Free Republic

President Trump is facing a fast-approaching deadline to extend an executive order he imposed earlier this year suspending various temporary work visas amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump is under pressure from some corners to extend the order into 2021, which would put pressure on the incoming Biden administration over whether to quickly rescind it. The president's advisers are said to be split over whether Trump should act, according to sources familiar with discussions. Trump in June signed an executive order suspending the issuance of H-1B visas, H-2B visas, H-4 visas, L-1 visas and certain J-1 visas. The moratorium on new...

WELLSTON, Oklahoma—One day in the early fall of 2018, while scrutinizing the finances of his thriving Colorado garden supply business, Chip Baker noticed a curious development: transportation costs had spiked fivefold. The surge, he quickly determined, was due to huge shipments of cultivation supplies—potting soil, grow lights, dehumidifiers, fertilizer, water filters—to Oklahoma. Baker, who has been growing weed since he was 13 in Georgia, has cultivated crops in some of the world’s most notorious marijuana hotspots, from the forests of Northern California’s Emerald Triangle to the lake region of Switzerland to the mountains of Colorado. Oklahoma was not exactly on...

Press Release WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (CA-19) – Chair of the House Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee and author of H.R. 1044, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act – today released the following statement on the status of legislative solutions to improve the employment-based immigrant visa system in America: “I’m very disappointed that we have not yet been able to reach a compromise between the House and Senate on a version of the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act that creates the change we need and that can pass both Chambers of Congress. But I won’t give up hope...

December 21st, 2020 (4: 40 PM EST) : Below are the updates from today as of the updated time.Omnibus Spending Bill Text Released : The Omnibus Spending Bill Text is available now. It is a massive 5,593 page document. There is no reference to any legislative text related to HR1044 or S386 in it. Below is the summary of our review by section.Detail Review of Omnibus Spending Bill for HR1044 Text : We have reviewed major sections that has DHS or DOL agencies are involved and below is the summaryDIVISION F : This is the first section related to DHS...

Robert Heath, a skilled IT worker and a U.S. citizen, operating without a lawyer, has won an important battle with a Dallas-area corporation that published advertisements saying it was interested in hiring specific classes of aliens; in other words, it was discriminating against U.S. citizens, according to a Justice Department press release.The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division on December 8 approved a settlement among Heath (the "charging party"), the Department, and Ikon Systems of Frisco, Texas, the recruiting firm in question. The key section of the settlement is this:[The government's] investigation found that ... Ikon posted at least eight...

Update 12/3/20: A unanimous consent (UC) agreement for S.386 was reached and the bill was passed as amended. Congress.gov has updated H.R.1044 as "Passed/agreed to in Senate" and has made the text of the Senate amendment available.Jessica Vaughan, the Center's Director of Policy Studies, stated:This would make a very significant change to the employment green card system, and moves us farther away from a merit-based process. It rewards the companies that replaced Americans with guest workers. Will the President sign it? https://t.co/b1VlB5VKkx— Jessica Vaughan (@JessicaV_CIS) December 3, 2020View the passage of the UC agreement on the Senate floor in the...

A federal judge in California on Tuesday blocked badly needed reforms in the H-1B program, seemingly largely on the grounds that the new rules were rushed through, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, according to articles in Law360 and Politico.The administration, after not making these changes for more than three and a half years, argued that the Covid-19 crisis gave them the opportunity to issue the new regulations without going through the normal comment and review process. U.S. district court judge Jeffrey White, a Bush II appointee, did not buy that argument.Two different sets of new regulations were involved....

A historic bill to legalize marijuana at the federal level is expected to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives in December. This would be the first time a chamber of Congress has ever voted on removing marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act. Cannabis was included as what is called a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. Schedule I drugs are defined as having a high potential for abuse and no medical benefit. Other Schedule I drugs include heroin, LSD, ecstasy and peyote. “I write to share the busy Floor schedule we have...

She's on SeeBS looking like RBG.

The Senate has voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, just about a week before the general election and 30 days after she was nominated by President Trump to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. While Senate Democrats tried to slow down the confirmation process of Trump's third Supreme Court nominee with various procedural maneuvers, the fact that Republicans control the Senate has always meant a Barrett confirmation was all but promised. "The Senate is doing the right thing. We're moving this nomination forward and colleagues, by tomorrow night, we'll have a new...

