THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
The Biden Department of Labor (DOL) proposed rescinding a Trump administration rule that protects the religious liberty of faith-based organizations that contract with the federal government.
On Tuesday the DOL said it would roll back the Trump rule that went into effect on January 8 and allows religious groups that are federal contractors to specifically hire people who hold to their faith beliefs.
In August 2019, the Trump Labor Department announced the proposed rule intended to clarify that faith-based organizations “may make employment decisions consistent with their sincerely held religious tenets and beliefs without fear of sanction by the federal government.”
The Biden administration signaled it intended to overturn the rule, however, after civil rights organizations claimed it allowed discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in terms of hiring by faith-based groups.
The Biden administration is claiming the Trump rule “departed from” the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs’ (OFCCP) “longstanding policy and practice of applying principles and case law to interpret the exemption.”
Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs Director Jenny R. Yang claimed:
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs’ proposed rescission would protect against discrimination and safeguard principles of religious freedom. With this proposal, OFCCP would simply return to our policy and practice of considering the facts of each case and applying Title VII principles and case law and other applicable law.
But, Mary Beth Waddell, Family Research Council’s director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty, said the Biden administration is actually “couching its change in terms of following precedent and the law to promote religious freedom,” and “doing the opposite.”
Waddell said in a statement sent to Breitbart News:
This Department of Labor proposed rule curtails the ability of religious individuals and entities to live out their faith in the public square. This is one of many choices the Biden administration has made to sideline religious freedom and elevate other policies in its place.
“Religious freedom must protect the ability to practice and exercise sincerely held religious beliefs in the public square,” she added. Waddell noted the Trump administration:
…understood this and did not tamper with what constituted a religious exemption in this rule, but rather defined the terms and added a rule of construction in favor of the broadest protection of religious exercise ‘permitted by the U.S. Constitution and law.’
Waddell explained that, under the Trump-era rule, “religion” was defined as including “all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief.” She went on:
The Biden administration’s move away from this definition is bad news. Faith-based entities should not be denied government contracts and grants just because they want their employees to follow the same faith tenets they do. They should be allowed to freely exercise their religious freedom and run their business in accordance with the tenets of their faith.
American Atheists released a statement praising the Biden DOL’s proposed rule as it claimed the administration was “restoring workers’ freedom of religion.”
“The government should never fund businesses that justify discrimination based on religious beliefs,” said Alison Gill, the group’s vice president for legal and policy. “And American taxpayers should never be forced to be complicit in discrimination.”
Nick Fish, president of American Atheists, added, “Finally, atheists, LGBTQ people, women, and religious minorities will see these important protections restored.”
“Let me be clear: The people who will be complaining about this change do not care about religious freedom—they only care about how they can use religion as a weapon against people different from them,” he stated.
But Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, said in a statement sent to Breitbart News that the proposed rescission of the Trump-era rule is a sign that “Joe Biden’s anti-American war on our fundamental freedoms continues.”
He elaborated:
The administration is lying when they claim this move will prevent “discrimination.” In fact, it will do the very opposite: by eliminating critical religious liberty protections, the administration is declaring open season on persecuting religious organizations that dare to dissent from the left’s prevailing sexual orthodoxy. This is an affront to the First Amendment, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone — this is who they are. They oppose free speech. They reject the idea of religious freedom. The once great Democratic Party has been reduced to a bunch of would-be totalitarians hellbent on forcing everyone to submit to their insane mandates on gender, critical race theory, or even the latest politicized COVID “science.”
“It’s obviously not going to work,” Schilling said. “Americans are sick and tired of the left’s radicalism, and there will be political hell to pay next November.”
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for nationalimmigration policy — which seeks to drive uplegal and illegal immigration levels to theirhighest levels in decades — offers a floodedlabor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by WallStreet.
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.
Bidenflation: Labor Costs Soar Even While Real Worker Pay Crashes
U.S. businesses paid sharply higher labor costs in the third quarter to produce their goods and services—even though hourly compensation for workers fell after adjusting for inflation.
So-called unit-labor costs soared 8.3 percent in the period from July through September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Thursday.
These costs indicate how much a business spends to produce one unit of output.
At the same time, consumer prices have been rising faster than hourly compensation, a measure that includes wages, salaries, benefits, employer contributions to benefit plans, and taxes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that hourly compensation rose at a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 2.9 percent in the quarter, near its average in the decade before the pandemic. But after adjusting for inflation, hourly compensation fell at an annual rate of 3.5 percent.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index rose 5.3 percent in the third quarter.
The government also said on Thursday that labor productivity, a measure of how long it takes to produce of unit of output, fell by the most since 1981.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Smugglers Coordinate with National Guard to Ferry Migrants into South Texas
ROMA, Texas — Human smugglers ferried more than 100 migrants into the downtown square Monday night. National Guardsmen assisted Border Patrol agents to line the migrants and march them into the city for transport. In what has become a nightly ritual, smugglers made short work of transporting the migrants into Roma from Miguel Aleman, Tamaulipas.
The Central American migrants were mostly from Guatemala and Nicaragua. Breitbart Texas interviewed several who said they were fleeing government corruption, violence, and poverty. Most said they hoped they would be allowed to remain in the United States and receive asylum.
The smugglers openly communicate with the soldiers and Border Patrol agents, coordinating where to beach the raft so children can easily climb the riverbank.
Once on dry land, soldiers and Border Patrol agents march the migrants downtown and take basic biographical information.
The migrants will be taken to a nearby soft-sided processing center. Many of the family unit migrants with tender age children will ultimately be released. Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley Sector arrested more than 549,000 migrants in Fiscal Year 2021. Roughly 257,000 of those were classified as family unit members, according to the Border Patrol. Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on Twitter @RandyClarkBBTX.
The Biden administration is negotiating what could turn out to be a very expensive settlement of litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of illegal immigrant families. These families allegedly experienced “trauma” from being separated during the Trump administration and are suing for damages. The total settlement could approach as much as a billion dollars.
A Fox News reporter asked President Biden directly on November 3rd whether his administration’s reported plan to pay members of illegal immigrant families who were separated at the border up to $450,000 each would incentivize even more immigrants to enter the country illegally. Biden called such reports “garbage.” But then, after the ACLU executive director, Anthony Romero, claimed that “President Biden may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department,” the White House had to do some cleanup.
The Biden White House’s principal deputy press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters at the November 4th White House press briefing that payouts to the separated illegal immigrants could indeed happen.
