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There will be no immediate overhaul or reforms to the H-1B foreign guest worker visa program, according to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Thirty-one Democratic and Republican Senators are asking the Department of Homeland Security to maximize the use of blue-collar outsourcing visas so U.S. companies can import more foreign workers instead of recruiting, training and paying unskilled U.S. workers. Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), John Cornyn (R-TX), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Chris Coons (D-DE), John Barrasso (R-WY), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Susan Collins (R-ME), Tom Carper (D-DE), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Patty Murray (D-WA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Angus King (I-ME), Tim Scott (R-SC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Richard Burr (R-NC), Lisa Murkowski...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The University of California, San Francisco on Tuesday laid off 49 information technology (IT) employees and outsourced their work to a company based in India, ending a year-long process that has brought the public university under fire. The university announced the plan last July as a way to save $30 million over five years. The University of California system, which includes health care and research-focused UCSF, has been struggling to raise revenue and cut expenses. Globalization and outsourcing have become hot-button political issues in the United States, as more employers cut costs by farming out work...

Play-Doh will soon be squeezed out of a factory in the U.S. again, as Hasbro Inc. brings manufacturing of the popular moldable clay back to America for the first time in years.  Hasbro said it is working with a manufacturing partner to make Play-Doh at a facility in East Longmeadow, Mass., starting in the second half of 2018. Although the preschool clay was invented in Cincinnati in the 1950s, it hasn't been made in the U.S. since 2004. 

For decades, H1B visas have been one of the cornerstones of the traditional IT outsourcing business model. In many ways, the possibility of legally sending workers to the US has allowed Indian firms to offer an enticing service: the client gets to work face to face with less expensive engineers that are authorized to temporarily work in the US, yet can also leverage a much larger team of offshore talent that is orchestrated by the on-site, visa-holding resources. The proposition is hard to beat: not only is it inexpensive, but the model can help solve time-zone issues thanks to a...

While America's political future is steeped in uncertainty, there is no questioning what the US political establishment wants to do with the controversial H1B visa for highly-skilled workers. Three legislative bills and a soon-to-be-expected executive order may look like overkill but growing momentum against the H1B gives the impression, at first glance, that the visa program in its present form is living on borrowed time. Especially noticeable about these efforts is the fact that they transcend party lines. see also Will Donald Trump's first 100 days as president include a cybercrisis? Will Donald Trump's first 100 days as president include...

U.S. companies feel less welcome in China and some are shifting operations to other countries, a business group reported Wednesday, amid rising tension between President-elect Donald Trump and Beijing over trade. The report by the American Chamber of Commerce in China reflects frustration among companies that see China as a key market but face growing efforts to block access to technology and other promising industries. […] Communist leaders have promised to make China’s state-dominated economy more productive by opening more industries to private and foreign competitors. Business groups say such initiatives have had little impact. The American chamber said 81...

On Monday, Bret Stephens wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Doomed to Stagnate.” The article was predicated on a little-known annual survey by the World Bank known as “Doing Business,” a document that ranks the business climate of nearly every nation around the world. Most Americans might expect the largest capitalist economy in the world, the United States, to lead the pack — but they’d be wrong. In fact, most Americans might be surprised to learn that not only are we not on top, but we have become less economically competitive in the world since Obama took...

When Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, the man dubbed "Trump of the East", told U.S. businesses to pack their bags if they didn't like his anti-American rhetoric, the huge and growing outsourcing industry got a little nervous. It's now the real Donald Trump who has businesses worried here, after the U.S. president-elect vowed to bring offshored jobs home from places such as the Philippines, a big provider of back-office services for corporate America. The Southeast Asian country accounts for 12.6 percent of the global market for business-process outsourcing (BPO), which has been growing 10 percent a year for the past decade,...

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday warned that the government would punish companies seeking to move operations overseas with “consequences,” setting the stage for an unusual level of intervention by the White House into private enterprise. Trump’s remarks came as he triumphantly celebrated a decision by the heating and air-conditioning company Carrier to reverse its plans to close a furnace plant here and move to Mexico, helping keep 1,100 jobs in Indianapolis. About 800 of those were manufacturing positions that had been scheduled to move south of the border, said a person familiar with the negotiations.

WikiLeaks: Hillary Clinton Touts H-1B White-Collar Outsourcing Program Hillary Clinton repeatedly touted the H-1B white-collar outsourcing program while meeting behind closed doors with technology companies, Wall Street firms and banks during 2013 and 2014, according to a collection of her comments released by unknown hackers. “The only point I would make for the tech community is on the H1B visas, I support them. When I was a Senator from New York I supported them,” she told a meeting hosted by a software company in August 2014, according to a document apparently prepared by her campaign team.

