Donald Trump

For Donald Trump, Time is Up on Hire American

Article title: 
For Donald Trump, Time is Up on ‘Hire American’
Article author: 
Joe Guzzardi
Article publisher: 
NOOZHAWK
Article date: 
Sun, 10/04/2020
Article importance: 
Medium
Article body: 

Three years ago, President Donald Trump issued his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order. But as the Nov. 3 election draws closer, many critics insist that he has come up short on his promise to “hire American.”

Trump’s myriad critics cynically joke that COVID-19 has been more effective at slowing the foreign-born worker influx, especially in the tech sector, than the hapless White House.

Through executive order, Trump pledged to protect American workers’ economic interests by creating tighter labor markets. Fewer international employment-based visa holders mean that U.S. workers will benefit from a more limited labor pool.

But in the end, the pandemic did more to help U.S. tech workers unfairly forced to compete with H-1B visa holders than Trump’s administrative bluster.

Because international university student enrollment has dropped precipitously to about 150,000 from the 2019 level of 400,000, future opportunities for U.S. graduates will increase dramatically.

Sept. 10 Bloomberg article, “COVID-19 Interrupts Flow of Foreign Students to U.S.,” panicked the pro-immigration lobby of universities, cheap labor-addicted corporations and immigration lawyers.

An Institute for International Education study that polled 520 U.S. universities and colleges found that about 50 percent reported international enrollment declines, some of them steep. The Bloomberg reporter noted that many international students, who arrived on F-1 visas, decide to “stick around.” Therein lies the rub.

The F-1 student visa originated in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. As originally intended, a student would secure his F-1 visa, come to the United States, earn his degree and then return to his native land to improve his country’s economic future.

Today, however, an F-1 student who graduates with a science, math, engineering or technology degree (STEM) can apply for an Optional Practical Training (OPT) permit that allows him to work in the United States for three years. At that

In other words, the F-1 visa, which initially had to be renewed annually, has become, in some cases, the first step in a path to citizenship.

DACA Drags On

Article title: 
DACA Drags On
Article author: 
Mark Krikorian
Article publisher: 
National Review
Article date: 
Thu, 07/30/2020
Article expiration date: 
Thu, 12/31/2020
Article importance: 
Medium
Article body: 

DACA is shaping up to be like the Spanish-American War tax or Jim Geraghty’s USDA Agency of Invasive Species — an almost unkillable absurdity.

Since the first days of this administration, I’ve been trying to hold the president to his unequivocal promise to terminate the unlawful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program “on Day One.” The White House was afraid to follow through, but eventually, on Day 228, DHS rescinded (with a wind-down period) the Obama-era memo that granted work permits to roughly three-quarters of a million illegal immigrants who came here before age 16.

What no one anticipated at the time were the lengths to which our lawless courts would go to keep DACA in place; my colleague Andrew Arthur includes a DACA timeline in a piece today. The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 last month (guess who was number five) that DACA — a program pulled out of thin air, with no basis in statute or regulation — could only be rescinded by jumping through the hoops of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which is supposed to be for promulgating and changing formal regulations, not ephemeral (not to mention illegal) policy directives.

This week, the administration finally responded to the absurd SCOTUS ruling with a plan for coming up with a rescission order that won’t give John Roberts any pretext for continuing to delay the termination of the program. In the meantime, the new DHS directive allows DACA to continue, though with no new applications, with a renewable duration of only one year from the current two years, and ending the practice of granting “advance parole” to DACAs (which facilitates the conversion of DACA’s amnesty-lite to the amnesty-premium of a green card). In addition, DHS has proposed charging a fee for DACA renewals; currently there is no fee for DACA itself, only for the work permit and fingerprinting. This would raise the total cost of renewing DACA from $495 to $765 (which is still only about half of what it actually costs to process the package of DACA applications, meaning the rest is poached from fees paid by legal immigrants).

Some immigration hawks were disappointed that DHS isn’t just pulling the plug on DACA immediately. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, said that “conservatives are right to be disappointed that DACA continues to live on.” But as the OG Squeaky Wheel for ending DACA, I actually think the administration is approaching this the only way it can. Since any new rescission order will receive a judicial colonoscopy, DHS needs to make sure to polish its every emanation and penumbra. None of that should be necessary for the simple rescission of a memo, but that’s the hand that’s been dealt.9

 

 

 

Trump's golden opportunity to defend American workers

Article title: 
Trump's golden opportunity to defend American workers
Article subtitle: 
Article author: 
Joe Guzzardi
Article publisher: 
The News-Herald
Article date: 
Fri, 04/10/2020
Article expiration date: 
Sat, 10/10/2020
Article importance: 
High
Article body: 

The Trump administration has an historic opportunity to find out, once and forever, if Silicon Valley employers are truly dependent on imported foreign labor.