The deputy press secretary said that when Biden characterized the reports of payouts to illegal immigrants as “garbage,” the president was referring specifically to the $450,000 per person payout mentioned in the reports and not to the possibility of payouts per se.
“If it saves taxpayer dollars and puts the disastrous history of the previous administration’s use of zero tolerance and family separation behind us, the president is perfectly comfortable with the Department of Justice settling with the individuals and families who are currently in litigation with the U.S. government,” Jean-Pierre added.
On November 6th, during a tense exchange, Biden raised his voice and pointed his finger indignantly at a reporter, taking issue himself with the specific $450,000 number. Biden falsely put words into the mouth of the Fox News reporter who had asked him the original question three days earlier about the reports of payments to illegal immigrants. According to Biden, this reporter had said that “everybody coming across the border gets 450,000 dollars.” Not true.
The Fox news reporter had actually said “there were reports that were surfacing that your administration is planning to pay illegal immigrants who are separated from their families at the border up to $450,000 each, possibly a million dollars per family.” (Emphasis added)
Biden was creating a red herring to distract attention from his willingness to pay some amount of compensation to those illegal immigrants claiming “trauma” from their family separations. There would have been no such separation “trauma” in the first place but for the fact that the adults had recklessly dragged children along with them to the United States in violation of U.S. law.
Biden thinks the illegal immigrants are entitled to be rewarded even though they have broken the law. “If in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you coming across the border — whether it was legal or illegal — and you lost your child,” Biden said during his November 6th outburst. “You lost your child, he’s gone, you deserve some kind of compensation no matter what the circumstances.”
Biden said that he had "no idea" what the final dollar settlement payouts will be. This leaves open the distinct possibility that illegal immigrant family members will receive more U.S. taxpayer money from the settlements than the surviving families of members of the Armed Forces, who die while on active duty, would receive.
It is outrageous that the surviving families of each of the 13 U.S. service members, who were killed in a terrorist attack last August as a direct result of Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, may well receive less than the free-riding illegal immigrant families.
The president of the United States is authorized by the Constitution to enforce the laws, not to remake or ignore them. Former President Trump was doing no more than strictly enforcing the nation’s immigration laws on illegal border crossings.
There is nothing that the Trump administration did that merits a windfall to separated illegal immigrant families. Trump followed the law in not detaining the children for more than twenty days along with the adults who accompanied them across the U.S.-Mexico border. At the same time, Trump would not go back on his word to end “catch and release.” He would not simply release all the adults as well as the children they had traveled with, who may not have even been those adults’ own children in the first place. The adults who violated U.S. immigration law remained in detention. This necessarily required the separation of illegal immigrant parents or other adult custodians from the children.
In any case, only a few thousand children were separated before the Trump administration decided to discontinue its family separation policy. Any “trauma” from the separations was entirely the lawbreaking adults’ fault.
There was no catastrophic border crisis when Biden took office on January 20, 2021. He inherited immigration policies that had worked in stemming the flood of illegal immigrants into the United States.
Then the floodgates opened after Biden allowed record numbers of illegal immigrants to enter the United States without federal COVID-19 vaccinations or testing, only to then be released to settle in communities across the country.
Now Biden wants to go even further and compensate the separated immigrant families who had criminally entered the country. Biden has not addressed whether families legally residing in the United States with parents who commit a crime and are separated from their children after incarceration also deserve "some kind of compensation no matter what the circumstances.”
For example, an illegal immigrant in his twenties who posed as a 17-year-old minor was taken into custody last month for allegedly killing Francisco Javier Cuellar, a father of four. The Biden administration bears responsibility for this permanent separation of Cuellar’s four children from their murdered father, taken from them allegedly by an illegal immigrant the Biden administration allowed into the country and then released.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lashed out at the Biden administration. “This horrific crime is the latest example of how unfettered illegal migration costs Floridians’ lives,” DeSantis said in a statement to News4Jax. “If not for the Biden Administration’s unlawful ‘catch and release’ policy, [victim] Francisco Cuellar would still be alive today.”
If anyone deserves compensation from the Biden administration, it is the child who loses a parent at the hands of an illegal immigrant whom the Biden administration released following the illegal’s apprehension.
The separated illegal families, on the other hand, do not deserve a single penny of American taxpayers’ money.
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.
In a truly disturbing development, the Biden administration has declared that federal law enforcement is largely prohibited from conducting any immigration enforcement of criminal aliens near countless locations throughout the country, including near any “place where children gather” such as a playground or recreational center.
Angel Families: Biden Plan Is $450K for Illegal Aliens, $0 for American Victims
Angel Families, whose loved ones were killed by illegal aliens, say that while President Joe Biden weighs providing reparations-style payouts to border crossers, the American victims of open borders receive no compensation for the federal government’s failure to enforce federal immigration law.
Last month, reports circulated that Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were working to settle with a number of border crossers represented by the ACLU, who claim they have suffered trauma as a result of former President Donald Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” policy that was briefly imposed in 2019.
As part of the settlement, attorneys with the DOJ, DHS, and HHS are considering a plan that would give each border crosser about $450,000 and family units about $1 million. The total cost of the payouts would reach $1 billion.
U.S. President Joe Biden stands alongside Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas after signing executive orders related to immigration in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, February 2, 2021. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Angel Families with Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC) — including Don Rosenberg whose son Drew Rosenberg was killed by an illegal alien in 2010 and Maureen Maloney whose son Matthew Denice was killed in 2011 by an illegal alien — detail in an open letter how Biden plans to reward border crossers while American victims of open borders are ignored.
