Free Republic

Elon Musk wants H-1B visas because he says America needs more tech workers. The real reason for these visas is our schools aren’t teaching math well enough. By law, H-1B visas go to foreigners who do specialized jobs, mostly in tech. Every year, 65,000 regular visas are handed out, plus 20,000 for advanced degrees. A 2023 federal report showed 65% of H-1B jobs are computer-related, but less than 1% go to social sciences. America’s math problem is getting worse. In 2024, a staggering 72% of eighth-graders failed to score at the proficient level in math, which is up from 66%...

US President Donald Trump's new $100,000 ( £74,000) visa fee for foreign workers has drawn sharp criticism from the global tech community, triggering confusion at airports, concerns of brain drain, and growing fears that the policy could derail American innovation.In a wave of social media condemnation over the weekend, tech executives, startup founders, and economists expressed dismay over the hefty cost attached to H-1B visa applications—used predominantly by major tech employers such as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft to hire highly skilled workers from abroad.While the White House scrambled to clarify the policy late Friday, the initial announcement sent shockwaves through...

More than 300 South Korean workers detained in an immigration raid in the United States last week were brought back home on a charter plane and reunited with their loved ones on Friday. They were among about 475 people detained during the Sept. 4 immigration raid at a battery factory under construction on the campus of Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant west of Savannah. Their roundup and the US release of video showing some Korean workers shackled with chains around their hands, ankles and waists have caused public outrage and a sense of betrayal in South Korea, a key US ally....

Four workers have died in Japan after falling into a manhole near Tokyo as they inspected sewage pipes, authorities said on Sunday (Aug 3). The incident comes after a huge sinkhole swallowed a truck driver near the capital in January after a road collapsed because of corroded sewage pipes, sparking a nationwide inspection.The workers - all men in their fifties - were checking pipes in the city of Gyoda, north of Tokyo on Saturday, when one fell down the manhole, followed by three more who tried to save him, the local fire department told AFP. The department said rescuers detected...

The Trump administration is launching a new visa program for migrant workers as farmers and hotel owners express concerns that their labor force is being threatened by the president’s mass deportation raids. The Department of Labor’s newly-created Office of Immigration Policy will help fast track visas for foreign laborers — but the administration has made it clear that the initiative is “not amnesty” for illegal migrant workers, a senior administration official told Axios. “This is not amnesty. It’s not amnesty lite,” the official told the publication. “No one who is illegally here is being given a pathway to citizenship or...

President Donald Trump is reportedly working on a "temporary pass" program that would allow tax-paying illegal immigrant workers, particularly those employed on farms and in the hospitality industry, to remain in the U.S. legally for work purposes, even if they originally entered the country unlawfully. Under the proposal, the decision would rest with American employers, such as farmers and hotel owners, who could vouch for these workers as long as they are paying taxes and contributing to the economy. In a recent sit-down with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, President Trump shared his vision for a new "temporary pass" program...

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Emergency workers pulled more bodies Wednesday from the rubble of a nine-story Kyiv apartment building demolished by a Russian missile, raising the death toll from the latest attack on the Ukrainian capital to 28. The building in Kyiv´s Solomianskyi district took a direct hit and collapsed during the deadliest Russian attack on Kyiv this year. Authorities said that 23 of those killed were inside the building. The remaining five died elsewhere in the city. Workers used cranes, excavators and their hands to clear more debris from the site, while sniffer dogs searched for buried victims. The...

At least fourteen businesses throughout Illinois are scheduled to begin laying off employees this summer, according to information provided to Illinoisworknet.com from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity as part of Illinois Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act — of the WARN Act. According to the site, the "information ... does not encompass layoff activity and is not intended to be a proxy for employment or job loss data. Additional layoff activity may be represented outside of an official WARN correspondence, which might not necessarily reflect the company's final action.​"

Walmart is reportedly laying off more than 100 employees in its technology offices in Silicon Valley, part of larger corporate layoffs across the country. The company’s tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area are being axed as part of Walmart’s plan to lay off around 1,500 corporate employees across the country, according to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle. Positions within Walmart’s global technology, U.S. e-commerce fulfillment, and advertising divisions will reportedly also be hit as a result of the company being restructured. The company, however, did not disclose all of the locations that will be affected.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy ripped NJ Transit engineers for going on strike Friday — blasting their actions as a “slap in the face” to commuters and a “mess of their own making.” The Democrat lashed out after roughly 400 rail engineers walked off the job after marathon contract talks stalled ahead of a midnight deadline, setting off the first strike to hit the major transit system in more than 40 years. “It did not have to come to this,” Murphy told a news conference after the morning commuter rush got underway. “A small handful of locomotive engineers have walked...