The 2020 lottery that will grant 85,000 new H-1B visas is over and done. But imagine that President Trump did the right thing, and announced that allowing 85,000 new workers into the U.S. during this period of rising unemployment (which the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank predicted may exceed 32 percent) is against the best interests of the U.S. President Trump could add, truthfully, that to allow 85,000 overseas workers into the U.S. as the coronavirus rages on would unnecessarily expose them to dangerous and possibly fatal health risks.

Although immigration advocates would oppose visa restrictions even though unemployment and health crises grow greater daily, they would look foolish and self-serving. The Indian lobby, nevertheless, has taken the extraordinary step of asking a federal judge to commandeer immigration-making decisions from President Trump and suspend the routine visa deadlines for about 2 million workers.

President Trump should allow foreign-born workers whose H-1B visas have expired to self-deport instead of, as the Indian lobby has requested, extending by six months their grace period. Under the H-1B guidelines, unemployed H-1B visa holders have 60 days to find another job or return home.

ICE ready to deport 1 million illegal aliens with final deportation orders

Article title: 
ICE ready to deport 1 million illegal aliens with final deportation orders
Article subtitle: 
Article author: 
John Binder
Article publisher: 
Brietbart News
Article date: 
Sun, 07/07/2019
Article expiration date: 
Sun, 12/01/2019
Article importance: 
High
Article body: 

Acting United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ken Cuccinelli says the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is ready to deport about a million illegal aliens who remain in the country despite having final orders for deportation.

During an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Cuccinelli said despite a delay of mass deportations by President Trump two weeks ago, ICE agents are ready to detain and deport the roughly one million illegal aliens who have been ordered deported from the country.

Cuccinelli said:

[ICE agents are] ready to just perform their mission which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders. They’ve been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort or not is really just information kept within ICE. [Emphasis added]

Cuccinelli said mass deportations by ICE of illegal aliens with final deportation orders “should be going on on a rolling basis” and blamed “the politics of Washington” for interfering with ICE operations.

“I’m just pointing out that the pool of those with final removal orders is enormous,” Cuccinelli said. “It’s important to note, here we are talking about ICE doing its job as if it’s special. And really this should be going on on a rolling basis for ICE and they’ve been interfered with, effectively, and held up by the politics of Washington to a certain extent…”

Trump, last month, delayed a plan by ICE to mass deport about 2,000 illegal aliens who had final deportation orders after details of the operation were leaked to the media. Former ICE Director Thomas Homan accused Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan of leaking the plans of the ICE raid in order to halt the operation.

Mark Pocan: Master of deceit on immigration policy

Rep. Mark Pocan continues to leave his constituents guessing as to where he stands on the nation’s federally-created immigration crisis. Read more about Mark Pocan: Master of deceit on immigration policy

Republicans Vote to Gut Enforcement, Increase Foreign Workers

Article title: 
Republicans Vote to Gut Enforcement, Increase Foreign Workers
Article subtitle: 
The DHS funding bill shows the skewed priorities of GOP appropriators
Article author: 
Mark Krikorian
Article publisher: 
National Review
Article date: 
Fri, 07/27/2018
Article expiration date: 
Sat, 09/01/2018
Article importance: 
High
Article body: 

The House Appropriations Committee this week approved the Department of Homeland Security funding bill for fiscal year 2019 (starting October 1, 2018), after considering a raft of amendments. This is not necessarily the final product; the bill will likely be amended further if and when considered by the full House of Representatives, and again when the House and Senate confer on reconciling their respective versions of the legislation.

Nevertheless, at this stage the DHS appropriations bill, passed Wednesday on a party-line vote of 29–22, is a snapshot of priorities of this most important committee. And it contains several harmful provisions that would increase illegal immigration and the importation of foreign workers on “temporary” visas — provisions passed with the support of the Republican chairmen of the full committee and its Homeland Security subcommittee.

The following is not necessarily an exhaustive listing of its immigration-related provisions, but it highlights the most important ones.

Funding levels. The provision most remarked on is the $5 billion for “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure,” i.e., construction of an estimated 200 miles of border barriers, without the restrictions that are in the current-year funding bill that prevent use of funds for anything like a wall.

The bill also funds more than 400 additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and increases the number of detention beds by more than 3,000 over the current level, to 44,000. That said, the funds approved are very different from what the administration requested. The mostly non-immigration part of ICE, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is given about 17 percent more funding than the administration requested, while Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which handles deportations, is given 19 percent less than requested.

Asylum standards. The worst mischief comes in the amendments. Among those added in Wednesday’s markup, perhaps the most damaging is one introduced by Representative David Price (D., N.C.), supported by Representative Kevin Yoder (R., Kan.), chairman of the panel’s Homeland Security subcommittee, and approved by voice vote. The measure prevents U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) from implementing the attorney general’s ruling regarding eligibility for asylum.

