Chicago has reportedly taken meetings with illegal alien advocates from St. Louis, Missouri, about a deal to ship thousands of border crossers from the Windy City to the Gateway City.
EAGLE PASS, Texas — According to a source within CBP, the influx of Special Interest Migrants across the U.S./Mexico border continues early in the NEW fiscal year as nearly 100 Syrian and 50 Iranian nationals have been apprehended by the Border Patrol since the beginning of October. The source says the influx of Syrian and Iranian Special Interest Migrants is concerning, considering the turmoil unfolding in the Middle East.
The Syrian and Iranian migrants were apprehended in multiple sectors across the southwest border during October. The latest arrest of an Iranian national by the Border Patrol occurred near Eagle Pass, Texas, on Saturday. The Iranian national was discovered within a single group of more than 300 that crossed into the small border city. A debrief of the Iranian migrant is pending as of press time, according to the source.
The source says the continued encounter of Syrian and Iranian nationals is more concerning considering the recent U.S. air strikes against Iran-linked sites in Syria in response to drone and missile attacks on U.S. military bases in the region. According to the source, the arrivals of Special Interest Migrants at the southwest border are appearing with little to no advance intelligence warning.
“We are receiving no advance warning of the arrival of Special Interest Migrants from the region with any specificity,” the source explained. “We are left to sort through the grab-bag of migrants in small and large groups to figure out who is in the group and why they are coming.”
Eleven Special Interest Migrants from Middle Eastern countries were apprehended in just one sector of the border patrol in one week alone.
As reported by Breitbart Texas, during the week of October 8 to October 14, Border Patrol agents apprehended six Iranian nationals, three Lebanese nationals, one Egyptian national, and one Saudi Arabian national that made landfall in Texas on the banks of the Rio Grande in the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector that includes Eagle Pass.
The Syrian and Iranian Special Interest Migrants are mostly single adult males. Both countries are subject to travel warnings by the U.S. State Department. The State Department has issued a Level-4 advisory regarding travel to Syria due to terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, armed conflict, and the risk of unjust detention.
Iran is also subject to a Level-4 travel warning by the State Department due to the risk of kidnapping and the arbitrary arrest and detention of U.S. citizens.
The source says, absent any significant intelligence indicting a Special Interest migrant may pose a known threat to the United States, they are generally released into the U.S. to pursue asylum claims.
As reported by Breitbart Texas, more than 61,000 Special Interest Migrants were encountered by the Border Patrol in Fiscal Year 2023, which ended on September 30. The number of migrants from Special Interest countries climbed by more than 140 percent from Fiscal Year 2022, when more than 25,500 were apprehended. In all, more than 86,000 Special Interest migrants have illegally entered the United States in the previous two fiscal years.
According to a 2019 DHS fact sheet, the term “Significant Interest Alien” is defined as follows:
Generally, an SIA is a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests. Often, such individuals or groups employ travel patterns known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism. DHS analysis includes an examination of travel patterns, points of origin, and/or travel segments that are tied to current assessments of national and international threat environments.
This does not mean that all SIAs are “terrorists,” but rather that the travel and behavior of such individuals indicate a possible nexus to nefarious activity (including terrorism) and, at a minimum, provide indicators that necessitate heightened screening and further investigation. The term SIA does not indicate any specific derogatory information about the individual – and DHS has never indicated that the SIA designation means more than that.
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.
Chuck Schumer: Amnesty and Migrants Prevent Labor Shortages
226AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
NEIL MUNRO
Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Monday amnesty and migrants are needed to prevent labor shortages.
Schumer made his claim as many employers say they must raise wages for Americans in a national labor shortage.
Since early 2020, many Americans quit their jobs in low-wage sectors, such as bars, restaurants, retail stores and for home-healthcare contractors. That resulting labor shortage has boosted wages for millions of blue-collar Americans.
Schumer spoke the morning after the Senate’s debate referee, the Parliamentarian, blocked the Democrats from putting an amnesty for illegal migrants in a special funding bill. The bill can pass with only 51 votes instead of the usual 60 votes in the Senate.
Schumer said:
The last year and a half … have shown how vital our [illegal] immigrants have been to keeping our economy going during the time of crisis … We’re short of workers from one end of America to the other — one of the reasons? The Trump administration dramatically cut back on immigrants in this country. We need them. We need them in our labor force. We need them to continue American vitality. We need them because they’re part of the American dream.
