, who lost his job with a food distributor near the start of the pandemic. He received benefits up until June when he accidentally entered “return to work” while verifying his claim.

He has not been able to reactivate his benefits since that time and has suffered severe deprivation as a result. “I’m sleeping in my car and in the next few weeks I’ll be without a phone,” said Williams. He has been unable to find new employment and has had to rely on charities for food assistance. “It is impossible to get a hold of the unemployment department. ... all I’m hearing is ‘be patient.’ Isn’t 31 weeks patient enough?”

The increasing economic desperation of millions of workers stands in sharp contrast to the enrichment of the financial oligarchy, who have been the recipients of trillions of dollars in federal handouts. This is a symptom of a deeply unjust and dysfunctional capitalist system that prioritizes private profit over human need. The answer is socialism, the control of production by the working class, the producers, on a rational and planned basis in the interest of the common good. 

GRAPHIC: Cartel Gunmen Kill 9 During Wake in Central Mexico

A mourner stands next to the coffin containing the remains of slain journalist Victor Manuel Baez during his wake in Xalapa, Mexico, Friday, June 15, 2012. Baez is the fifth journalist to be killed in just over a month in Veracruz, one of the states most affected by drug violence …
AP Photo/Felix Marquez
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A group of cartel gunmen killed nine victims and injured another during a brazen attack at a home. People in the home gathered for a funerary wake in the central Mexico state of Guanajuato.

The mass shooting took place on Thursday night when a group of gunmen stormed a home in the Arboledas de San Andres neighborhood in the city of Celaya, Guanajuato. The state Public Security Secretariat confirmed nine victims had died in the attack. A tenth person sustained a critical injury.

According to the local news outlet Periodico Correo, neighbors claimed they heard more than 100 shots, some sounding like automatic fire. The gunman managed to escape before authorities arrived at the scene.

Responding paramedics found the victims inside and outside the home in pools of blood while searching for survivors. Details of who the wake was for and their cause of death remain unclear. However, the mass shooting comes at a time when an ongoing turf war between rival drug cartels turned the once peaceful state into the most violent region in Mexico.

Since the start of the year, the turf war between the remnants of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion led to approximately 60 murders.

Tony Aranda is a contributing writer for Breitbart Texas. 

Jose Luis Lara and “J.C. Sanchez” from Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project contributed to this report