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House Republicans have slipped a massive foreign worker expansion into their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, a blow to the GOP’s promise to protect the nation’s working class from powerful special interests. After markups and hearings, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee approved the DHS spending bill which would blow the lid off blue-collar migration caps to the United States, spurring an influx of foreign visa workers in the labor market with whom working class Americans would have to compete for jobs. “Who represents the working class? This bill suggests it’s not necessarily Republicans,” Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA...

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...

The Justice Department announced today that it reached a settlement agreement with ASTA CRS Inc., a provider of IT staffing and consulting services with offices in Ashburn, Virginia, and Greenbelt, Maryland. This is the ninth settlement under the Civil Rights Division’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which is aimed at targeting, investigating, and taking enforcement actions against companies that discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of temporary visa workers.The settlement resolves a claim that ASTA’s Maryland office discriminated against U.S. workers because of their citizenship status when it posted a job advertisement specifying a preference for non-U.S. citizens who held...

China refuses to take back thousands of Chinese citizens stranded in the U.S. illegally, many of whom have committed violent crimes, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday. As many as tens of thousands of Chinese nationals are currently stuck in the U.S. because China refuses to repatriate them. In 2015, U.S. immigration authorities estimated that 38,000 Chinese citizens were awaiting deportation, 900 people among them classified as violent offenders. While many of the people awaiting deportation to China have committed serious crimes, others are guilty of lesser infractions, such as overstaying their visas or breaking traffic laws, according...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday that the order President Trump signed earlier in the day suspending certain temporary work visas through the end of the year will have a “chilling effect” on the nation’s economic recovery amid the coronavirus pandemic. “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,” Graham said in a series of tweets. The order Trump signed Monday applies to H-1B visas, H-2B visas, H-4 visas, L-1 visas and certain J-1 visas. “Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered...

LEADING AN AMERICA FIRST RECOVERY: President Donald J. Trump is extending and expanding the suspension of certain visas through the end of the year to ensure American workers take first priority as we recover from the economic effects of the coronavirus. President Trump is extending the pause on new immigrant visas through the end of the year to ensure we continue putting American workers first during our ongoing coronavirus recovery.President Trump is building on this measure with an additional pause on several job-related nonimmigrant visas—H-1Bs, H-2Bs without a nexus to the food-supply chain, certain H-4s, as well as Ls...

President Trump is expected to sign an order as soon as Saturday to suspend H-1B, L-1 and other temporary work visas through the end of the year, according to the multiple sources familiar with the plan. The new order — which is expected to come with broad exceptions — comes as the administration continues to wrestle with high unemployment among American workers because of the coronavirus pandemic as well as kick-start the economic recovery. The order would target H-1B visas, which are designed for certain skilled workers such as those employed in the tech industry, as well as L-1 visas,...

President Trump is expected to sign an expansion of immigration restrictions in the coming days in response to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic -- an order that will reportedly suspend a number of guest worker programs. Trump signed an order in April suspending some forms of immigration, citing “the impact of foreign workers on the United States labor market, particularly in an environment of high domestic unemployment and depressed demand for labor” as a reason for the restriction, as well as pressures on health care and other factors. That order suspended, for 60 days, green cards for immigrants...

The federal government will not provide companies with extra H-2B visa workers this year, homeland security chief Chad Wolf told Breitbart News. The decision is good news for blue-collar Americans, who have lost millions of jobs amid the coronavirus crash, and it comes despite pressure from many companies for easy access to compliant foreign labor. The decision comes as the migration of blue-collar workers across the Mexican border slows to a trickle, mostly because of President Donald Trump’s forceful diplomatic and regulatory policies. “We do not expect to increase the [66,000] cap given the pandemic and the unemployment,” the Acting...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Unemployment remains a major issue across the country. Many New York and New Jersey residents are losing hope, and are out of cash. Adam D’Aleo has listened to the New York Department of Labor’s “we are experiencing high call volume” recording more times than he can count. “It’s embarrassing, I remember it,” D’Aleo said. When he was laid off at the beginning of April, he filed for unemployment benefits online. Every time he logs in, he gets this notice: “To complete the claim, call the claims center.”