“Just when you thought Biden had reached the pinnacle of absurdity in welcoming illegal aliens into the country and refusing to deport those who once here violated our laws comes a plan to create millionaires out of over 5,000 illegal alien families,” Rosenberg and Maloney write:
On its face, none of these illegal aliens deserve anything more than a removal back to their country of origin. [Emphasis added]
Paying these families anything compared to the amount paid to our fallen soldiers and victims of 9/11 shows how completely devoid of reality this administration is. But we already knew that. [Emphasis added]
One group conspicuous in its absence is the victims of illegal alien crime. But, unlike these “mothers,” the victims of illegal alien crime weren’t breaking any laws. [Emphasis added]
Rosenberg and Maloney also hit back at the various pro-mass immigration groups representing the border crossers in the case, asking if they have ever considered the pain brought to Angel Families as a result of illegal immigration:
Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, representing five mothers and their children, said, “No amount of money can compensate for the amount of pain and suffering these parents and children endured under this unconscionable and unprecedented policy.” [Emphasis added]
Lee Gelernt, a lead negotiator on behalf of the families and deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrant rights project, said, “There is no question that the Biden administration is doing the right thing by providing meaningful monetary compensation, given that the U.S. government deliberately brutalized these families, including babies and toddlers. But ultimately, the Biden administration will be judged on whether it provides a pathway for these families to remain in the United States, to allow them to once and for all try to put this trauma behind them.” [Emphasis added]
Well, Trina and Lee, what about the families who have lost a loved one FOREVER because of illegal immigration. What pain and suffering have they endured? Unfortunately, the U.S. Government, often with your organization’s help, has deliberately ignored illegal immigration resulting in tens of millions of crimes being committed against American families, including hundreds of thousands of rapes where often the victims are children and over 100,000 deaths since the last amnesty. [Emphasis added]
In two weeks, it will be eleven years since an illegal alien killed my son. Our vice-president’s son was killed over ten years ago. Our other two Board members lost their brothers twelve and ten years ago. If these payments compensate for the “psychological trauma” these families “suffered” for being separated – often of their own doing – for a few months, what does the government owe the families who have been victimized by illegal aliens, often forever? [Emphasis added]
Not only are Angel Families left to deal with the loss of their loved ones, without any financial help from the federal government, but they often struggle to sue the sanctuary jurisdictions that sometimes aid the illegal alien suspects in a case.
Former President Trump endorsed a plan, initially authored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), called the Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act that would give Angel Families the right to sue a sanctuary jurisdiction if it had helped shield an illegal alien suspect.
In this Feb. 18, 2017, file photo, thousands of people take part in the “Free the People Immigration March,” to protest actions taken by President Donald Trump and his administration, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu, File)
“The United States of America should be a sanctuary for law-abiding Americans — not criminal aliens,” Trump said at his last State of the Union address in 2020.
Tillis has since reintroduced the legislation, alongside Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC), with Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), Steve Daines (R-MT), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Mike Braun (R-IN).
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Mayorkas Uses Drug-Free Zones as Template for Protecting Criminal Aliens
ICE is further hampered by a perversion of state laws designed to protect children
On October 4, I analyzed Biden administration directives gutting ICE immigration enforcement. Since then, the Biden administration announced it will halt ICE worksite enforcement efforts, furthering this effort. It was the latest diktat from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, “Enforcement Actions in or Near Protected Areas”, that really gave up the game, however. The administration is attempting to create a de facto amnesty for the vast (vast) majority of criminal aliens in the United States, using state laws protecting children from drugs as a guide.
What used to be safe spaces for vulnerable members of society have been transformed into safe spaces for violent offenders. This new policy prohibits even basic surveillance of a criminal alien suspect who happens to be in or near so-called “protected” areas. These locations are mini sanctuaries for criminal aliens who are now “protected” from federal law enforcement officers at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Why would Mayorkas propose creating “mini sanctuaries” for rapists and murderers? Feere posits that “shielding criminal aliens from the law is the top priority” for the Biden administration, and that these restrictions further that effort. If you review the October 27 guidelines, it is difficult to disagree with that assessment, and reference to state law proves it to be true.
Mayorkas’s Faux Maudlin Tone
Before I explain, however, let me first note that the secretary veers into the faux maudlin in that memo, stating:
It is because of the profound impact of our work that we must consider so many different factors before we decide to act. This can make our work very difficult. It is also one of the reasons why our work is noble.
One can almost picture Mayorkas stiffening his lip as he writes those words, drawing a carefully ironed, brilliantly bleached monogrammed handkerchief from the breast pocket of his expertly tailored bespoke suit to daub away a manly tear.
Of course, he does not consider ICE’s work to be “noble” in the least. That word is defined as “having, showing, or coming from personal qualities that people admire”. He hates the fact that ICE officers remove aliens, as that guidance reveals.
The Insidious Passage
Want proof? Three paragraphs after Mayorkas makes that factitious assertion, he states:
We can accomplish our enforcement mission without denying or limiting individuals’ access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food and shelter, people of faith access to their places of worship, and more.
You need to read that passage carefully to understand how insidious (to say nothing of insipid) it is, and how much it reflects Mayorkas’s disdain for immigration enforcement.
First, the insidious part. In the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), Congress mandates that the immigration laws be enforced, period, regardless of whether an alien facing removal will have to seek medical care elsewhere, change schools, get a new job or house, or find a new place of worship.
In fact, once aliens are removed, they must do all those things. It is baked into the removal scheme.
Second, the disdain. As the Supreme Court has held, an “order of deportation is not a punishment for crime”, but rather “a method of enforcing the return to his own country of an alien who has not complied with the conditions upon the performance of which the Government ... has determined that his continuing to reside here shall depend.”
In this context, the purpose of removal is not to punish aliens by forcing them to seek medical care elsewhere, find new schools for their kids, get new houses and jobs, and find new places of worship, but rather those are the inevitable costs of being removed from the United States.
Mayorkas either ignores or is ignorant of that fact, but he implicitly castigates the ICE officers who enforce the INA, and thereby impose those consequences on removable aliens. Worse, however, he is attempting to create an enforcement scheme in which those consequences are avoided by inflating the “protected areas” that are off limits to ICE officers — which will lead to no enforcement at all.
ICE October 2011 “Sensitive Locations” Memo, and Mayorkas’s Expansion
ICE officers have been required to obtain pre-approval to enforce the INA at certain protected areas since October 2011, when then-ICE Director John Morton issued a memo to that effect. His list included schools, hospitals, places of worship, funerals, weddings, other religious ceremonies, and (oddly) public demonstrations.
Mayorkas expands these restrictions, as Feere explains, to add areas “near” playgrounds, bus stops, rec centers, domestic violence shelters, food banks, pantries, and various other locations.
The secretary admits that there is no definition of “near” in this context, but asserts: “A variety of factors can be informative, such as proximity to the protected area, visibility from the protected area, and people’s behavioral patterns in and around the protected area.” Respectfully, that explanation makes the word vaguer, not clearer.
The “Rosary” Exception that Makes the Universe a “Protected Area” from ICE Enforcement
Significantly, this list includes places “where a ... rosary ... occur[s]”. Not only is that bad grammar (Rosary is capitalized, and Rosaries are “prayed”, they don’t “occur”), but it shows an unconscionable ignorance of the practices of the nation’s 51 million Roman Catholics, coupled with an expansion of ICE “no-go” zones to the universe as a whole.