Ford Motor Co (F.N) Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr. said on Wednesday he has met with Donald Trump to talk about the Republican presidential candidate's extensive criticism of the automaker's investments in Mexico. Ford told the Economic Club of Washington that he thought Trump's criticism of the No. 2 automaker's foreign investments were "infuriating and "frustrating" because of the company's extensive investments and employment in the United States. Trump has threatened if elected to impose hefty tariffs on Ford imports from Mexico. Ford told reporters after the event that the session with Trump was a "great meeting" that took place...

THE FALL OF ROME was a culmination of external and internal factors. GREAT WALL OF CHINA By 220AD, the Later Eastern Han Dynasty had extended sections of the Great Wall of China along its Mongolian border. This resulted in the Northern Huns attacking west instead of east. This caused a domino effect of tribes migrating west across Central Asia, and overrunning the Western Roman Empire. OPEN BORDERS Illegal immigrants poured across the Roman borders: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Alemanni, Thuringians, Rugians, Jutes, Picts, Burgundians, Lombards, Alans, Vandals, as well as African Berbers and Arab raiders. Will and Ariel Durant...

When Brahmachari Vrajvihari Sharan led his first worship service in his new job as a Hindu chaplain Sunday, he knew his audience. As the service began, he asked worshipers to clear their minds. “Close all the tabs that are open, just as you would do to a Firefox window,” he said. The comparison — of a spiritual mindset to an Internet browser — worked at once. More than 40 college students, many of whom had been up until 3 a.m. the Saturday night before this 9 a.m. service, chuckled appreciatively and fell into a reverent silence. This is Sharan’s new...

... I found it staggering that we have seen such an increase. To go from a world where about 2 percent of the people in the developed world were facing this problem to a world where somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of people in the developed world are no longer advancing is such a substantial step up. ... First of all, the rise of technology replacing jobs. We’ve seen this today. Remarkably, if you go back 500 years, there were monks who used to write out Bibles, whose jobs disappeared when the printing press came along. But what...

Remarks made by Hillary Clinton in India in 2005 favouring outsourcing, are being targeted in a political advertisement released by a pro-Donald Trump super-PAC, carrying the message, “She’s earned India’s trust.” The advertisement by the political action committee ‘Rebuilding America Now’ features Clinton, then a Senator, at a conclave hosted by an Indian media house in New Delhi in 2005. The ad plays her remarks on outsourcing in which she says: “I don’t think you can effectively restrict outsourcing, there is no way to legislate against reality so I think that the outsourcing will continue; but I don’t think there...

J.C. Penney is opening an IT office in Bangalore, India, as it restructures that critical department which was hurt during the retailer's failed reinvention in 2012 and 2013. The new IT office will have an emphasis on analytics, innovation and reporting capabilities, said Penney spokesman Joey Thomas. With some IT job functions moving to India, some jobs now performed by contract employees in Penney's Plano headquarters will be cut, but Thomas didn't say how many. Penney is hiring full-time IT engineers and analytics professionals for the new office in India and in Plano, he said.

BE A MARTIAN! Mars needs YOU! In the future, Mars will need all kinds of explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers . . . but most of all YOU! Join us on the Journey to Mars as we explore with robots and send humans there one day.

Why does North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory hate American workers? McCrory’s GOP administration is a serial offender when it comes to using tax dollars to lure Indian offshore outsourcing firms to the U.S. Deon Roberts at the Charlotte Observer reported this weekend on the state’s subsidies for companies that use or specialize in H-1B visa workers. Roberts mentioned New Jersey-based Spectra Group, which received “a $2.9 million grant to create 250 jobs in Charlotte” and then applied for 10 H-1Bs, and top outsourcing firm HCL Technologies, which snagged $19 million in state grants in 2014 and then filed initial H-1B...

It was a double whammy for Brooklyn and New York City manufacturing this week with news that 3D printer company MakerBot Industries would be laying off local workers as it shifts its production work, although not its headquarters, to China. It is doing so through St. Petersburg, Florida-based Jabil Circuit (NYSE: JBL), one of the largest contract manufacturers in the world, which has facilities in China. The reasons behind this decision are myriad. Chief among them are the competitive headwinds in the 3D consumer printer business itself, and the high cost of doing business in New York City, ..... <...