Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Trump to order increased scrutiny of H-1B visa program
President Trump will travel to Wisconsin Tuesday, where he will sign an order aimed at changing a visa program that brings in highly skilled workers from overseas.
The order, dubbed "Buy American, Hire American," would direct the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Labor and State to propose new rules to prevent immigration fraud and abuse. Those departments would also be asked to offer changes so that H-1B visas are awarded to the "most-skilled or highest-paid applicants."
The White House said the H-1B program is currently undercutting American workers by bringing in cheaper labor and said some tech companies are using it to hire large numbers of workers and drive down wages.
Administration officials said the order also seeks to strengthen requirements that American-made products be used in certain federal construction projects, as well as in various federal transportation grant-funded projects. The officials said the commerce secretary will review how to close loopholes in enforcing the existing rules and provide recommendations to the president.
The order specifically asks the secretary to review waivers of these rules that exist in free-trade agreements. The administration said that if the waivers are not benefiting the United States they will be "renegotiated or revoked."
During his campaign, Trump said at some points he supported high-skilled visas, then came out against them. At one debate, he called for fully ending the program, saying: "It's very bad for our workers and it's unfair for our workers. And we should end it."
The officials said the changes could be administrative or legislative and could include higher fees for the visas, changing the wage scale for the program or other initiatives.
About 85,000 H-1B visas are distributed annually by lottery. Many go to technology companies, which argue that the United States has a shortage of skilled technology workers.
But critics say the program has been hijacked by staffing companies that use the visas to import foreigners -- often from India -- who will work for less than Americans. The staffing companies then sell their services to corporate clients who use them to outsource tech work.
Employers from Walt Disney World to the University of California in San Francisco have laid off their tech employees and replaced them with H-1B visa holders. Adding to the indignity: The U.S. workers are sometimes asked to train their replacements to qualify for severance packages.
On the planned order by Trump, Ronil Hira, a professor in public policy at Howard University and a critic of the H-1B program, told the Associated Press, "It's better than nothing." But he added, "It's not as aggressive as it needs to be."
The tech industry has argued that the H-1B program is needed because it encourages students to stay in the U.S. after getting degrees in high-tech specialties -- and they can't always find enough American workers with the skills they need.
Congress is considering several bills to overhaul the visa program. One, introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would require companies seeking H-1B visas to first make a good-faith effort to hire Americans, a requirement many companies can dodge under the current system; give the Labor Department more power to investigate and sanction H-1B abuses; and give "the best and brightest" foreign students studying in the U.S. priority in getting H-1B visas.
Trump will sign the order at the Kenosha headquarters of tool manufacturer Snap-on Inc. His visit comes as the president faces an approval rating of just 41 percent in Wisconsin, a state he barely won in November. The visit also would take him to the congressional district of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who won't be joining the president because he's on a bipartisan congressional trip visiting NATO countries.
Trump has traveled to promote his agenda less than his recent predecessors. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump wanted to visit "a company that builds American-made tools with American workers."
Trump carried Wisconsin in November by nearly 23,000 votes -- less than 1 percentage point -- making him the first Republican to win the state since 1984. He campaigned on the promise of returning manufacturing jobs that have been lost in Upper Midwest states.
Founded in Wisconsin in 1920, Snap-on makes hand and power tools, diagnostics software, information and management systems, and shop equipment for use in a variety of industries, including agriculture, the military and aviation. It has eight manufacturing sites in North America, including one in Milwaukee. The company employs about 11,000 people worldwide.
Gorsuch breaks mold, asks numerous questions in Supreme Court debut
An upbeat Justice Neil Gorsuch wasted little time getting to work in his first public session Monday as the 113th member of the Supreme Court.
Sitting at the far right end of the nine-member bench, Gorsuch spent the morning hearing three oral arguments, each lasting about an hour. In his first case, considering a federal workplace discrimination claim, the newest justice was among the most active of questioners -- unusual for the court "rookie."