I am a Catholic and own several Rosaries, and they were regular fixtures at the prison where I served as an immigration judge. Some Catholics pray the Rosary (a series of prayers) daily, others only when deeply troubled, and many not at all.
The point is, however, that “a [R]osary” can “occur” anywhere. Given the fact that Mayorkas’s memo restricts ICE “surveillance” in areas, how would any officer know that a Rosary was being, or could be, prayed there? Does that sacred object now carry the same power to daunt ICE officers that garlic possesses to defend against vampires in ancient lore?
Perversion of State Laws Protecting Children from Drugs
The insidious nature of that guidance, however, only gets worse, because it perverts state laws that protect children from drugs into a federal policy that shelters criminal aliens.
That is because it closely tracks “drug-free zone” laws, which enhance the penalties for drug trafficking and/or possession, on the books in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. As the Sentencing Project (which opposes such laws) explains:
The premise behind drug-free zone laws was that drug trafficking near schools posed a danger to children. In order to protect children from drug activity, lawmakers established protected zones around the places where children were most likely to be present, including schools and public parks.
Like the Mayorkas restrictions, those drug-free zones include “schools, school buses ... public parks [and] churches” (Illinois); day care centers (Louisiana); and rec centers (Utah). No mention in any of hospitals, food banks, or domestic violence shelters (added by Morton and/or Mayorkas).
Many — progressives, moderates, and conservatives — have begun to rethink those zones, not least because they “are so extensive they aren’t effective in moving drugs away from children”.
One analysis done in Connecticut showed that 94 percent of residents in Hartford, 93 percent in New Haven, and 92 percent in Bridgeport live in areas with such sentencing enhancements (which include public housing, not on Mayorkas’s list).
Logically, Biden’s policy people are aware of those issues, which means Mayorkas’s list is deliberately expansive, all the better to (1) make it harder for ICE to arrest illegal aliens and, thus, (2) create sanctuary zones in major metropolitan areas. The “Rosary” exception makes the policy universal.
“Protected Areas” Guidance Only Protects Terrorists, Spies, and Serious Criminals
It only gets worse, however, because this “protected areas” guidance is to be applied in addition to, not in lieu of, Mayorkas’s earlier ICE enforcement restrictions.
As explained in that earlier post, Mayorkas restricted ICE’s “priorities” for immigration enforcement in a September 30 memo to three groups: Terrorists and spies; aliens who have engaged in “serious criminal conduct”, and recent illegal entrants.
ICE officers can act against other removable aliens, but must go through a review process so restrictive I described it as “as non-enforcement through micromanagement”.
Thus, the only aliens who are protected under this perverse game of “tag”, in which vast swaths of areas are “safe zones” where they cannot be touched (assuming they failed to bring a Rosary), are spies, terrorists, criminals, and those who entered illegally after October 31, 2021.
Given that there is no real way for ICE officers to know who entered illegally, as a practical matter the latest guidance exists only to protect hard-core criminals and national-security risks.
Conclusion: The Topsy-Turvy World of Biden Immigration Enforcement
Why? Because, as the Washington Post has explained: “ICE under President Biden is an agency on probation”, for no greater offenses than enforcing the INA and having the favor of Donald Trump.
That is how topsy-turvy immigration enforcement has become under the Biden administration: ICE officers charged with enforcing the law are treated as criminals on probation, and state laws protecting children from drug dealers are now being used as a template to protect real criminals (and spies and terrorists) from removal.
CAN'T FIND A JOB? JUST CLAIM TO BE A DEM VOTING ILLEGAL
An analysis of the Census Bureau monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that after falling for much of 2020, the foreign-born population (legal and illegal), has rebounded dramatically, increasing by 1.6 million between September 2020 and September 2021, which is the most recent data available.
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
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
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.
Criminal Immigration Prosecutions Plummet, with One Smuggling Exception
Despite the record number of apprehensions at the Southwest border, few aliens face jailtime
On November 1, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University released a report captioned “Federal Immigration Prosecutions at Record Lows”. Despite promises from the Biden DHS that “repeat offenders” would be referred for criminal proceedings, prosecutions for most immigration-related offenses have plummeted since the start of the pandemic, and are unlikely to rise under the current administration. Only smuggling prosecutions are returning to normal.
Illegal entry is both a civil ground of removability under the INA and, as noted, a criminal offense. A first offense for illegal entry is a criminal misdemeanor, subject to a sentence of not more than six months’ imprisonment and a fine (though most defendants receive time served).
If aliens reenter the United States after being ordered removed, they are subject to a felony sentence of not more than two years and a fine, even if they have not been previously prosecuted. Criminal convictions are the most significant consequence of entering the United States in violation of law, and therefore are also the strongest deterrent.
During the period of “zero tolerance” under the Trump administration, prosecutions for illegal entry under section 275 of the INA exceeded 6,000 per month between May 2018 and February 2019 (they peaked at 8,780 in June 2018). Even after that point, however, they exceeded 4,000 per month from March to August 2019, and only fell below 3,000 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020.
Thanks to orders issued under Title 42 of the U.S. Code by the CDC in response to the pandemic, DHS began quickly expelling illegal migrants beginning in late March 2020, and therefore both the total number of illegal entrants and border-related criminal prosecutions fell, as TRAC explained.
In August 2020, there were just 21 prosecutions for illegal entry under section 275 of the INA, although prosecutions for illegal reentry began to increase that month (to 1,077, up from 324 in April).
Prosecutions for illegal entry haven’t recovered thus far under the Biden administration, and by June 2021, they cratered at 12. All told under Biden, there have been just 178 prosecutions for illegal entry under section 275 of the INA.
Similarly, in February, the first full month of the Biden administration, there were a mere 997 prosecutions for illegal reentry after removal, down from a pre-pandemic Trump high of 4,035 in July 2019.
Even as Border Patrol apprehensions at the Southwest border surged in the spring and summer of 2020, monthly illegal-entry prosecutions exceeded 1,300 just once (in June, at 1,304), and have barely approached 1,100 since.
That said, however, smuggling and harboring prosecutions under section 274 of the INA have slowly climbed back up to their pre-pandemic levels.
The peak monthly total under the Trump administration in this category was hit in October 2019, when there were 613 prosecutions. That total fell to just 92 in April 2020, the depths of the pandemic, before rising to 467 in December 2020.
That trend has continued under the Biden administration — sort of. Post-inauguration, they reached their peak in April (559) before falling again to 370 in September.
