Free Republic

If President Donald Trump can push his H-1B reforms into 2021, he will dramatically increase the marketplace power of U.S. college graduates, complains a top manager at the Fortune 500 business group the Conference Board. “If the [H-1B] suspension continues beyond 2020, recruiting high-quality tech workers could become much more difficult,” wrote Gad Levanon, who heads the group’s Labor Market Institute that has repeatedly recognized that a smaller supply of workers tends to raise wages and salaries. Under Forbes‘ headline, “Tech Workers Were Already Hard To Find. The H-1B Visa Suspension Just Made Recruiting Them Even Harder,” Levanon wrote: Hundreds...

A federal judge late Tuesday night struck down a Trump administration rule that banned most migrants from receiving asylum at the southern border with Mexico. U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly said the administration failed to follow the procedural law governing how regulations can be implemented, which requires advance notice and a period for the public to comment on the proposal. "These procedures are not a mere formality," Kelly, who was appointed by President Trump, said in his opinion. The rule was implemented last year by the Justice Department and Homeland Security in an attempt to crack down on migrants...

In January, the Trump administration issued a rule prohibiting immigration judges from speaking about their job or their take on US policy. The one exception is judges who serve in their union. But the Trump administration is also trying to decertify that union. On July 1, the National Association of Immigration Judges filed a lawsuit alleging that the administration is violating the right to free speech. "We are in the midst of an urgent public debate about immigration reform in this country and some of the most crucial voices in that debate are being silenced," Ramya Krishnan, staff attorney at...

A federal court Tuesday night upheld a challenge to the Trump administration's asylum restrictions, specifically a 2019 rule that requires seekers to ask for asylum closer to home. U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly of Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of immigrant nonprofits and asylum-seekers who argued that the rule known as the "third-country asylum rule," which was jointly published by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, violated the Immigration and Nationality Act. Kelly, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2017, agreed that in adopting the policy, the administration did not...

Joe Biden told NBC News that he would immediately lift President Donald Trump’s June 22 moratorium on the inflow of H-1B contract workers if he wins the 2020 election.

Trump “ended H1B visas the rest of this year,” Biden said in a June 27 town hall meeting organized by NBC News. “That will not be in my administration.” “The people coming on these [H-1B] visas have built this country,” Biden added. “He said the H-1Bs built this country? So the country didn’t exist before 1998? That is interesting,” responded Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA. If Biden is elected, she said...

No sooner had the ink dried on President Trump’s executive order that broadened his original April 22 immigration pause to include several categories of temporary, employment-based visas, than globalists put up a collective howl. To powerful elitists like corporate lobbyists, immigration lawyers, the donor class and some in Congress, the concept that available jobs in the United States should go to American citizens or legally present immigrants is distasteful. The visas that President Trump put on hold until the year’s end---the H-1B, the H-2B, the J-1, and the L-1---represent either a lost job that an American would do, or a...

222 miles completed, 333 miles under construction, 183 miles under pre-construction. (738 Total)

The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision that rejected environmental groups’ challenge to sections of wall the Trump administration is building along the U.S. border with Mexico. The high court on Monday declined to hear an appeal involving construction of 145 miles (233 kilometers) of steel-bollard walls along the border in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Southwest Environmental Center had challenged a federal law that allows the secretary of Homeland Security to waive any laws necessary to allow the quick construction of...

U.S. employers keep roughly 600,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in jobs throughout the United States, according to an unprecedented report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. The total number of resident H-1B workers has successfully been kept secret for decades, mainly because Fortune 500 companies do not want voters to recognize the massive outsourcing of jobs for themselves and their college graduate children.

In June, the US government suspended H-1B and other work visas for the rest of 2020. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners will no longer be able to attain work in the US as a result. This halt will deal a one-two punch to employers of computer-related occupations, which includes jobs such as software developers and computer systems analysts. First, people in this field receive the overwhelming majority of H-1B visas. Out of the nearly 400,000 H-1B petitions approved in fiscal year 2019, about two-thirds were in that line of work. Most went to software developers. Second, computer-related workers are the...

