Posted on 03/04/2016 8:32:02 AM PST by ConservingFreedom
Short version: at last night’s debate the topic of H-1B visas* came up. Last night Megyn Kelly asked Donald Trump at the debate how he felt about temporary work visas now. Trump said that he loved them to death, and was softening the position found on his website. Somewhere out in the political wilderness, Senator Jeff Sessions (an H-1B visa restrictionist who is endorsing Trump solely because of Trump’s position on immigration, supposedly) immediately suffered a nosebleed from the psychic shock of this sudden, yet inevitable betrayal**. The Trump campaign had to go out and send around an email saying, No, really, forget that Trump said that. Please, please, please, forget that Trump said that. Also: Trump can’t tell the difference between a H-1B and a H-2B visa.
For the longer story? Well, let’s go to the transcripts.
KELLY: Mr. Trump, your campaign website to this day argues that more visas for highly skilled workers would, quote, “decimate American workers”. However, at the CNBC debate, you spoke enthusiastically in favor of these visas. So, which is it?
TRUMP: I’m changing. I’m changing. We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in. But, and we do need in Silicon Valley, we absolutely have to have.
So, we do need highly skilled, and one of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges. They’ll go to Harvard, they’ll go to Stanford, they’ll go to Wharton, as soon as they’re finished they’ll get shoved out. They want to stay in this country. They want to stay here desperately, they’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brain power in this country.
KELLY: So you abandoning the position on your website…
TRUMP: … I’m changing it, and I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country.
If you’re taking a strong stance on ending or at least cutting back the H-1B program – like, say, Mark Krikorian of National Review, or Michelle Malkin – this position is appalling. I want to be really careful right now, because I am of course a pro-immigration squish; but if I understand Mark Krikorian’s position here he feels that Trump is simply talking tough about immigration to please his own base, and is using the H-1B issue to signal to hypothetical*** general election donors that Trump’s not actually really into all this immigration hawk stuff. Which last part I’ll agree with, for reasons that I’ll get into later.
At any rate, Trump’s long-suffering official He Didn’t Mean It Squad had to play cleanup again:
Megyn Kelly asked about highly-skilled immigration. The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration…
– And we’ll stop there because when there are two flat-out lies in the first two sentences of your press release, there’s no point to keep going, is there? Look at the transcript again. Megyn Kelly didn’t ask about immigration. She asked about work visas. As for the high-skilled part – look, H-1B visas are for people with college degrees. One of the major criticisms of the H-1B program is that it supposedly takes away STEM jobs from Americans with equivalent skills.
Which means that the aforementioned press release shows that neither Donald Trump nor his staff knows the difference between a H-1B visa and a H-2B visa. You see, H-2B visas are for low-skill temporary work. And Donald Trump knows this, certainly, because he still uses them all the time for his hotels. Including, interestingly, in Florida. And why does Trump use H-2B visas? Well, let’s go to the transcript yet again, because Marco Rubio was able to explain the entire thing succinctly:
RUBIO: … And, here’s why he does it this way, let me explain why he (INAUDIBLE) H2-B…
TRUMP: … Wrong…
RUBIO: … Because when you bring them in this way, when you bring someone in on one of these visas they can’t go work for anybody else. They either work for you or they have to go back home. You basically have them captive, so you don’t have to worry about competing for higher wages with another hotel down the street. And, that’s why you bring workers from abroad.
Note that Marco Rubio knows exactly what a H-2B visa is. And why Donald Trump uses them (because H-1Bs and H-2Bs give companies a lot of leverage over the foreigners that they’ve hired). And this is part and parcel of the reason why some immigration hawks are a little steamed right now at Trump. Nobody likes being flat-out lied to, particularly when it’s being done in this contemptuous a fashion.
And if Trump is lying about this, it’s for certain that he’s lying about building a wall. Which you hopefully already knew, anyway. If you didn’t, well… he’s not building a wall.
Moe Lane
*For those who are not familiar with them – lucky, lucky you – H-1B visas are work visas issued to non-immigrants in specific occupations. These visas are tied to a specific job and employer, and their existence and use are a… definite part of our current robust and vigorous debate over immigration policy.
**Not really. I’m sure that he felt suddenly sick and confused, though.
***A bit more hypothetical now than before the debate, might I add. And the Trump campaign agrees with me, given how quickly they leaped to smother the fire with their own bodies.
First our current immigration system is based on family unification, with absolutely no standards other than DNA.
The H-1B program is for non-immigrants and should be eliminated for the reasons sited in the article.
If our objective is the bring in highly educated immigrants then we need to scrap the family unification preferences and shift to a education and skills based preference.
Right now our immigration system is designed to import poverty and cheep labor.
With Sessions acting as his adviser and consultant, I’m confident he will make good decisions once he has all the facts.
I’m not sure I understand why people want to lock Trump in (or Cruz, Rubio) to policies if the candidates are admitting they have re-analyzed and come up with a different answer.
Everyone still has free choice to then decide whether to support or not.
Totally false.