Why the fluctuation in prosecutions for illegal entry and reentry between Trump and Biden? As TRAC explains:
The change in the number of federal prosecutions is often unrelated to the number of migrants coming across the border. Instead, prosecutions are largely driven by U.S. border policy. In order for migrants to be prosecuted in federal court, they typically must be referred to federal prosecutors by Customs and Border Protection. U.S. border policy has chosen to not criminally prosecute illegal border crossers before deporting them.
Criminally prosecuting aliens for smuggling and harboring under section 274 of the INA is politically safe; the president will likely not risk alienating those in his “progressive” base if he does so, and thus the return to the norm.
Prosecuting aliens for entering or reentering illegally, on the other hand, is likely to stir a backlash among those on the left for whom all illegal migrants are “asylum seekers” — regardless of whether they have a legitimate asylum claim or not.
The “family separation” and “kids in cages” tropes that Biden peddled on the campaign trail largely were premised on that period of “zero tolerance” (as I have explained in the past), when adults in family units were sent to U.S. Marshals Service custody for prosecution, leaving their erstwhile accompanying children “unaccompanied”.
That required DHS to send those children to shelters run or contracted for by the Department of Health and Human Services, for placement with a “sponsor” in the United States — the legal source of their separation from their parents.
Consequently, the Biden administration is unlikely to prosecute any adult alien who enters with a child, even though the number of aliens in family units apprehended at the Southwest border increased more than sevenfold, to more than 451,000, over FY 2020.
Of course, aliens in family units are also likely to be quickly released from DHS custody, boosting the incentives for foreign national adults to bring a child with them when entering this country illegally.
That journey exposes those children to danger and trauma (as a bipartisan federal panel determined in 2019), and not prosecuting the adults entering in family units for illegal entry simply makes the incentives to bring a child along during that dangerous trek to the United States even greater.
Given the fact that the Biden administration is now proposing to make migrant families that were separated millionaires (as my colleague, Rob Law, explained on October 29), expect to see the number of illegal migrants entering with a child soar in FY 2022. Those children are not only a “get out of jail free” card, but an “avoid prosecution and get rich” one, too.
The pandemic and Title 42 orders plainly tamped down on the number of aliens who were prosecuted for illegal entry and reentry, but as the number of aliens entering illegally reached all-time highs at the Southwest border in FY 2021, prosecutions should have surged, as well.
That they did not is a policy choice on the part of the Biden administration, as explained above.
That said, in its August 2021 Monthly Operational Update, CBP asserted that it had begun “a Repeat Offender initiative, under which single adults who have previously been apprehended and deported under” the INA (as opposed to Title 42) would be “referred for prosecution” in July.
If that happened, it is not reflected in TRAC’s statistics: Prosecutions for illegal reentry instead fell between June (1,304) and September (1,067), with minor monthly fluctuations. Interestingly, CBP did not repeat this claim in its latest, September 2021, Operational Update.
TRAC cites to, of all sources, the libertarian Cato Institute for the proposition that: “Many immigration commentators. ... viewed criminal prosecution as a disincentive for crossing unlawfully.” I concur, and if Cato and I agree, it must be true.
By failing to prosecute aliens — and in particular aliens who have reentered the United States illegally after being ordered removed — the Biden administration is not using its best tool to discourage illegal immigration. That said, there are few if any Biden policies that would dissuade illegal migrants from violating U.S. law at the border, so non-prosecution is just more of the same.
House Committee Sneaks ‘Parole’ Amnesty into Reconciliation Bill
Proposal exposes the American people to unacceptable terrorism and criminal risks
On November 3, the House Rules Committee published its version (known in legislative parlance as a “chairman’s mark”) of H.R. 5376, the massive “reconciliation” bill that progressives in Congress have been pushing for months. It is a sneaky piece of work that would grant de facto amnesty to millions of aliens and threaten the national security and communities across the United States.
Prior Amnesty Proposals in the Proposed Reconciliation Bill
Reconciliation is a legislative maneuver that allows bills to be passed without the normal 60-vote majority in the Senate. Democrats who control that chamber currently have 50 seats there, with Vice President Kamala Harris the tie-breaker as president of the Senate.
The Senate parliamentarian had blocked a previous attempt to insert a full amnesty into an earlier version of the bill (known as the “Build Back Better” Act).
The current registry date is January 1, 1972, and section 249 allows aliens who entered before that date to apply for green cards, even if they are in unlawful status. The date the Democrats proposed is unknown (negotiations with the parliamentarian are generally informal), but it presumably would have moved it up decades to legalize the status of most aliens unlawfully present.
North subsequently reported that Senate Democrats were having a third go at the parliamentarian on amnesty, proposing the extension of “a temporary status, parole, to an unspecified number of (presumably millions) of illegals”. (This approach is sometimes called Plan C, since the first two attempts at inserting an amnesty in the bill were rejected by the parliamentarian.) She has not decided whether that is permitted under the strict reconciliation rules yet, but as this proposal shows, House Democrats are pushing ahead, anyway.
Understanding “Parole”
Parole is a very limited immigration authority Congress has extended to the executive branch. Under section 212(d)(5) of the INA, it enables DHS to allow aliens into the United States temporarily, without formally admitting them, but “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”.
Those terms have traditionally been construed to enable DHS to allow aliens into the United States who are not otherwise admissible, but only if they are seeking urgent medical treatment, or because they are needed for a legitimate law-enforcement interest. Recent administrations, however, have stretched those terms beyond all recognition to allow large numbers of aliens to be released into the country.
Most recently, it appears that President Biden’s DHS has been using parole to allow tens of thousands of illegal migrants apprehended at the Southwest border into the United States. And in a recent regulatory statement, it has proposed administratively expanding parole to move hundreds of thousands of illegal border-crossers into the country, in clear violation of the limited power Congress has granted the department.
The House Rules Committee Proposal
Of course, what Congress has done, Congress can undo or expand, which leads me to the latest idea from the House Rules Committee.
It wants to extend parole to all aliens who entered the United States — legally or illegally — prior to January 1, 2011. Tightening prior amnesty proposals, aliens who are removable under the criminal, national security, smuggling, draft-dodging, polygamy, international child abduction, and unlawful voter grounds of inadmissibility in section 212 of the INA would not be eligible for this massive amnesty.
The proposal would, however, grant those aliens work authorization (and thus Social Security numbers), allow them to travel abroad, and exempt them from the standards for issuing driver’s licenses in the REAL ID Act.
Grants of parole would be good for five years, renewable for another five-year period.