Schumer sought to shame Americans into supporting the mass migration policies which allow New York’s employers and landlords to become reliant on plentiful and cheap legal immigrants and illegal migrants:
It’s estimated in my city [New York] by some that one-third of the healthcare workers at the height of COVID who risked their lives for us were immigrants. Having a strong law that helps our immigrants is vital. The American people understand that fixing our broken immigration system is a moral imperative [emphasis added] and an economic imperative.
Immigration reform has been one of the most important causes of my time in the Senate, and I will not stop fighting to achieve it.
Schumer blamed President Donald Trump’s 2020 curbs on migration for the labor shortage. But that admission indirectly credits Trump’s 2020 policy with helping to raise 2021 wages for millions of Americans.
Schumer’s claim the economy needs migrants is in direct contradiction to President Joe Biden’s inconsistent support for wage raises amid labor scarcity, technically known as “a tight labor market.”
Biden, age 78, explained his support for the long-standing and very popular goal of a tight labor market in a May 28 speech:
Rising wages aren’t a bug; they’re a feature. We want to get — we want to get something economists call “full employment.” Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract wrk. We want the — the companies to compete to attract workers.
[…]
Well, wait until you see what happens when employers have to compete for workers. Companies like McDonald’s, Home Depot, Bank of America, and others — what do they have to do? They have to raise wages to attract workers. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Many economists say labor shortages make the economy more efficient and productive per person.
“The labor scarcity we’re experiencing is real … [but] this is an opportunity, not a crisis,” David Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a September 4 op-ed for Schumer’s home-town newspaper, the New York Times. He continued:
Couldn’t raising wages spur employers to automate many low-paid service jobs? Yes — but that’s not bad. There’s no future in working the fry station at White Castle. We should welcome the robot that’s now doing that job at some locations. Automating bad jobs has positive consequences for productivity. When employers pay more for human labor, they have an incentive to use it more productively … And one way to use people more productively is to train them. This may be one reason that employers provide more training opportunities in a tightening labor market — something happening now.
However, lobbyists have persuaded Biden to back the amnesties that would deliver roughly six million workers — at least — into many of the jobs needed by Americans.
To a large extent, Biden has been pushed to back amnesties — and to forget about tight labor markets — because of face-to-face pressure by lobbyists from Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group of West Coast investors.
On September 17, Biden’s economic advisors downplayed the wage damage to Americans as they issued a pro-amnesty memo. Notably, the memo did not endorse lobbyists’ claims that an amnesty would raise wages for Americans, and promised that wage losses would disappear “in the longer run.”
People attend a protest supporting DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, at Foley Square in New York, on August 17, 2021. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
The economic damage caused by migration to Americans was made clear September 1, when several Americans and illegal immigrant were drowned in the their cheap basement apartments in New York. The apartments were all they could afford in a city where migration has swelled real-estate values.
The New York Times posted an article on September 2, which was discreetly silent about the federal government’s role in the drowning of migrants — and of poor Americans — in New York’s cheap basements:
In one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, they have offered low-income New Yorkers, including many working-class families who work in restaurants and hotels, affordable places to live. The basement apartments also provide some extra income for small landlords, many of whom are also immigrants.
[…]
Deborah Torres, who lives on the first floor of a building in Woodside, Queens, said she heard desperate pleas from the basement apartment of three members of a family, including a toddler, as floodwaters rushed in. A powerful cascade of water prevented anyone from getting into the apartment to help — or anyone from getting out. The family did not survive.
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 their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
However, donor-funded GOP leaders have downplayed the pocketbook impact of migration on Americans’ communities. Instead, they try to steer voters’ concerns towards subsidiary non-economic issues, such as migrant crime, the border wall, border chaos, and drug smuggling.
Democrats Want $5.5 Billion Bailout of New York City’s Illegal Population
fundexcludedworkers.org/
NEIL MUNRO
17 Nov 20201,148
3:37
The coronavirus crash has completely impoverished New York City’s huge illegal-migrant population, so it needs a bailout from billionaires, says a far left group of open border activists.
The advocacy group, Make the Road NY, wants to raise $5.5 billion from 120 New York billionaires to provide roughly $750 per week in aid for up to 1.2 million illegal migrants and their dependents. Numerous Democratic legislators back the campaign.
The New York Times gave the draft legislation a boost on November 15, with an excellent video report that showcased some of the unemployed, illegal migrants who were trying to earn some cash as street vendors:
On one corner, Cristina Sanchez stood forlornly at a produce stand. She had not sold a single thing. During the pandemic she had lost her job, and then her rented room, triggering a frantic hustle to survive: First she sold produce, then tacos, then produce again …
…
“This has affected my children [in Mexico] a lot,” Cristina said, as she started to cry. “I try to tell them that because there’s no steady work, whatever I make is only enough for me to survive for the day.”
