In the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump promised to reform the H-1B work visa program. That should have been the least controversial of his plans, as the visa has long been recognized by both major parties as having major problems. Almost all the major candidates in 2016 — Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Clinton and Sanders — were critical of the program.
As I reported here the other day, the White House has endorsed an immigration reform bill by Sens. Cotton and Perdue, known as the RAISE Act. The bill seems to be already drawing both support and fierce opposition. CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta was so upset about the Trump administration’s endorsement of the bill that he picked a fight with Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller during the latter’s press conference.
Two key parts of the Trump administration have now announced something of a get-tough policy on H-1B employers. Today USCIS released a memo announcing the policy, and DOJ released a similar statement. To my knowledge, this is the first time that American STEM workers have been given a voice.
On Trump’s third day Trump is one up on the Establishment. Can this last? I am not a Trump booster. I am a scorekeeper.
On the third day of his presidency Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacificic Partnership (TPP). Based on this we must assume he will also deep-six the Trans-Atlantic Partnership.
Trump and his advisors regard the Pacific and Atlantic partnerships as trade deals like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that sent American jobs to Mexico at the expense of Americans.
Last night’s blog post was titled, “You Can’t Fix It If You Don’t Understand It,” in which I showed that the industry lobbyists are so deft at presenting a misleading view of the H-1B work visa, and policymakers and worker advocates are so uninformed, that effective reform is impossible.
A number of people have called my attention to the “McDonald’s hires H-1Bs” article in Breitbart. I certainly recommend it, though I would point out that it is actually a meandering article that covers all kinds of interesting facts and numbers beyond McD’s. There is a ton to learn from here. I do have a couple of comments.
Traditionally presidential election campaigns are said to begin in earnest after Labor Day, but with the mutual rancor between the two parties and their candidates, things should heat up right away now that both conventions are over.
Sometimes it seems as though the mainstream media reports superdelegates as though they were permanent votes. Or if they don't, they only mention superdelegates as a side bar or an asterisk when reporting, like an afterthought, in a quick sound bite, when no one is really listening. They post the superdelegate numbers on the TV screen in big bold type, to be sure that if someone is busy and can't watch the entire segment, they will see the graphic and just assume that Bernie Sanders has no chance at all of winning the Democratic primary.
The Obama administration has offshore outsourced Obamacare. They made Accenture the lead contractor for the website healthcare.gov. The contract is estimated to be worth $90 million and the original contractor, CGI Federal, is out.
Obama wants to import more foreign guest workers than there could possibly be jobs for in the United States per the demands of cheap labor corporate lobbyists. Yet again, instead of focusing in on jobs for Americans, Obama is busy pushing comprehensive immigration reform which will absolutely decimate U.S. workers by flooding the very weak U.S. labor market.
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