Why This Proposal Is an Amnesty
Why do I refer to this proposal as an “amnesty” if it does not grant permanent status to the aliens who would be eligible to apply? Because it allows aliens without status to remain lawfully for a decade, and because it specifically permits DHS “to provide administrative or statutory relief to aliens on an individual or class-wide basis.”
Aliens who entered illegally but have been paroled into the United States are eligible to apply for green cards under the adjustment of status provision in section 245 of the INA. Otherwise, pursuant to that section of the INA, aliens who entered illegally and who thus have not been admitted or paroled are barred from receiving adjustment.
This bill would relieve them from this impediment and allow them to obtain green cards through a family- or work-based visa filed on their behalf. Untold numbers of illegal aliens have married U.S. citizens or are the parents of adult children born in this country, and they would each be immediately eligible for green cards.
Given the 10-year timeframe, lawful permanent resident spouses and children of illegal aliens would have plenty of time to naturalize, and thus render the illegal alien family member eligible to adjust status.
Of course, that assumes that the secretary of DHS doesn’t simply extend some sort of “deferred action” to those aliens, essentially leaving them in de facto legal status in the United States.
The longer that those aliens are in parole status, the more pressure that will be applied to Congress and some future administration to grant them all amnesty. Applicants for parole under this proposal would all be portrayed as “good hardworking, law-abiding Americans” (even if they aren’t), “citizens” in all but name.
Significant National-Security and Criminal Risks
The national-security and criminal risks, however, are a much more salient problem.
As I explained in a September 30 post, the driver’s license standards in the REAL ID Act were a direct recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.
They exist to set strict limits on license and ID issuance to ensure that the bearers of those documents — when they are being used to board airliners, access federal facilities, or enter nuclear power plants (to name a few) — are who they say they are so they can be identified, and their intentions assessed.
Waiving those standards for aliens who have entered the United States illegally and who have never been screened before entering this country is foolhardy, to say the least. In the years immediately following September 11, it was common to refer to the new security climate as the “post-9/11 world”.
The House Rules Committee proposal simply doubles down on this risk, however, because (like similar recent amnesty plans) it includes a strict “confidentiality” provision. Under that bar, information that aliens provide DHS in conjunction with their “parole” applications cannot be shared with CBP or ICE for purposes of immigration enforcement.
So, if in the course of adjudicating those applications, USCIS determines that an alien is inadmissible on terrorism grounds and has the nom de guerre of “Timmy the bombmaker”, ICE officers will not be able to pick him up and remove him.
If Timmy is actually conspiring to explode a bomb, or has already done so, that information could putatively be shared with law enforcement or national security agencies for prosecution. That said, law enforcement often hands aliens posing a terrorism threat over to ICE for removal, to protect other national-security information that would have to be disclosed in criminal proceedings.
The bill would eliminate that option, not to mention that such restrictions often have a “chilling effect” when it comes to sharing such information to begin with. USCIS adjudicators — rarely national security experts — who determine that an alien is too deluded to be granted parole but who do not want to risk violating the confidentiality provision may just deny the application and shelve the file.
Putting national security aside, however, this confidentiality provision by its terms only protects aliens who are otherwise removable. Thus, even if aliens are ineligible for parole because of murder, child-sex-abuse, or drug-trafficking convictions and therefore don’t get the benefits in the Build Back Better Act, they will still be allowed to remain in the United States, and therefore be able to continue to prey on the community here.
There is no reason for any confidentiality restrictions. If aliens are unlawfully present and want to apply for immigration benefits, they should do so taking the risk that they could be removed. Only the most fervent immigrant advocates think that such ideas are good ones, but they make it into bills because few understand how bad confidentiality restrictions are.
Conclusion
The proposals in the House Rules Committee’s version of H.R. 5376 may be slightly better versions of a massive amnesty (in large part thanks to the Senate parliamentarian), but they are a massive amnesty all the same. And this one is written in such a way that exposes the American people — citizens and lawful immigrants alike — to unacceptable national security and criminal risks.
The Expendables isn’t just a movie anymore. It is fast becoming the American way of life under the most callous and dictatorial Presidential administration this nation has ever seen.
On Wednesday, November 3, US House Representatives Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Luis Gohmert attempted a welfare check on the January 6 prisoners in the D.C. jail in which they are being held. They were turned away.
The US Marshals, however, when they conducted a surprise inspection of the jail in which the 1/6 prisoners were being held, were able to obtain admission. They found the conditions so deplorable that 400 pretrial detainees were transferred to another facility. The January 6 prisoners were not among them. They continue to languish under brutal conditions. Why weren’t they moved with the other detainees? To ask the question is to answer it.
Meanwhile, due to the despicable COVID vaccine mandate, thousands if not tens of thousands of first responders who exhausted themselves saving countless lives during the pandemic will now be out on the streets and struggling to support their families and keep roofs over their heads. That they declined the vaccine due to natural immunity or for personal medical or religious reasons is of no consequence. “Do what we tell you or we will destroy you!” is a hell of a way to pay back those armies of heroes.
It’s no way to treat any Americans under any circumstances. Yet possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans face the same ugly fate for the crime of noncompliance with this totalitarian mandate.
Meanwhile, over in Afghanistan, the State Department confirmed that four hundred American citizens, possibly more, are trapped inside the terrorist hellhole state the Biden Administration itself created through the single most devastating act to America since the 9/11 attacks. If you are wondering about their fate, you have good reason.
A search on the State Department website for “Afghanistan” leads to a page announcing that, on November 9 at 1:30 pm, there will be an Afghan Resettlement Stakeholders Town Hall...whatever that means. So far, the true American citizen stakeholders in all this haven’t fared so well. My search results indicate that the last State Department briefing held on the status of American citizens held in Afghanistan was on September 27.
It all looks very grim. But the news isn’t all bad, depending on who you are. The hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens that have crossed our Southern border are not required to be vaccinated at all before they spread out all across the American wild. Unlike American citizens, illegals are encouraged but not compelled under duress.
Members of Congress and their staffers, of course, are exempt from the mandate, as per the Orwellian-named Safer Federal Workforce Task Force. If you are ultraviolent Antifa Flying Squad Blackshirts, no worries compared to the 1/6 detainees. Your charges, even up to felony assault of a federal law officer, will be dropped before you ever see the inside of a courtroom. Also, unlike the 1/6 detainees who have been detained without bond, Antifa and BLMers have high-ranking Democrats up to the Vice President herself who will do all they can to bail you out.