The New York Times showcased one of the group’s members, “Gerardo,” a Mexican who arrived in 2006:
He decided to sell tacos de alambre — made with steak, chiles, bacon and cheese — on the street. The owner of a local deli let him use an enclosed sidewalk stand at night, free of charge. During the day it sells smoothies.
…
Gerardo’s sales have not been brisk. His tacos cost two for $5. He needs to sell at least 130 each day, a target he often misses by half.
Many excluded workers have become street vendors in the past few months as a new source of income.
Our member Gerardo, also featured, has fought to #FundExcludedWorkers after losing his job and having to sell his car to make ends meet.https://t.co/Z9AwjTqiIH
— Make the Road NY (@MaketheRoadNY) November 16, 2020
The group also wants the state legislature to approve more licenses for street vendors — even though the extra supply of vendors would reduce income for the native-born and immigrant who operate the existing stands.
The Make the Road group said its surveys showed that:
92% of respondents reported that either they or another earner in their household has lost their job or income as a result of the crisis.
84% of respondents are now themselves unemployed, with 88% of them reporting job loss due to COVID-19.
Only 5% of respondents received unemployment benefits in the last month.
90% of household cleaners had lost their jobs. Those that were working had fewer clients than usual and had lost income.
The group’s survey says that 28 percent of renters in New York pay more than 50 percent of their wages on housing in the city’s migrant-crowded neighborhoods.
The scale of the imported poverty is huge but unclear.
Make the Road claims 1.2 million people “who haven’t received any aid,” while the New York Times says the city includes roughly half a million illegals.
The leaders in New York City choose to build their service and real-estate economies on cheap imported labor, so denying wages, jobs, and home to the many Americans who did live – or want to live — in the city.
Now the coronavirus crash is threatening the city’s economy by pushing out impoverished migrants, and their departure is pressuring employers to raise wages high enough to attract Americans to jobs in New York.
New York’s problem with impoverished illegal migrants is mirrored in Boston, Massachusetts, and in Los Angeles.
Mass immigration shifts investment, jobs & wealth from the central states to the coastal states.
NY shows how Trump partly reversed the wealth transfer by curbing migration.
Yet GOP pols keep voting for immigration that makes their states poorer. #H1B https://t.co/NsKy7qY76V
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) September 19, 202
0
Democrats Want $5.5 Billion Bailout of New York City’s Illegal Population
fundexcludedworkers.org/
NEIL MUNRO
17 Nov 20201,148
3:37
The coronavirus crash has completely impoverished New York City’s huge illegal-migrant population, so it needs a bailout from billionaires, says a far left group of open border activists.
The advocacy group, Make the Road NY, wants to raise $5.5 billion from 120 New York billionaires to provide roughly $750 per week in aid for up to 1.2 million illegal migrants and their dependents. Numerous Democratic legislators back the campaign.
The New York Times gave the draft legislation a boost on November 15, with an excellent video report that showcased some of the unemployed, illegal migrants who were trying to earn some cash as street vendors:
On one corner, Cristina Sanchez stood forlornly at a produce stand. She had not sold a single thing. During the pandemic she had lost her job, and then her rented room, triggering a frantic hustle to survive: First she sold produce, then tacos, then produce again …
…
“This has affected my children [in Mexico] a lot,” Cristina said, as she started to cry. “I try to tell them that because there’s no steady work, whatever I make is only enough for me to survive for the day.”
The New York Times showcased one of the group’s members, “Gerardo,” a Mexican who arrived in 2006:
He decided to sell tacos de alambre — made with steak, chiles, bacon and cheese — on the street. The owner of a local deli let him use an enclosed sidewalk stand at night, free of charge. During the day it sells smoothies.
…
Gerardo’s sales have not been brisk. His tacos cost two for $5. He needs to sell at least 130 each day, a target he often misses by half.
Many excluded workers have become street vendors in the past few months as a new source of income.
Our member Gerardo, also featured, has fought to #FundExcludedWorkers after losing his job and having to sell his car to make ends meet.https://t.co/Z9AwjTqiIH
— Make the Road NY (@MaketheRoadNY) November 16, 2020
The group also wants the state legislature to approve more licenses for street vendors — even though the extra supply of vendors would reduce income for the native-born and immigrant who operate the existing stands.
The Make the Road group said its surveys showed that:
92% of respondents reported that either they or another earner in their household has lost their job or income as a result of the crisis.