When Democrats cry 'Abolish ICE,' they really mean 'abolish borders'

Article title: 
When Democrats cry 'Abolish ICE,' they really mean 'abolish borders'
Article author: 
Mark Krikorian
Article publisher: 
The Hill
Article date: 
Wed, 07/04/2018
Article expiration date: 
Sat, 12/01/2018
Article importance: 
High
Article body: 

Are we going to have immigration limits or not?

That's the question underlying the calls for the abolition of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE), the bureau within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for upholding our immigration rules away from the borders.

The push to #AbolishICE is threatening to become a litmus test for Democratic politicians. It has been embraced by presidential hopefuls like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand(D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as other far-left figures such as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, actress-turned-New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, and a number of House members.

Despite the efforts of some senior Democrats to try to tamp down the anti-borders fervor of their base for fear of political backlash, the energy in the Democratic party is clearly on the far left. In the words of activist Sean McElwee, a co-founder of AbolishICE.org:

"I believe that every Democrat running in the 2020 Presidential Election will have to articulate a vision of a world without ICE."

Don't mistake the Democrats' outrage as true compassion for immigrant children

Article title: 
Don't mistake the Democrats' outrage as true compassion for immigrant children
Article author: 
Jonette Christian
Article publisher: 
Bangor Daily News
Article date: 
Mon, 07/09/2018
Article expiration date: 
Sat, 12/01/2018
Article importance: 
High
Article body: 

Democrats have a solution for illegal immigration: Abolish ICE. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, is drafting legislation to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and five Democrats are joining him. Looking at the recent protest signs in Portland, this idea is taking off. Well, it’s a novel idea. No police, no lawbreakers. No Border Patrol. No border.

So, how did we get caught between separating children from their parents and abolishing ICE? As a child therapist, I’m keenly aware of the trauma that’s caused when children are separated from their parents. And I don’t support it.

But since the 1990s, between 6,000 and 10,000 migrants, including children, have died miserable deaths along our southern border. Millions of families have been separated as the parents came north to get better paid jobs and provide wealthy Americans with an abundant stream of cheap labor as nannies, landscapers, house cleaners and so on. The negative impact on children and family structure of migrating providers is well documented by academics, and many children have been abandoned entirely by fathers who started new families in America.

Prior to President Barack Obama’s “catch and release” policies, 90 percent of illegal migrants were single men, who, if caught, faced incarceration until their cases were heard. But the number of children brought to the border exploded when people realized that with a child they would be released into the interior with an appointment for a future hearing, and many never showed up. In addition, these policies created business opportunities for drug gangs who moved into smuggling children and using children to carry drugs.

So, where was public shock and moral outrage on behalf of children all these years?

Why do we need more people in this country, anyway?

Article title: 
Why do we need more people in this country, anyway?
Article subtitle: 
Article author: 
Michael Anton
Article publisher: 
The Washington Post
Article date: 
Thu, 06/21/2018
Article expiration date: 
Tue, 12/25/2018
Article importance: 
Medium
Article body: 

As Capitol Hill Republicans attempt for — what, the eighth? ninth? — time in the past two decades to jam through an amnesty that their voters have explicitly, loudly and repeatedly said they do not want, it’s worth asking a question that is rarely raised:

Does the United States — population 320 million and rising — need more people? If so, why?

To most ears, the question sounds blasphemous, which illustrates the rottenness of our immigration debate. Actually, “debate” is far too generous. One side has made sure that there is no debate. Good people want more immigration, and bad people object or raise questions. An inherently political issue has been effectively rendered religious, with the righteous on one side, sinners on the other.

The basic question remains. The pat answer over the past 20 years — “to do the jobs Americans just won’t do” — may seem to have some salience with a 3.9 percent unemployment rate. But that only further raises the question. After at least two decades of wage stagnation and even decline, now that we’ve finally reached the nirvana of full employment (and who knows how long it will last), why not take advantage of this tight labor market to raise wages across the board? Especially for the working and middle classes that got nowhere or even lost ground during the housing, finance and tech booms of recent years?

 
 

 

Trump administration in ‘informal’ talks with allies to take more Venezuelan refugees

Article title: 
Trump administration in ‘informal’ talks with allies to take more Venezuelan refugees
Article subtitle: 
Article author: 
Franco Ordonez
Article publisher: 
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Article date: 
Thu, 04/12/2018
Article expiration date: 
Sat, 09/01/2018
Article importance: 
Medium
Article body: 

WASHINGTON 

The Trump administration has begun informal talks with partner countries in Latin America about the United States taking in some refugees from Venezuela, a potential turnaround from its tough stance on accepting refugees from conflict-torn countries.

A senior administration official told McClatchy that while no agreements have been struck and details were scarce, U.S. officials have begun these talks “informally” as part of a larger strategy to address the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Venezuelans whose numbers threaten to destabilize partner countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Those conversations are happening,” a senior administration official said. “I’m not prepared to speak to where we’re going with those yet, but it’s certainly something that we’re looking at in terms of how the region generally is going to be absorbing all of these people flowing out of Venezuela.”

 

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