If you firebombed an NYPD van or even committed murder, you have all the right people on your side. Even the FBI. It’s almost enough to lead you to believe that Antifa, like the Klan before it, is the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party. What they protest and who they attack has yet to deviate from DNC policy that I can see. Strange, no?
There are countless other Expendables such as parents doxxed, blacklisted, and fired for the audacity of challenging their school boards over anti-white racist constructs, gender insanity, and Marxist orthodoxy. Even though the National School Boards Association has rescinded its infamous ‘domestic terrorist parents’ letter, AG Garland’s FBI memo on parents is still in full effect.
Why? If you back way up and look at the overall picture here, it has all the appearances of a Stalinist purge of the non-compliant and brutal examples made of those who would challenge Democrat authority as a warning to others. This left-wing Democratic fascism is also apparent in cancel culture and the purge of American culture in exchange for one that is repugnant to most Americans, yet familiar to our immigrant citizens who have experienced it.
Big Tech and Big Media are also doing their part in full to demonize and silence any who would dare challenge the Orthodoxy. A Congressman who dares declare that DHHS Secretary Rachel Levine, a biological male for half a century, is a male isn’t safe from unpersoning on Twitter. Even comedians such as Dave Chappelle aren’t safe. Where this is all going, I have no idea, but it really looks bad.
What happened in Virginia is a huge breath of relief for parents. Under a second term of Terry McAuliffe, does anyone doubt that he would have resisted allowing undercover FBI agents to operate in the state to collect intel and prepare to arrest parents whose only concerns are their children’s education? Given that the FBI memo is still active, I have no doubt that this is happening in Democrat-run states.
How I wish that we had a proactive Republican opposition in Congress. Serving as a wall for the Democrats’ Destroy America bills (and a very weak wall as Friday’s House vote showed) is all well and good, but it’s nowhere near enough. A select handful, like Reps. Taylor-Greene and Gohmert are being proactive and getting directly involved. As to the vax mandate, Nicki Minaj has single-handedly done more to counter the fascist vax mandate than the entire GOP.
It makes me wonder. Are Republicans so quiet on the mandate because they are all receiving Vegas paydays from Pfizer?
In the meantime: Do Not Comply! Challenge any school boards trying to mess your kids up so bad they don’t even know who they are anymore (which is the idea in my humble opinion). When people have no identities or are so screwed up they don’t even recognize their own bodies, programming is far easier and resistance far less forceful.
In closing, I will make a prediction. If the Biden administration tries to force a vaccine mandate on children under duress as they have adults, they are asking for q catastrophic pushback. Voices far more influential than mine are saying the exact same thing. The adult vax mandate is poking a stick into a tiger cage. With a child vax mandate, that tiger is out.
And Republicans, do every damn thing you have to to get our citizens out of Afghanistan. Hire mercenaries if you must. State is useless. Get them out. And free the January 6 Detainees. Issue Congressional orders or obtain court orders. Sue. Get them out.
I’ll be watching. You better at least try. Or I will have no problem doing all I can to support primary challengers to as many of you feckless, cowardly, and corrupt Uniparty worms next year as humanly possible. The nation’s black mood is on my side, not yours. Words to the wise. Do your jobs!
Image: American under attack. (American map by George Hodan. Public domain. Military Missile from freeiconspng.)
Biden has lied about so much that I am not sure if he ever told the truth or is now even capable of doing so. Thanks to Big Tech's and Big Media's suppression of his record, he can present himself as a man of character and high morals. We must feel sorry for the multitude of gullible Americans who believe him. MARK CHRISTIAN
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
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
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
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…”
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations are cheering on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would pack the United States labor market with more foreign visa workers for business to hire over American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are out of work today and hundreds of thousands of U.S. graduates enter the labor market every year looking for white-collar professional jobs with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Employees of tech companies in San Francisco, California, can’t leave the city fast enough, fleeing for the potential tech hubs of tomorrow such as Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida. One former San Francisco exec said: “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been fielding inquiries from top executives in the tech world, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a report by NBC News.
The report added that the mayor has also met with former Google Chairman and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt, and the chairman of Palantir, Peter Thiel, among others.
“There is absolutely no doubt that a big part of the reason why they are moving is that they feel that there is an inhospitable environment for regulation and taxation,” said Suarez.
Miami is not the only city experiencing this type of migration, as tech employees from San Francisco are fleeing to other states offering them better opportunities as well.
Tech workers living in San Francisco had once believed that the high rent, high taxes, long commute to work, and rude neighbors were worth it if they could live in “the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world,” reported SFGATE.
But now, in the wake of the pandemic, tech workers can’t flee the city fast enough, as spending months working remotely in other towns has shown them that the quality of life can be higher elsewhere.
“Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school,” noted SFGATE.
And so they fled to more affordable places, like Georgia, and states with no income taxes, like Texas and Florida. The report added that the number one choice of relocation for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas.
John Gardner, the founder and CEO of the remote personal training startup Kickoff — who fled San Francisco for Miami Beach — told SFGATE that he can’t help but wonder, “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
As for Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, the tech worker said that he and his wife moved into a $1.3 million house that he “only saw on video for 20 minutes.”
“It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money,” added Rothermel.
Justin Kan, who co-founded Twitch, tweeted to his followers in August last year, asking them where he should move.
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” asked Kan.
We're selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?
“Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society,” responded Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir.
Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.
“You start to feel stupid,” said Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup, of living in San Francisco. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
Boydas and his family ended up moving to Austin, where they were able to buy a five-bedroom home on an acre of land for the same price they were paying for their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, California.
‘We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Boydas also noted that his bills are lower, too, such as the water bill, trash bill, and the cost of dining out at a restaurant with his family — adding that he didn’t even know that there were no income taxes when he moved.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error — there’s no tax line here,” said Boydas. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.'”
The report added that there are currently 33,000 members in a Facebook group called “Leaving California,” as well as 51,000 members in its sister group, “Life After California.” In the groups, people share photos of moving trucks, and links to property listings in new cities.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” said Terry Gilliam, the founder of both Facebook groups.
Bear Kittay, the co-founder Good Money, echoed those sentiments, and even acknowledged that some people may find themselves relocating to “a place that is more conservative.”
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” said Kittay of San Francisco.
“A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity,” he added. “And maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue.”
President Joe Biden plans to fix the border meltdown by inviting economic migrants to come in legally, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said in a conversation with Stephen Miller, the former immigration deputy in President Donald Trump’s White House.
The legal changes are buried in the Democrats’ Build Back Better bill, which is scheduled for a House vote as early as Friday, November 5.