84% of respondents are now themselves unemployed, with 88% of them reporting job loss due to COVID-19.
Only 5% of respondents received unemployment benefits in the last month.
90% of household cleaners had lost their jobs. Those that were working had fewer clients than usual and had lost income.
The group’s survey says that 28 percent of renters in New York pay more than 50 percent of their wages on housing in the city’s migrant-crowded neighborhoods.
The scale of the imported poverty is huge but unclear.
Make the Road claims 1.2 million people “who haven’t received any aid,” while the New York Times says the city includes roughly half a million illegals.
The leaders in New York City choose to build their service and real-estate economies on cheap imported labor, so denying wages, jobs, and home to the many Americans who did live – or want to live — in the city.
Now the coronavirus crash is threatening the city’s economy by pushing out impoverished migrants, and their departure is pressuring employers to raise wages high enough to attract Americans to jobs in New York.
New York’s problem with impoverished illegal migrants is mirrored in Boston, Massachusetts, and in Los Angeles.
Mass immigration shifts investment, jobs & wealth from the central states to the coastal states.
NY shows how Trump partly reversed the wealth transfer by curbing migration.
Yet GOP pols keep voting for immigration that makes their states poorer. #H1B https://t.co/NsKy7qY76V
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) September 19, 2020
Joe Biden Delivers Flood of Cheap Migrant Labor to New York
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty
NEIL MUNRO
4 Mar 20220
11:34
President Joe Biden’s deputies have delivered so many illegal migrants into New York that some of the female migrants cannot find work to pay their smuggling debts, according to claims by advocates for migrants.
“This intersection in Williamsburg, New York City, known as LaParada, or the stop, is a place where [illegal migrant Ecuadorian] women find a job for the day, primarily doing domestic work,” NBCNews.com reported on February 28. The report continues:
Every day up to 150 [illegal migrant] women wait here, bargaining for hourly pay that is often below minimum wage, according to data collected from the Workers Justice Project last year. Often these day laborers are undocumented [illegals] and in recent months, many come from Ecuador. Rosa migrated from Ecuador and eventually settled in New York city nine years ago. She still comes to La Parada at least five days a week to look for work: [She said] “Now it is very, very difficult because there are a lot of people”
With more women, looking for work there’s more competition. Desperate to find a job and with little to no English, many new arrivals don’t negotiate their rate … [NBC asked] So you were here for a month before you could get a first job? [A migrant answered] Yes, one month.
The inflow is illegal because long-standing laws passed by Congress generally bar the admission of foreign workers into Americans’ labor market.
But Biden’s deputies — chiefly, the pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas — helps tens of thousands of migrants from the country of Ecuador in South America walk through the U.S. border. Roughly 500,000 Ecuadorians walked through the southern border between 2000 and 2017, and another 97,000 Ecuadorians were recorded in 2021 while trying to cross the border.
“I left my country because of the economic situation that all of us Ecuadorians are living,” a recently released migrant told NBC.
“I’ve been here almost 34 years and I’ve never seen the wave of Ecuadorians coming in the short time,” said Walter Sinche, the executive director of the Alianza Ecuatoriana Internacional, or the Ecuadorian International Alliance. “I knew a family, for example, they came with five kids. Not only undocumented but also people that come with visa, they overstay, so that’s also a large number,” he told Breitbart News on March 2.
“Most of the ‘[female migrants arrive] with some kind of relatives, some on their own with no relatives,” said Sinche.
The female migrants are being exploited because employers pay them less than the minimum wage of $15 per hour, Sinche said “It’s a new wave of new migrants coming to the U.S. and that’s why they [employers] take advantage,” he told Breitbart News. He continued:
The minimum wage in New York, it’s $15 an hour. But since they are new in the country, the people sometimes get paid that amount and sometimes they pay them less. I know people, they get paid like $7, $8 an hour … Like I said, a new generation.
“I earned very little and it was not enough,” one of the migrant women told NBC.
State governments and federal agencies do little about wage theft against illegal migrants. The lax enforcement of labor law hels to push down wage levels for Americans. For example, NYSFocus.com reported in June 2021:
“Employers were using the pandemic as an excuse to not pay workers,” said Glendy Tsitouras, an organizer with the Workers Justice Project, a Brooklyn-based worker center that serves day laborers and domestic workers. “They would tell workers that something happened and that they will pay next week—but that never happened.”
In April of 2020 alone, Tsitouras said, her organization was flooded with between 30 and 35 cases. Pre-pandemic, they typically received around 15 cases a month.