At the start of the morning session, Chief Justice John Roberts publicly acknowledged his new colleague in the crowded courtroom, wishing him a "long and happy career in our common calling."
Gorsuch responded by thanking the other justices for giving him a "warm welcome."
The 49-year-old Colorado native paid close attention to the arguments, sitting straight up and resting his hand occasionally on his chin.
He remained focused -- not even chatting with his "bench neighbor," Justice Sonia Sotomayor -- as he asked a number of questions of counsel. The back-and-forth exchanges lasted more than 10 minutes of the first 60-minute argument.
The first case out of the gate for Gorsuch was not a blockbuster, but the justice repeatedly pressed lawyers from both sides with his positions.
When one attorney admitted he tended to agree with the justice on one point, Gorsuch dryly replied, "I hope so."
At one point, he even apologized for the amount of questions, saying, “Sorry for taking up so much time.”
The other cases being argued separately Monday deal with a property rights dispute and securities class-action lawsuits.
Settling In
Even before Monday's arguments, Gorsuch had begun settling in at the court, arranging his chambers to create a comfortable, efficient workplace. Reminders of his roots in Colorado and the West will grace his offices, along with plenty of photos of his family and friends.
He is allowed to hire secretaries, a messenger, and four law clerks -- who typically serve for one year.
Those clerks will be especially important helping the justice get up to speed on his caseload, since joining the court in the midst of the term is not standard. It will be a nonstop whirl of activity until the term effectively ends in late June.
All four of the law clerks brought on in recent days served previously for then-Judge Gorsuch, and are all experienced litigators or academics. Two of them later went on to clerk for Antonin Scalia (the late justice whose seat Gorsuch is now occupying) and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
His colleagues are welcoming their newest member.
"We hope we're serving with Justice Gorsuch for the next 25 years," Roberts said last week before a university audience in New York. "It's kind of like a marriage. If you're going to be with someone that long, you can't have knock-down, drag-out fights over a case."
Lunch Is Served
Food for thought for the newest member of the Supreme Court: being the junior justice has its benefits and challenges.
For Gorsuch, it will mean being assigned to the court's internal Cafeteria Committee, where dessert toppings and silverware choices will compete for his time with constitutional issues big and small -- all part of the dizzying first few weeks for the justice.
Justice Elena Kagan, who had been the court "newbie" since 2010, unwittingly gave her future colleague some personal advice on managing the job. She appeared last September at a Colorado legal conference with Gorsuch and spoke to what it was like to have the least seniority.
"I think this is a way to kind of humble people," she said about her stint as one of the office lunch monitors. "You think you're kind of hot stuff. You're an important person. You've just been confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. And now you are going to monthly cafeteria committee meetings where literally the agenda is what happened to the good recipe for the chocolate chip cookies."
And the rookie hears about it when the food doesn't rate. One tradition of the court is the justices eat together privately after oral arguments.
"Somebody will say, 'Who's our representative to the cafeteria committee again?'" she told Gorsuch. "Like they don't know, right? And then they'll say, 'This soup is very salty.' And I'm like supposed to go fix it myself?"
Kagan recalled her proudest moment was getting a frozen yogurt machine installed in the dining area, which is open to the public.
She had been on the internal committee for seven years, with Justice Stephen Breyer in the job 11 years before that.
"It's a way of bringing them back down to Earth after the excitement of confirmation and appointment," Roberts said in 2011. Roberts' role as "first among equals," though, meant he never had to endure any of the "new guy" responsibilities.
Another duty for the "junior" justice is to answer the door when the members meet privately for their weekly closed-door conferences -- voting on cases and deciding which petitions get added to the docket. His first such conference will be this Thursday.
Gorsuch will also take notes at the conferences, and will vote last when cases get decided.
It is a learning curve that many on the court admit can be baffling and often overwhelming.
Justice Samuel Alito said he frequently got lost in the marbled halls of the court when he joined in 2006, especially since the building was undergoing a massive internal renovation at the time.
Breyer said it took him years to feel fully comfortable in the job.