After President Trump announced he would be suspending immigration to the United States to protect the jobs and wages of millions of newly unemployed workers during the pandemic, the Spectator USA reported an “internal battle” broke out in the White House. Sources familiar with the situation told the Spectator that Kushner “is one of the loudest voices pushing back on a full ban and is seeking to carve out exemptions for refugees, temporary workers under the H1B visa program, and farmworkers under the H-2A visa program.” If that’s true, then Kushner achieved a total victory. The ban applies only to...

Of the total visas available, 10,000 will be reserved for people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador The Trump administration said it is making an additional 35,000 seasonal guest-worker visas available this year ahead of the busy summer season, the largest increase since President Trump took office. The additional visas announced Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security will bring the total available this year to 101,000, though the additional visas will primarily be made available to returning workers. The seasonal-worker visa program, known as H-2B, enables U.S. employers to hire as many as 66,000 foreign workers a year, with...

Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security will import 45,000 extra foreign workers for GOP-aligned small businesses, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reported February 20: The Department of Homeland Security plans to announce the additional seasonal-worker visas next week, an administration official said. They will become available in two waves: the first 20,000 will be immediately available, while employers can apply for the remainder for jobs beginning June 1. It wasn’t clear whether the White House has fully signed off on the numbers, and an administration official cautioned they could change. The additional...

Collins was prominent during the House impeachment proceedings as an aggressive questioner on President Trump’s behalf. I didn’t find his questioning particularly cogent, but that’s just my opinion. He did his best, and gained good will from the president and the party for his efforts. But there are good reasons not to support Collins over Loeffler. For one thing, Collins’s record on immigration leaves plenty to be desired. He is part of a group of GOP Senators and congressman that has pleaded with DHS Secretary Chad Wolf to bring more foreign workers to the U.S. to compete against Americans for...

123 Republicans in the Senate and House are pleading with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf to bring more foreign workers to the United States to compete against working-class Americans for jobs. In a letter to Wolf, 26 Republican Senators and 97 Republican House members joined 66 Senate and House Democrats in demanding DHS allow businesses to bring an additional roughly 30,000 foreign workers on the H-2B visa program to take nonagricultural blue-collar U.S. jobs.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked a push by Maine Democrat Rep. Chellie Pingree to double the inflow of foreign blue-collar H-2B workers up to almost 140,000, according to complaints by employers of the visa workers. “Speaker Pelosi objected to the inclusion of the [Maine Rep. Chellie] Pingree language due to vehement opposition from the labor unions (UFCW and AFL-CIO),” said a December 2017 report by Amusementparkwarehouse.com, which added: This was despite the fact that authorizing [judiciary] Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, [Steny] Hoyer, [Joe] Neguse, [Sharice] Davids, [Joe] Cunningham, [Henry] Cuellar and many others made personal requests of the Speaker and her...

The recent news on jobs has been great. But the White House seems determined to torpedo it.The official unemployment rate is the lowest since 1969 and the number of job openings remains high, indicating continued high demand for workers, and wages are increasing. As a restaurant industry lobbyist told the Indianapolis Star recently, “It’s an employee market today. It’s not an employer market. And that’s not going to change for the foreseeable future.” This is the precondition for drawing more people into the labor market who are currently neither working nor looking for work. And it is sorely needed; the...

DHS and the Labor Department plan to grant an additional 30,000 H-2B visas this summer on top of the 33,000 H-2B visas they had planned to give out, the agencies confirmed.

Today's decision increases the H-2B cap by "only" 30,000, rather than the full 67,000 Congress authorized, but this surge nonetheless increases the cap to 96,000. Not even under President Obama did H-2B visas rise to such high levels....President Trump continues to increase the number of H-2B guestworkers every time he has the opportunity. This is entirely his own administration's fault. He could, at any time, direct Secretary Nielsen to not increase the cap.

South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham issued a statement Thursday calling for President Donald Trump to invoke national emergency powers to fund his border wall. "Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi's refusal to negotiate on funding for a border wall/barrier -- even if the government were to be reopened -- virtually ends the congressional path to funding for a border wall/barrier," Graham said in a statement. "It is time for President Trump to use emergency powers to fund the construction of a border wall/barrier."