Free Republic

Nikki Haley has kept busy since leaving her post in the Trump administration as United States ambassador to the United Nations. A former governor of South Carolina, Haley is often mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate for either 2024 or 2028 – depending on whether Donald Trump wins re-election in November. There has even been speculation that Trump might switch out Vice-President Mike Pence for Haley as his running mate in the hopes of boosting his lagging approval numbers among the broader electorate, though there has been no strong evidence that that will happen. Either way she has positioned...

Suburban women overwhelmingly support President Donald Trump’s policy of freezing the inflow of foreign workers until they, their husbands, and their children regain the jobs lost to the coronavirus crash, according to a poll of 1,810 likely voters by Rasmussen Reports. Just 12 percent of swing-voting “moderate” suburban women, and just 19 percent of all likely voters, agreed with business groups and Democrats that the government should “allow employers to import foreign workers to fill job openings instead of recruiting among these unemployed Americans.” But Trump’s June 22 policy is getting overwhelming support — even among groups who are not...

Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions attacked his July 14 GOP runoff opponent for “being wrong on immigration,” an issue that he calls “one of the most important issues” Congress is faced with as it wrangles with other concerns such as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and police reform. (I’m not saying) that it’s No. 1, but it’s right up there,” said Sessions during a news conference Monday in Mobile. “We have 11 million people here unlawfully. In some years, we’ve had 11 million people arrested at the (U.S.-Mexico) border. If we do this right, the number of attempts for entering...

Two California users of the H-1B program were shown in unfavorable lights earlier this month: One paid $171,300 in a settlement for past discrimination against white workers, and the other was sued because its high-caste Indian supervisors were said to have discriminated against an Indian Dalit (the group formerly known as "Untouchables"). Both companies are in the IT business.The smaller of the two firms, Mphasis, which has its headquarters in India and an operation in San Jose, agreed to pay the money to citizen workers it had not hired because of a preference for H-1B aliens from India. The San...

Alexey Komissarouk, a software engineering manager, was among those let go when San Francisco real estate startup Opendoor laid off more than 600 employees in mid-April in response to the coronavirus pandemic’s economic impact. As an Israeli citizen working with an H-1B visa, Komissarouk can’t receive unemployment benefits. But more crucially, under immigration rules, losing his job set a clock ticking on his time in the United States.

President Trump has signaled he is planning to sign an executive order on immigration reform. He made the announcement on Friday during an interview with Spanish language network Telemundo. He has said the order will focus on instituting a merit based immigration system. The president also stated he would introduce a path to normalizing the immigration status of DACA recipients, who were brought into the U.S. illegally as children and have remained in the country since. “What I’m going to do is there going to be part of a much bigger bill on immigration. It’s going to be a very...

Immigration Will Go Bust Without $1.2B Bailout By Charles Benavidez - Jul 02, 2020, 6:00 PM CDT United States With the Trump administration on a continued anti-immigration tear as a campaign-hedge for November 2020 elections, and as the COVID-19 pandemic rampages on, the American immigration system—largely funded by visa and green card applications—is basically running out of money. Now, it may have to temporarily lay off thousands of workers, and thus potentially bring immigration to a near halt from its already painfully slow crawl.

President Trump’s suspension of various visa programs and regulatory reforms is set to give American workers newly found leverage in the job market, a report details. The banking and technology industry, Sarah Butcher reports for efinancialcareers.com, may go into “bidding wars” to fight for American workers at higher wages and better benefits thanks to Trump’s suspension of the H-1B, H-4, H-2B, J-1, and L visas. Trump has also implemented vital regulatory reforms to the H-1B visa to prevent corporations from using the program to outsource cheap tech jobs to imported foreign workers. The visa suspension and reforms, Butcher reports, are...

NEW YORK (AP) — California regulators have sued Cisco Systems, saying an engineer faced discrimination at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters because he is a Dalit Indian. India’s caste system long placed Dalits at the bottom of a social hierarchy, once terming them “untouchables.” Inequities and violence against Dalits have persisted for decades after India banned caste discrimination. The engineer worked on a team at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters with Indians who all immigrated to the U.S. as adults, and all of whom were of high caste, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday by the California Department of Fair Employment...

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...

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...

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 U.K. tech sector is trying to encourage entrepreneurs affected by President Donald Trump’s immigration restrictions to move to the U.K. and start a company in a city like London..."Relocating to an EU member state would be the smarter move," said pro-EU campaigner Richard Scott on Twitter. "Citizenship grants you Freedom of Movement in 27 countries, allowing you and your children to study, work, start a business and retire wherever you like."

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...

“ This decision, in my view, will have a chilling effect on our economic recovery at a time we should be doing all we can to restore the economy.”

Summary While the percentage of immigrants who arrive with a college or advanced degree has risen over the past decade, the extent to which foreign education translates into useful skills here in the United States is an open question. Based on English-language tests of literacy, numeracy, and computer operations administered by the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this report finds that, among test-takers with at least a college education, U.S.-degree holders out-score foreign-educated immigrants by a wide margin. For example, among those with at least a college degree, native-born Americans score at the 74th percentile on literacy,...