And Justice Clarence Thomas recalled what Justice Byron White told him when he donned the robes in 1991. White, whose clerks included Gorsuch, said, "Well, Clarence, in your first five years you wonder how you got here. After that you wonder how your colleagues got here."
Democrats’ post-election playbook: Stay big in California
After painful November 2016 losses, Washington Democrats still appear committed to devoting resources to strongholds like California, instead of responding to party pleas to put time and money into Middle America to reconnect with disaffected voters.
The contrast came into full view when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee earlier this month started moving senior staffers to deep-blue California, then provided essentially no help to its candidate in the Kansas special election, who on Tuesday nearly pulled off a huge upset.
Washington Democrats hailed candidate James Thompson’s narrow loss as a moral victory, considering Republicans have held the seat since 1995.
But Thompson made clear that the DCCC and the Democrat National Committee could have done more, considering Washington Republicans including President Trump, Vice President Pence and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz invested time and money to save the seat.
“The DCCC and the DNC need to be doing a 50-state strategy,” said Thompson, after coming within 6 percentage points of winning Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo’s open House seat. (Pompeo won reelection there last year with roughly 60 percent of the vote before becoming the CIA director in January.)
GOPS WIN IN CLOSE SPECIAL ELECTION IN KANSAS
Thompson also pointed out that his campaign was largely financed by individual, small-dollar donations, saying 99 percent of the money came through average-$20 contributions.
The state Democrat party disputes a report that it gave Thompson just $3,000 late in the race but has failed to provide documentation showing the group in fact backed the first-time candidate’s campaign from the start.
The DNC contributed no last-minute money to counter the GOP infusion, with newly-installed Chairmen Tom Perez telling The Washington Post: “There are thousands of elections every year, though. Can we invest in all of them? That would require a major increase in funds.”
DNC Communications Director Xochtil Hinojosa told Fox News on Wednesday that the outcome of the Kansas race -- in a district Trump won in November by 27 percentage points -- proves voters’ “resounding frustration” with the president’s agenda and that Washington Democrats are “committed to organizing in every zip code.”
Meanwhile, the DCCC, which declined to comment for this story, is already sending staffers to Southern California to establish a base camp for 2018 House races in the state and in Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
“Moving out West is one of the improvements that we’re making at the DCCC in order to maximize gains in the midterms,” says group Chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luján.
The New Mexico congressman also vowed that he and fellow Democrats are “on offense across the map -- including in districts that have not seen a serious challenge in a long time.”
To be sure, the DCCC has sent dozens of paid staffers and hundreds of volunteers to Georgia for the special election Tuesday for the open seat of former GOP Rep. Tom Price, in a district Trump barely defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. (Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff has raised more than $8 million in that race.)
But whether the plan is enough to satisfy rank-and-file Democrats after November 2016 remains to be seen.
Before last year, Republicans had already controlled both chambers of Congress as well as the majority of state houses and governors’ offices.
And losses in Democratic strongholds like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida in 2016 that led to Trump’s upset victory over Clinton -- and nixed the party’s chances to retake the Senate -- only reinforced the notion that the Midwestern, blue collar vote has been neglected.
“We have to talk to those people who take a shower after work, not those who just take a shower before work,” Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan said after the losses and amid his subsequent, failed effort to replace California Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader.
He also joined fellow party members in saying Democratic leaders had become too focus on liberal bastions like California, New York and neighbor East Coast states.
Despite Democrats last year winning a handful of House seats, Republicans will still have a daunting, roughly 44-seat majority going into the midterms and a 52-48 seat edge in the Senate.
In California, Democrats are targeting seven incumbent House Republicans -- including high-profile Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Darrell Issa and three others in Southern California.
Ben Tulchin, a San Francisco-based Democratic pollster and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ pollster in the 2016 Democratic primaries -- supports the party’s California strategy.
He says such grassroots efforts in places like Los Angeles and Orange counties make sense because voter-registration drives can reach a large number of unregistered Latinos, Asian-Americans and others who frequently vote Democrat.