President Donald Trump’s H-1B reforms will shrink the Fortune 500’s large-scale use of cheap Indian gig-workers, say opponents and supporters.The immediate beneficiaries may include thousands of middle-class Americans at the Vanguard Group, Ascension Healthcare, and other companies who have been told they will soon lose their jobs to Indian contract-workers imported by Indian-run staffing companies, such as HCL and Infosys. The staffing H-1B gig-workers comprise seven-in-ten of the more than 600,000 H-1Bs in the United States.Industry representatives and lawyers are objecting to the new rules, which will dramatically raise the cost of hiring foreign workers and reduce the CEOs’ incentives...

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) has just introduced a bill that would seriously shrink the H-1B program and, at the same time, suspend the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which currently bribes American employers with a tax break when they hire recent college graduates here on foreign student visas rather than those who are citizens or legal permanent residents.If it passes (unlikely this late in the session), it would probably open up hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs for U.S. citizens and green card holders. Whether it passes or not, it is a useful addition to the ongoing conversation about the...

For over 20 years, H1B, L1, etc. replaced local s/w workers for cheaper pay (actual pay divided by hours worked). We trained them because their resumes were stuffed with lies and exaggerated skills, which by the way allowed HR and placement agencies to get H1Bs slots. Last 10 years or more, they are replacing entire systems with products built overseas with a few local sales/support/migration/managers (often H1Bs to boot). These products were quickly written spaghetti code javascript and unstructured backend that were full of bugs, performance and security issues. As it grew over time, the codebase would be hard to...

link only - Bloomberg

Those who are interested, let's talk about the games. We'll see if those who dislike/despise the NFL feel a childish compulsion to pester us - or not.

Democrats are taking an unprecedented gamble this month: voting to legalize cannabis at the federal level.The MORE Act would remove the penalties for marijuana, erase some criminal records and create grant programs for people hit especially hard by the war on drugs.Democrats say the timing is perfect: Support has been building for loosening marijuana restrictions over the last decade, with the most recent Gallup poll showing 66 percent of Americans favor legalization, including more than half of Republicans.The demands for racial justice that have ratcheted up following the killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd gave the bill the final...

As we've noted here before, big banks and big technology firms have been big users of H1B visas, which enabled them to hire-in global talent and that were temporarily banned by President Trump in June 2020. Despite protestations that the ban will lead to pay inflation for the "finite pool of super-smart folks" that have U.S. citizenship, the ban also has plenty of supporters. Key among them is Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. There's absolutely no reason why banks and tech firms should complain about the lack of H1B visa talent, Salzman tells...

Business groups are training young Americans for jobs and careers because President Donald Trump temporarily blocked the inflow of foreign contract-workers, according to multiple press reports. In Tennessee, the Gatlinburg-area tourist industry was denied many J-1 workers, so it “responded by developing a hospitality internship program that seeks to bring more U.S. college-age workers to the area,” according to a September 6 report in the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve tried to get creative,” said Allen Newton, the director of the Sevier County Economic Development Council. In Kentucky, the horseracing industry is hiring and training Americans because Trump blocked the inflow...

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., announced his strong opposition to Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 outsourcing bill, likely sinking the Utah Republican’s bill for the rest of the year. Lee’s S.386 bill aids the tech industry and visa workers from India and China “at the expense of American workers, highly skilled immigrants, workers from Latin America and Europe, as well as Florida’s most important industries,” Scott wrote in the August 31 op-ed in the Miami Herald.He continued: I’ve heard from many constituents about how this bill would impact people in Florida, especially those who came to Florida from Latin America. Florida’s...

No GOP or Democrat members of the House voted against a rushed bill, approved August 22, that would help Fortune 500 companies quickly outsource jobs to foreign workers instead of Americans. The outsourcing bill is titled H.R. 8089, “the Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act,” and it was unveiled the day before the vote. It is being portrayed as an emergency bill to prevent imminent furloughs by the underfunded U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency. The agency is funded with fees paid by employers and migrants, but the fee revenue crashed during the coronavirus crash, likely forcing a cost-saving agency...