If the Democrats’ bill becomes law, Biden “is going to be able to say, ‘Hey, we got the border under control,'” Blackburn told Miller.
“Well, no,” she added. “What [Biden] did was to open a door over here where [he’s] going to let people pay $2,500 … Come in, get citizenship, and then reap the benefits,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to be changing law in a reconciliation budget bill,” she added. Democrats “know this would never pass, so they’re going to try to get this provision through in the [fast-track] budget bill, and we want to get the word out on it.” Miller responded:
It’s really important that people speak out about this as much as they can. As you know from personal experience, most Democrats in Congress just do what they’re told by [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and do not exercise any independent thought whatsoever.
Miller described the pending immigration changes in the Democrats’ bill.
“Little attention has been given to the immigration provisions, which are truly breathtaking in scope and would completely, completely, reorder American society,” he said, adding:
First, and simplest really, is a giant amnesty for most of the nation’s illegal immigrant population …
The second is a very shocking provision, which I know you, Senator, have been very concerned about, which allows people to effectively Buy American citizenship for a relatively small fee …
How does it do this? Under federal law, there are some categories of immigration that are expressly capped [at roughly one million per year for all legal immigration].
These categories include chain migration and foreign workers [hired by U.S. companies]. So there are specific [annual] caps Congress has established on both of these to ensure that there isn’t unlimited immigration, that there’s some measure of control, as every society has. In fact, a lot of people would argue, if anything, that the caps are too generous.
What this bill does is, it says even if you can’t get into the country right away — because there’s a [annual] cap on chain migration or a cap on foreign-worker migration, for a fee of $2,500 for a family of chain migrants, or for a fee of $5,000 for foreign workers — that would primarily be in the big tech space — you can get a green card, come to America, stay here for life.
So literally, an unlimited number of people can come into the country for this fee, be put on a path to citizenship, no special criteria, no merit-based sorting, no demonstration of any particular contribution. It’s just “Give the money and get in.”
It will mean that if you’re a college student graduating in Tennessee and you want to go work for one of these big technology companies, make a great living, and be able to support your family, [the companies] can just instead go get a foreign worker for much less than they would pay an American worker.
That I think is a great tragedy, and I’m frankly astonished that this has been put in the bill without getting any real national attention.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) also focused on the section’s impact for American technology grads in a November 3 op-ed at Fox News.
The current draft of the Democrat’s bill also includes a nearly unprecedented assault on the livelihoods of American tech workers. In service of their big money donors, Democrats intend to authorize green cards for hundreds of thousands of foreign tech workers. On day one, Democrats want to open the floodgates to 200,000 such workers.
The tech industry has been subsidized with cheap foreign labor for long enough. Silicon Valley should invest in upskilling the American workforce instead of using their money to lobby Congress for a new giveaway.
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) is also calling attention to the bill’s green-cards-for-cash rule.
Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents. Migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture.
Joe Biden is promising to deliver more of India’s contract workers — plus an unlimited supply of tech graduates — to the small but growing Indian community in the United States.
“He will increase the number of visas offered for permanent, work-based immigration based on macroeconomic conditions and exempt from any cap recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields,” says a new page on Biden’s campaign website. The page is titled “Joe Biden’s Agenda for the Indian American [sic] Community.”
The document touts his choice for Vice President, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Her mother was Indian, and he promises to put Indian visa workers on a fast track to green cards:
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires &
Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are
ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
By Michelle Malkin and John Miano
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.
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
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 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
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 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.
“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.
Valley Insiders Added to Biden Transition Team
ALLUM BOKHARI
After an election year in which the tech giants repeatedly interfered in the election against President Donald Trump, Joe Biden is now rewarding Silicon Valley by appointing insiders to a range of roles in his transition team.
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for nationalimmigration policy — which seeks to drive uplegal and illegal immigration levels to theirhighest levels in decades — offers a floodedlabor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by WallStreet.
Biden has lied about so much that I am not sure if he ever told the truth or is now even capable of doing so. Thanks to Big Tech's and Big Media's suppression of his record, he can present himself as a man of character and high morals. We must feel sorry for the multitude of gullible Americans who believe him. MARK CHRISTIAN
Zuckerberg Mentor Roger McNamee Calls for Criminal Probe of Facebook
At this year’s Web Summit conference, early Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, Roger McNamee, called for a criminal probe into Facebook. One of McNamee’s six proposed criminal investigations of Mark Zuckerberg’s company is that the company “allowed human trafficking on its platform and was ‘paid to enable it to happen.'”
Business Insider reports that speaking at this year’s Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, longtime Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, Roger McNamee, called for a criminal probe of the tech giant. In fact, McNamee called for six different criminal investigations and prison sentences for executives found responsible.
American businessman, venture capitalist and former Facebook investor Roger Burroughs McNamee poses during a photo session in Paris, on September 19, 2019. (Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)
The Web Summit conference, which hosts as many as 80,000 people some years, was opened this year by far-left “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, who told an audience of 20,000 that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should step down.
“Whistleblower”Frances Haugen dishes on Facebook (Jim Watson/Getty)
“They were putting lives in jeopardy … Facebook is currently prioritizing content in the news feed that has a side effect of prioritizing and amplifying the most extreme and divisive content,” she said. She was met with a huge round of applause.
The next day, McNamee sat down with Guardian journalist Jane Martinson before an audience of around 1,000. McNamee has been attempting to raise concerns about Facebook’s actions for years. In 2018, McNamee stated in an interview that Facebook is designed to make users angry and scared, stating: “All the content is stuff that you like, right? It’s what they [Facebook] think you like. But what it really is, is stuff that serves their business model and their profits. And making you angry, making you afraid, is really good for Facebook’s business. It is not good for America. It’s not good for the users of Facebook.”
Speaking at the Web Summit, McNamee outlined the six areas where he believes “felony investigations are warranted.” Business Insider reports that McNamee’s list includes:
The US Securities and Exchange Commission should look at Facebook’s failure to disclose information about its business.
Facebook allowed human trafficking on its platform and was “paid to enable it to happen”
Facebook’s management was “complicit” in the “Stop the Steal” campaign which led to the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill.
The company is the subject of a state attorney general investigation in Texas into whether Facebook worked with Google to fix prices. “The standard penalty for that is three and a half years in prison for all of the executives and it is the clearest cut case of price fixing in the United States in decades,” he railed.
McNamee did not include the final two areas he believe should be investigated by the federal government on his list.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com.