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is drawing more criticism for bashing President Trump’s decision to suspend certain visa programs until at least 2021. The executive order will suspend H-1B visas, H-2B visas, and certain other visas. The order makes some exceptions for workers who are deemed to be essential to the U.S. economy or national interest as well as the spouse or child of a U.S. citizen. The order is meant to be part of President Trump’s promise to put American workers first. “The President is taking decisive action to put American families and workers first in the reopening of the...

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday for the Trump administration in a key immigration case, determining that a federal law limiting an asylum applicant’s ability to appeal a determination that he lacked a credible fear of persecution from his home country does not violate the Constitution. The ruling means the administration can deport some people seeking asylum without allowing them to make their case to a federal judge. The 7-2 ruling applies to those who fail their initial asylum screenings, making them eligible for quick deportation. In a decision in the case of Dept. of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, the court...

HOUSTON (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday extended an order preventing the Trump administration from deporting a 16-year-old boy from Honduras under its emergency border declaration citing the coronavirus. U.S. District Judge Carl Nicholas in Washington did not rule immediately on the first challenge to a policy that has resulted in the rapid expulsions of hundreds of migrant children. Instead, he told lawyers for the government and the American Civil Liberties Union that he wanted to hear more about the case and make a final decision on the teen's fate in the near future. The judge did not set...

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is responsible for approving citizenship, work visas and other benefits for legal immigrants, has begun notifying 13,400 of its 20,000 employees that they will be furloughed beginning Aug. 3 unless Congress approves more funding, a spokesperson for the agency told NBC News. The agency runs largely on fees paid by applicants, which have been down by 50 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic and are estimated to be down by over 60 percent by the end of the fiscal year, the spokesperson said. "This dramatic drop in revenue has made it impossible...

U.S. President Donald Trump praised what he described as a “powerful and comprehensive” wall along the nation’s southern border Tuesday, highlighting one of the key promises from his successful election campaign four years ago to secure the U.S. borders. A day after ordering tighter restrictions on a variety of visa categories, Trump visited a new section of the border wall in the southwestern U.S. state of Arizona. After signing a plaque on the imposing slatted black wall at San Luis, the president, in response to a question from VOA described the new construction as “really foolproof.”  “You have everything you...

San Luis, Arizona12:46 P.M. MSTQ Can I ask question on the wall: How’s it looking?THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s great. It’s great. It’s going to be — it’s really foolproof. It’s solid steel. It’s rebar and concrete inside the steel. So we have a very heavy concrete inside the steel. And inside the concrete, we have rebar. So you have everything you could have. It’s what they wanted, and that’s what we did.Any questions?Q Mr. President, with all the problems that we’re facing right now, why are you determined to end DACA at this time — with unemployment, with...

Footage shows yobs pelting cops with rocks as a German police union boss said that "young people with a migrant background" were among those arrested. The riots on Saturday night began in reaction to the arrest of a white German 17-year-old for drugs offences - prompting hundreds of people to start attacking the police in "solidarity" with the teen. Videos from the scene even show rioters attacking paramedics who had been called to the scene, which local media described as a "battlefield". At least 40 shops had been ransacked while 19 police officers were injured in the night of horrific...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the Trump administration can move forward with expanding a procedure for quickly deporting undocumented immigrants while a lawsuit against the program moves forward. A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a preliminary injunction against the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) new rule that significantly expands the number of undocumented immigrants who can be deported without being able to make their case to an judge or accessing an attorney. The panel majority ruled that a group of nonprofits had legal standing to bring the lawsuit but that immigration law...

President Trump's executive order temporarily expanding immigration restrictions to include guest-worker programs does not go far enough, the president of the nation's largest union group said on Tuesday. "Don't just do this temporarily," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told "Mornings with Maria." "Let's do this and make it a sane system so when there's a real need we can get people, but when there isn't a real need we shouldn't be able to bring people in to lower the wages of American workers." The order Trump signed Monday is meant to open more opportunities for Americans grappling with unemployment amid the...