The workplace migrant abuse tends to come from Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants, Sinche said. There are “not many” complaints about Americans “like, for example, [Americans] from Ireland, Italians, Germans,” he said, adding:
Because they’re more conscious about their past, their history and they know also their grandma, their grandparents, came to the U.S. almost the same situation and [so] they are less abusive with new migrants on a high percentage. I’m talking about new communities, the Asians, they came a little later, and they start purchasing homes, for example, in the Corona area … They [are] not bueno, can be really bad … mainly Chinese … I’m just talking about the facts of what people have been telling me … They take advantage of new migrants and also basically if you’re trying to claim [legal protections] they say they will call immigration.
New York City’s government encourages and funds illegal migration into the city, despite the damage to Americans’ wages and housing costs. In September 2021, for example, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared:
The last year and a half … have shown how vital our [illegal] immigrants have been to keeping our economy going during the time of crisis … We’re short of workers from one end of America to the other — one of the reasons? The Trump administration dramatically cut back on immigrants in this country. We need them. We need them in our labor force. We need them to continue American vitality. We need them because they’re part of the American dream.
“The main driver of both new business formation and population growth in New York has historically been international immigration,” says a September 2020 Axios.com article. If international “immigration remains suppressed, New York will suffer,” says the article, which was titled “The math of New York City’s recovery.”
Migrants in New York need jobs to live in the expensive city, but they also need money to pay off their debts of about $15,000 to $20,000 per person.
They also need cash to re-hire the coyotes so they illegally deliver the migrants’ children to them via the federal government’s Unaccompanied Alien Children child-delivery program.
If the migrants cannot get jobs, they cannot pay their smuggling debts, Sinche said. “All over, coyotes are lending money [to migrants] but they have to sign a document saying ‘If you’re not paying [the debt], I’ll take your land or house or any other property,'” he said. When the debt is not paid, “most of the time, they ended up taking the properties … That’s a corrupt system that’s happening in Ecuador.”
If the women cannot get jobs, they also cannot save enough money to pay coyotes to bring their children to U.S. border officials, Sinche said.
The rise in Ecuadorian migration during 2021 is partly caused by migrants hiring coyotes to deliver their children to the border, William Murrillo told BorderReport.com in August 2021. “It’s parents who haven’t seen their children in many years and send for them,” said Murillo, a former government official in Ecuador who now runs a binational legal firm for Ecuadorians.
Murillo’s “personal experience as an undocumented migrant marked his life and he decided to serve our community of Ecuadorians in the world,” according to the firm’s website.
The migrants try to save wages for debt payments by crowding into apartments, Sinche said. “They have to struggle — they cannot afford to spend too much money … because they want to save,” he said.
“For example, a two-bedroom apartment, it’s supposed to be for a family, maybe two [people per bedroom. But now] sometimes, it is five to six or seven in a two-bedroom apartment,” he said. Rents are “way too crazy, especially here in the area of Queens Corona. A single studio will go for $1,500 to $1,600, and a two-bedroom, sometimes it goes to 2000 to $2,400,” which is up about $150 since rents declined during the coronavirus crash, he said.
City officials do not stop landlords from subdividing apartments to extract more rent, he said. In an August rainstorm, 11 migrants drowned in their basement apartments.
Migrant men are in a better position because they can take construction jobs, Sinche added. “They do pretty good,” said Sinche, who offers government-designed safety training to the illegal migrants.
Without domestic work, some women are trying to get construction jobs, he said.
What I find out was that women are taking the men’s positions, even construction. I just got a conversation yesterday with a couple of women that they do concrete work, they do carpentry works. I know one woman is doing electrical work. So since I’m an electrician for many years, I never seen so many Hispanics on the electrical trade, for example. I mean it’s good for them, but they do because there’s no other options to pick up my new skills.
The migrants’ money generates profits for many businesses in New York, according to Sinche: “They also pay for taxes, regardless of immigration status … they make money circulate in society … They have to eat, they have to wear clothes, they have to take transportation, [when] they get sick, they take medication.”
“They make money circulate in society,” he said.
But the huge inflow of migrants cuts Americans’ wages and raises their housing costs. A 2021 report by New York City’s government says a couple with two children would need to earn at least $154,000 to count as middle-income in the city.
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of immigrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters in the U.S. economy.
The economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while also raising their housing costs.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland states. The economic strategy also kills many migrants, separates families, and damages the economies of the home countries.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.
SILICON VALLEY IS NOW INDIA EAST!