Almost all the elite foreign students who graduate from elite USA universities come from western Europe, Japan, Can-Aus-NZ, and the oil rich Persian Gulf.
They return home to their native countries because the pay scale and standard of living are the same or better than the USA.
If elite foreign graduates do stay in the USA, they are forced to compete for jobs against thousands of badly paid, completely average foreign students from China, India, Russia, and eastern Europe, who LEGALLY do stay in the USA.
Bottom Line - 80% of elite foreign PH.Ds return to their home country voluntarily. 80% of “average” foreign PH.Ds, who attend “average” USA universities, work in the USA for at least five years.
I agree and I’m always a little leery of candidates who have everything already figured out before they get elected.
I am voting for Trump because I think he is a natural born problem solver who will go to DC and gather experts together to figure it out and fix the problems.
And there's an inalienable natural right to cheap snowbirding? It's vital to our national defense or something?
It's not about cheap hospitality labor, it's about not enough local hospitality labor to go around.
The H-2Bs are also not local - but they work for less than Americans would ... so yes it is about cheap labor.
Perhaps this was just a trial balloon, so The Donald could gauge whether his minions were ready for the Great Switcheroo yet.
-PJ
And "elsewhere" can be within the United States, where a patriot would look ... or in foreign countries, where The Donald and his Cheap Labor cronies look.
You are not going to find many Americans from elsewhere willing to uproot themselves for five months at Thanksgiving/Christmas to be a minimum wage maid, waiter, or bartender at a Florida hotel, just to go back home again in March. It's just not worth it to the American who lives far away. This is not permanent work, nor is it skilled work.
The H-2B hospitality workers that Trump and other hoteliers bring over are young college-age students willing to learn the hospitality industry so they can go back home and find jobs at local hotels and restaurants. It's also why cruise ships have so many workers from poor countries.
I understand that you want to be outraged, but the H-2B is not the place. I'm with you about the H-1B abuses.
-PJ
And right there is where the cheap labor that The Donald loves comes in.
sadly, I dont think we will.
You keep saying cheap, but we're already talking about minimum wage work, so it can't get much cheaper than that.
-PJ
especially when you consider how many freepers went for Romney, I was adamant against that liberal from Mass, yet so many freepers just doted on the guy
now listen to them, I would bet good money that most of the strumpets who hate romney this week couldnt run to the polls fast enough to vote for him 4 years ago.
pathetic.
tragic, actually, zero sense of discernment on what a candidate’s morality and ability is.
especially with trump.
he is a huge democrat donor, confidante’, associate...and yet, for some reason, a strong delusion has come over America, and like sheep, they are deluded into thinking his flip from the dark side to claiming he was really one of us..has them so fooled.
shameful.
You forgot to mention something important.
The price of a hotel room in southeast Florida can double or even triple in February.
Why? Because there is a shortage of hotel rooms.
If there is a shortage of labor to maintain those rooms in February, Trump, and all the hotel owners, can raise the wage they pay to attract more workers.
Is that what Trump does? Of course not. Trump demands that the federal government import more foreign labor so he does not have to raise wages.
What counts is all those Dems voting for Trump in the GOP primaries in open states, not the fact that he doesn't mean at least half of what he says to do good in the polls.
Don't forget, eliminating waste, fraud and abuse will balance the budget.
He will ORDER Paul Ryan to eliminate the waste, fraud and abuse programs from the budget, OR ELSE.(Planned Parenthood excluded)
It's not like with the H-1B where permanent 100 $100/hr employees are replaced with $50/hr foreigners. We're talking about what, potentially displacing a $9.15/hr worker with what, a $6.50/hr worker? That is not the kind of savings that moves the needle in a company like Trump's. Heck, administrative costs are probably more than the labor savings.
This is about workers vs. no workers, not $9 workers vs. $6 workers.
Let's go somewhere else for a moment and talk about the kind of worker that is needed in the hospitality business. Over the winter holidays into March, first you have the seasonal retail workers in shops and malls. The locals will go there first, especially the older ones. The chain restaurants likely have a permanent bench of waiters/cooks, so there won't be much change here. So we're left with the luxury resort hotels.
Now, let's face it, these places want young attractive people to interact with their clientele. I hate to say this, but is the out-of-work sitting-at-home local the kind of person to be customer-facing at a luxury resort? Perhaps some, and Trump (and presumably the other hotels as well) have hired some of them. But I have to think that the eager and motivated already have jobs or are in college or just don't want those jobs.
-PJ
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform
“Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities. “
I think he wants to increase what the employers have to pay H1B visa holders. That is what I got out of reading his paper.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform
“More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas.”
My Dad owned a south Florida hotel for 30 years.
I completely understand the basic economics involved.
I’m just discussing a simple supply and demand issue.
Shortage of hotel rooms? Hotel prices go up.
Shortage of low skill labor? Wages go up.
Unless the government artificially increases the supply of low skill labor.
You mean the magic wall might be zero feet tall instead of 48 feet? Say it ain’t so!
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