Workers throughout China are flooding the streets in revolt as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs slam the fragile Chinese export economy. From the cramped streets of Sichuan in the southwest to the cold outskirts of Inner Mongolia in the northeast, furious workers are demanding back pay and protesting mass layoffs as factories shutter under pressure from Trump’s tariffs. Outside a LED light manufacturing plant near Shanghai, thousands of unpaid workers shouted furiously at company managers over wages that haven’t been paid since January. In central China’s Dao County, a similar scene unfolded outside a sporting goods store after the company...

Thousands of federal workers are newly reeligible for a Trump administration offer paying them to quit as agencies prepare to shed up to half of their staffs, documents reviewed by The Washington Post show. The deal, extended across at least six agencies in recent days, resurrects an option to resign now and be paid through September. Trump officials said the offer represented a life raft for workers who found themselves in positions the administration deemed nonessential in its quest to cut spending and tame a mounting national deficit. “We could have just fired people and not given them an off-ramp,”...

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has been the target of scathing criticism from members of his own party after voting for a Republican-drafted stopgap spending bill that cut many nondefense programs, says things are looking good for the Democratic Party, which he says has “a real direction now.” Schumer told The New York Times that President Trump’s agenda of slashing the federal government to pave the way for trillions of dollars in tax cuts has underscored the Democratic Party’s identity as the party of workers, even though some Democrats fear that’s no longer seen as true. “I don’t...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A young economist who had uprooted her life for civil service. A fierce housing advocate terminated just before buying her first home. A semifinalist whose dreams were dashed before they materialized. For decades, the Presidential Management Fellows program was seen as a building block for the civil service with the expectation that the few who earned the position would one day become leaders in the federal workforce. Now the road ahead is uncertain. Hundreds of the fellows have been terminated or placed on administrative leave amid a nationwide slashing of the federal workforce. One of President Donald...

In my previous message, I shared with you about how I grew up working hard on our family farm and starting my own lawn care business on the side; I told you about my first “real” job at the Holiday Inn and how I became the assistant manager of the entire complex at age 16. I also mentioned my work at the radio station, becoming Program Director by age 20 and working for a weekly county newspaper before opening my own photography studio. There’s more to my story than I can tell here, but I’ll share a few more tidbits...

A labor union representing farm workers that for more than a decade begged the Border Patrol to enforce immigration laws is now part of a lawsuit against the Border Patrol for doing just that. The lawsuit, filed by the United Farm Workers (UFW) and five Kern County residents, seeks to stop the Border Patrol from future enforcement actions that stop, arrest, and remove “community members” from the country. The lawsuit was filed in response to a week-long immigration enforcement operation conducted by Border Patrol agents assigned to the El Centro Sector of the United States Border Patrol in January. The...

Federal employees should expect another email on Saturday requiring them to explain their recent accomplishments, a renewed attempt by President Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to demand answers from the government workforce. The plan was disclosed by a person with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The first email, which was distributed a week ago, asked employees “what did you do last week?” and prompted them to list five tasks that they completed. Musk, who empowered by Trump is aiming to downsize agencies and eliminate thousands of federal...

They're scientists. Veterans. Park rangers. Lawyers. Researchers. Administrative staff. They work on fire safety. Safe drinking water. Veterans' health. Combating bird flu. They're from all over the country, in red states and blue. They're young and old. Thousands of federal workers have been fired in the last month. They're victims of efforts by President Donald Trump and his senior adviser, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, to cut the size of the government. And they want people to understand what they did and why they loved being public servants. Anna Conn, 35, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Asheville, N.C.:...

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) said on Monday that he has empathy for the state’s federal workers at risk of losing their jobs as a result of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut down the size of the federal government under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “I understand and I actually have extraordinary empathy for the fact that there are many workers in Virginia today from our federal workforce who are experiencing real concerns,” Youngkin said at a press conference in Northern Virginia highlighting new economic opportunities in the state. “Listen, we have a federal government that is inefficient...

A Democratic senator went on a crude online tirade over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) demand for all federal workers to answer a simple question about their productivity. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) called the world’s richest man a “d–k boss” for orchestrating the email that went out to federal workers on Saturday with the subject line, “What did you do last week?” Smith’s tirade comes as several government departments — including Kash Patel’s FBI — are instructing their employees not to respond to the message. In a similar fashion to the types of sporadic requests Musk blasted out to...