IT'S NOT JUST HIGH TECH JOBS THEY GET. IT'S ALL BANKS, INCLUDING WELLS FAROG AND BANK OF AMERICAN, WHICH ONLY HIRES INDIANS.
And these Indians, the team that I work with, they cannot even speak a single sentence in English without making any mistakes.
“The B-1 visa is the main vehicle to cheat American [college graduates] out of jobs,” said Jay Palmer, an expert on forced labor and human trafficking, and a former advisor to President Donald Trump. He continued:
Lawsuit Exposes B-1 Visa Fraud in College-Grad Jobs
14AP Photo/Butch Dill
NEIL MUNRO
14 Apr 202383
10:43
American professional Michael Harmon has just earned about $1 million by exposing visa fraud within an Indian company that does subcontract work for Fortune 500 companies.
The company defrauded the government by importing Indian college-graduate workers on B-1 visas that are only for non-working business visitors. Harmon exposed the visa fraud and earned a share of the $9.9 million federal fine with his Qui Tam lawsuit.
The Department of Justice said:
L&T Technology Services, LTD (“LTTS”), a company based in India, with U.S. offices in Edison New Jersey, has agreed to pay $9,928,000 to resolve allegations that between 2014 and 2019, LTTS underpaid visa fees owed to the United States by acquiring inexpensive B-1 visas, rather than more expensive H-1B visas, in alleged violation of the False Claims Act.
“The B-1 visa is the main vehicle to cheat American [college graduates] out of jobs,” said Jay Palmer, an expert on forced labor and human trafficking, and a former advisor to President Donald Trump. He continued:
Companies encourage [foreign] individuals to get a B-1 visa to come to the United States and work. They work these workers on 1099s [as contractors] with no benefits and they pay them through third-party consulting companies. Sometimes, the worker will be able to get an Individual Tax Identification Number and work undetectably for 10 years.
The fraud behind this visa is more rampant than any other visa we have in the United States.
Palmer applauded Harmon the whistleblower, saying, “Being a whistleblower is not an easy task — you have to have intestinal fortitude.”
Several other B-1 qui tam lawsuits are being litigated.
Palmer is familiar with the B-1 fraud because he works with many Indians who have overstayed their visas and are looking for ways to get legal status.
The B-1 fraud is easy to accomplish and rarely detected or penalized by federal agencies, Palmer said:
All you have to do is have an outbound and a return flight to the United States –that’s all. What they do is they get an outbound flight [to the United States]… and they cancel their return, get the money and go to work.
They’re coming over here legally but becoming illegal [by working]. When they’re over here, they’re getting driver’s licenses, some are even getting Social Security numbers … they’re not supposed to, but they’re still issued.
They come to the United States and they never leave. Most people working in a convenience store are over here on B-1 visas [often working for foreign managers with E-2 visas]. Hundreds of thousands are working on white-collar jobs.
The fraud is difficult for ordinary Americans to detect — even when it is happening in the next cubicle.
The commonplace B-1 fraud is disguised amid the churning population of 1.5 million-plus foreign graduates who are working in the United States under a wide variety of legal visas.
Those temporary work visas include H-1Bs, TNs, L-1s, J-1s, and the “Optional Practical Training” work permit for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges. The legal visa workers often switch workplaces because they are employed by Indian-owned subcontractors, and often go home to avoid an obvious overstay of their temporary visas.
The B-1 fraud problem is further hidden by foreign graduates who overstay their visas to become illegal gig workers in the layers of subcontractors under Fortune 500 companies.
The huge flood of foreign college graduates is forcing down the workplace clout and the salaries of American professionals because the foreign workers will accept very low salaries to stay in the United States. In February, Bloomberg News reported:
In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.
The government-delivered inflow of foreign workers is pushing many Americans out of white-collar technology jobs and into lower-wage, blue-collar jobs.
“I have seen the [hiring] system in the backend, and it is so appalling to see that there is so much [resume] forgery being done, there’s so much of corruption being done, that it is almost to the level back in India,” Aabha, an Indian contract worker in North Carolina, told Breitbart News. She continued:
I have met so many [American] people who are graduates and so much more knowledgeable than the Indians that I see in my regular day — and they are [saying] like “Okay, because we are not experienced, we are not getting [U.S. technology] jobs.” So they decide to do a blue collar job. They’re walking into Walmart, they’re walking into Best Buy.
And these Indians, the team that I work with, they cannot even speak a single sentence in English without making any mistakes.
Yet President Joe Biden’s officials are trying to import as many foreign workers as they can, even as Fortune 500 companies fire thousands of American professionals.