“There’s an untapped pool of Democratic voters that just doesn’t exist in place like Iowa,” he said.
Tulchin also argued that reaching voters by TV in the greater-Los Angeles market is too expensive and that voters in largely-conservative Orange County, particularly along the coast, are becoming more socially liberal or at least more moderate.
“They’re almost all pro-environment,” Tulchin said.
Democrats throw millions, Hollywood punch into Georgia House race
Another generation of dumb democrats. |
Hollywood has even come out for the off-cycle vote, with actor Samuel L. Jackson cutting a radio ad urging voters to flip the seat once held by Republican Tom Price, who is now Trump's health secretary.
“Vote for the Democratic Party. Stop Donald Trump, a man who encourages racial and religious discrimination and sexism,” Jackson says in the ad, casting the race as a chance to undermine the Republican president and throwing in "Pulp Fiction" references for good measure. “We have to channel the great vengeance and fury we have for this administration into votes at the ballot box.”
Democrats tried a similar tactic last week in their failed bid for the open seat of Kansas' Mike Pompeo, arguing a win in that conservative district would prove just how eager Americans are to end Trump and fellow Republicans’ control of Washington.
Washington Democrats, however, put essentially no resources into the race. By contrast, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee staffers are on the ground in Georgia, and supporters have given top Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff $8 million-plus, with 80 percent of the money coming from outside the state.
Republicans have held the suburban Atlanta seat for nearly four decades. However, Democrats saw an opening for an upset after Trump last year narrowly defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in that district, while Price won with 61 percent of the vote.
Democrats also see a win as a catalyst for them in the 2018 midterm elections, though Republicans would still have a roughly 44-seat majority in the House and a four-seat advantage in the Senate.
The race Tuesday features 18 candidates -- 11 Republicans, five Democrats and two independents. To outright take the so-called “jungle primary,” the winner must get more than 50 percent of the vote. If not, the leader would face the second-place finisher in a runoff.
Ossoff is expected to get the most votes but not the majority, likely sending him and one of the Republican candidates to the June 20 runoff.
Trump and other Washington Republicans have gotten into the act -- a clear indication of their desire to keep the seat and blunt any momentum toward a possible 2018 Democratic comeback.
“The super Liberal Democrat in the Georgia Congressioal (sic) race tomorrow wants to protect criminals, allow illegal immigration and raise taxes!,” Trump tweeted Monday.
He also tweeted Sunday: “The recent Kansas election (Congress) was a really big media event, until the Republicans won. Now they play the same game with Georgia-BAD!”
Republican field staffers also have been dispatched to Georgia. A GOP political action committee backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has spent more than $2 million attacking Ossoff.
In addition, the amount of money going to Ossoff is also a liability.
"I don't care what party you're from," said Marty Aftewicz, a 66-year-old Republican voter from Marietta. "If the money's coming from outside the district, it's dirty. … Anyone raising that much outside money can't represent me."
Republicans have also run a barrage of campaign ads trying to tie the 30-year-old Ossoff to House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, and portray him as too sophomoric and inexperienced to govern.
The Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, for instance, is running ads showing him pretending to be “Star Wars” character Han Solo while attending Georgetown University.
"Jon is being bankrolled by the most extreme liberals,” said Karen Handel, a former secretary of state and one of Ossoff's Republican challengers. “No one is naive enough to think that he will not be beholden to those who are bankrolling him."
Ossoff, nevertheless, pledges to be an "independent voice" in Congress. And he defends his campaign as a grassroots success powered by small and medium donors.
Ossoff is a former staffer to Rep. Hank Johnson and intern for civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, Georgia Democrats now supporting Ossoff in the race.
Though he could get the most votes Tuesday, national Republicans think he would lose in June to Handel or fellow GOP candidates Bob Gray, a technology executive, or Dan Moody or Judson Hill, former state senators.
Handel vows to work with Trump on common-ground issues but says her job is to “be a voice for people of the 6th District."
Gray says he would be a "willing partner" in the effort to fulfill Trump’s legislative agenda.
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