“The top 30 H-1B employers hired 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 and laid off at least 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023,” said an April 11 report by the left-wing Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Those layoffs include many visa workers, who are required by law to return home once their job disappears.
In response, Biden’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency is allowing the laid-off H-1B visa workers to get six-month B-1 visas so they have more time to win new jobs that are also being sought by U.S. graduates.
“[We are] aware, of course, of the many recent layoffs in the technology sector, [so] we published options and useful information for [foreign] employees across the country facing termination and those in this vulnerable situation,” said USCIS director Ur Jaddou said April 11.
“Searching for employment in the United States does not fall under the meaning of a legitimate business activity for the purpose of B-1 visa eligibility,” responded Elizabeth Jacobs, a lawyer with the Center for Immigration Studies.
Very few of the illegally-working B-1 graduates are deported, mostly because of Silicon Valley’s huge influence in the White House and in both parties. This week, for example, Indian media outlets reported that four House members from California are pressuring USCIS to ensure that laid-off Indian workers are not sent home. The legislators are Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Ro Khanna, Jimmy Panetta, and Kevin Mullin.
The Democrats’ support for foreign workers over their own swing-voting, college-educated voters could be an opportunity for GOP strategists. But GOP leaders show no willingness to reject the cheap-labor demands of their own business donors.
Biden’s federal agencies also make the white-collar fraud easier by bundling B-2 tourist visas with the B-1 visitor visas, Palmer said. “They should separate these and charge more for them,” he said.
“The United States issued over 16 million of these [B-1/B-2 visas] a year and they’re nontraceable, basically — this is the same visa that some of the 9/11 terrorists came in on,” Palmer added.
Breitbart has covered some of the many cases of B-1 fraud within the Fortune 500’s pyramids of Indian-managed subcontracting companies and gig workers.
In 2013, another Indian firm paid a fine of $33 million for cheating the government as it allegedly replaced American hires with smuggled Indian college graduates. But most of the B-1 fraud is tolerated by agencies, prosecutors, and politicians. In 2019, Breitbart News reported;
Infosys, one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies, allegedly cheated 500 American graduates out of jobs over 11 years from 2006 to 2017 — and will only have to pay $800,000, without admitting guilt, in a settlement with California’s attorney general.
The attorney general, Xavier Becerra, now runs the Department of Health and Human Services for President Joe Biden.
However, under President Donald Trump, the reform-minded officials in the agencies began to crack down on the B-1 fraud. “They tried but it didn’t work,” Palmer said.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, immigration chief Alejandro 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 elite opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats
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.
Report: Facebook to Cut Thousands of Jobs in Latest Corporate Downsizing
Reuters
February 22, 2023
(Reuters)—Facebook-parent Meta Platforms Inc is planning a fresh round of job cuts in a reorganization and downsizing effort that could affect thousands of workers, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last year, the social media giant said it will let go of 13% of its workforce, or more than 11,000 employees, as it grappled with soaring costs and a weak advertising market.
Meta plans to push some leaders into lower-level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management between top boss Mark Zuckerberg and the company's interns, the Washington Post reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
(Reporting by Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
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.
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
By failures of border security, a lack of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States and huge numbers of visas for high tech workers, the lives and livelihoods of Americans and their children, are being stolen by America’s corrupt political elite who are doing the bidding of those who provide them with huge “Campaign Contributions” (Orwellian euphemism for bribes) pursue legislation that is diametrically opposed to the best interests of America and Americans.
MICHAEL CUTLER
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Claims No Amnesty Ensures Midterm Defeat for Democrats
NEIL MUNRO
The Facebook-funded FWD.us investor advocacy group is touting the claim that Democrat turnout will drop in 2022 if the party cannot pass an amnesty through Congress.
But that claim is toothless, in large part because recent polls show that many Americans of Latino ancestry are increasingly voting for the GOP, precisely because GOP leaders oppose the amnesty-amplified wave of cheap labor into their communities.
The claim is being made by pro-migration groups, including the leaders of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) which denounced the Senate’s parliamentarian’s decision to exclude the parole amnesty for 6.5 million illegals from the draft Build Back Better spending plan.
NDLON declared Thursday night:
Democrats’ excuses for their failure, for their incompetence, and for their insincerity will be the ammunition used by xenophobes in the Republican Party to retake control of the federal government in upcoming elections. Inaction on immigration legalization risks further propelling Trumpism in every possible way … No more excuses. Where there is a will, there is a way.
The NDLON group represents illegal migrants, most of whom work for very low wages, and none of whom can vote in U.S. elections.
Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) is making the same claim, according to Bloomberg, which reported that he “warned that Democrats would face wrath from voters in the 2022 elections if they don’t secure a citizenship path”
But the NDLON claim is being echoed by the politically powerful investor class, who use imported workers, consumers, and renters to spike the value of their Wall Street investments.
Todd Schulte is the president of the FWD.us advocacy group for investors, which gets about $30 million a year from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to push for more migration. On Thursday night, he tweeted:
Schulte’s deputy also pushed a hard line:
Unsurprisingly, FWD.us has a hidden agenda in the amnesty debate.
The establishment media extensively cover the proposed parole amnesty for 6.5 million illegal migrants. But the media largely ignores two other proposed changes to immigration laws that would deliver huge benefits to West Coast investors who created the FWD.us advocacy group in 2013.
For example, the BBB legislation would allow the White House to provide green cards to millions of favored migrants, including perhaps three million “chain migrants” selected by recent immigrants. This open-doors policy would provide investors with millions of new profit-generating consumers, renters, and workers.
The BBB legislation would also allow President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies to sell green cards to at least one million migrants who have taken many of the Fortune 500 jobs sought by skilled U.S. college graduates. This change would allow Fortune 500 companies to hire many more foreign graduates with dangled offers of fast-track green cards. These workers are usually imported via the visa worker programs, such as the H-1B and Optional Practical Training program.
But those two benefits for the Fortune 500 investors may be dropped if the Democrat senators cannot also get their amnesty for illegal migrants.
On Friday, an advocacy group for corporate-funded immigration lawyers urged Congress to keep pushing the green card giveaway, even after the amnesty was nixed:
“The corporate guys are riding on perceived sympathy for the illegal alien population in order to get their immigration giveaways,” said Robert Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
The Hispanic population knows immigration is a pocketbook issue for them as well, and mass illegal immigration — plus legal immigration — hurts the economic opportunities of Hispanic Americans or the black community, or any people who typically are competing at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
The Senate’s debate referee has not issued any judgments on the two green card proposals.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters. The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.
FWD.us’also spotlights many family dramas amid the inflow of border migrants. This focus helps keep reporters from recognizing the huge pocketbook impact of the establishment’s economic policy of mass migration. The resulting family-drama coverage also keeps many young progressives from noticing that the extraction migration policy drives up their rents and cuts their salaries.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at other sites.
Biden’s Chief of Staff Worked on Behalf of Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas
JOHN BINDER
Democrat Joe Biden has chosen Ronald Klain to be his chief of staff should he enter the White House in January. Klain worked on behalf of Silicon Valley executives and their interests, which include providing tech corporations with an endless supply of H-1B foreign visa workers and more free trade.
Klain, who was made Biden’s incoming chief of staff this week, served on the executive council of TechNet — a firm that promotes the interests of Silicon Valley’s tech corporations in Washington, D.C. Klain served on the council alongside executives from the Oracle Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Google, Visa, Apple, and Microsoft.
TechNet, most recently, joined a lawsuit against President Trump’s reforms to the H-1B visa program that sought to prioritize unemployed Americans for jobs rather than allowing businesses to continue importing foreign workers.
TechNet is one of the groups that has filed an amicus brief to oppose the new regulations on H-1B visas. https://t.co/ofY4GJ2sVR
— U.S. Tech Workers (@USTechWorkers) November 12, 2020
Trump’s seeking to force businesses to hire Americans over importing foreign visa workers is an affront to Silicon Valley’s tech corporations, those represented by TechNet, who advocate for an endless flow of H-1B foreign visa workers.
There are about 650,000 H-1B visa workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.
TechNet’s listed immigration goals include allowing corporations to dictate the annual level of legal immigration to the United States and the elimination of per-country caps that would effectively let India and China monopolize the U.S. green card system.
The group’s goals on trade are in direct opposition to President Trump’s economic nationalist agenda that has imposed tariffs on foreign imports from China, Canada, Europe, and other parts of the globe.
TechNet’s trade goals include reducing “tariff and non-tariff barriers to information, communications, and advanced energy technology products, services, and investments” as well as “protections for the free flow of data across borders…”
While Biden has vowed to flood the U.S. labor market with more foreign workers to compete against Americans for jobs, he has shied away from questions on whether he will eliminate tariffs on foreign imports that were imposed by Trump. Such elimination of tariffs would be a boon to multinational corporations that offshore their production and jobs overseas only to import their products back into the U.S. market, often with no penalties for doing so.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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