by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions, World
Frank F. Islam
On June 22, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order suspending the entry of a number of non-immigrant work visa holders into the US till the end of the year. The visa categories affected include, most notably, H-1B, which has been used by more than a million Indian information technology professionals since the 1990s and L1 visa used by US companies to bring in workers from their Indian offices.
During his campaign for President four years ago, candidate Trump consistently railed against the H-1B programme. However, after he moved into the White House, Trump left the visa programme untouched in the first 43 months of his presidency, even as he delivered on most of his controversial campaign promises, such as the Muslim ban and dumping of multilateral treaties like NAFTA and Paris Agreement, through executive actions.
There were two compelling reasons Trump didn”t act on the visa programme until now. The US economy had been doing very well until Coronavirus hit the American shores early this year. And, the tech industry, which employs three-fourths of the H-1B visa holders, has been doing even better.
The second reason is the formidable lobbying power of the industry. The four most valuable companies in the world, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, and Facebook have historically used the H-1B workforce to augment their profits. They were not going to let it go without a fight.
The influence these organizations wield was evident when Trump spared H-1B in his first executive order to curb nonimmigrant work visa holders issued on April 22. According to reports, H-1B was to be part of that proclamation but the White House was talked out of it by the industry.
So, what has changed between late April and today?
A number of things, but primarily it is Trump”s dimming re-election prospects. A steady stream of polls in the past few weeks has shown that the incumbent is trailing badly in the race against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. The President”s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic — his initial refusal to see it as a threat and then his inability to provide the leadership to contain it — has shaken people”s confidence in Trump”s presidency.
Prior to the onset of the Coronavirus, Trump was banking on making the election a referendum on his stewardship of the economy. But the pandemic, which has claimed more than 125,000 American lives, has also eliminated up to 40 million jobs.
Although some of the jobs have come back thanks to the multitrillion dollar stimulus package, the re-opening plans promoted by Trump have not produced substantial results. Now, with parts of the country closing down again, and the deadly virus spreading in southern and western states, there”s no sign of the economy turning the corner before the November election.
Consequently, Trump needs to be seen as doing something to save the economy and American jobs. H-1B, which has been a bogeyman for the protectionists and economic nationalists, is an easy target during this downturn, even though study after study has documented that the visa programme actually helps create jobs. The administration claims that the executive order is going to save more than half a million American jobs without giving details.
It should be noted that the order mainly impacts petitioners who are outside of the US who have not gotten their visas stamped on their passports yet. As a result, it will only have little impact in the short term on those seeking work in the US.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Service issues roughly 85,000 new H-1B visas annually of which 20,000 are for those with US master”s degrees. Most petitioners in this category are already in the US and they will not have any problem in starting their jobs in October, typically the time new visa holders enter the work force.
According to immigration attorneys, a significant percentage of the remaining 65,000 visas are claimed by dependents of H-1B and L-1 visa holders, as well as foreign students who have graduated from US schools, but did not get the visa under the master”s degree quota. These groups will also not come under the purview of the executive order, as they are already in the country.
The real impact of the presidential proclamation, therefore, will be two-fold. First, as long as Trump is President, it will undoubtedly cause many international students, who are looking at the US as a potential destination for higher studies to reconsider their decisions. During the Trump era, the US has already been losing potential students to nations such as Canada, Britain and Australia.
Second, despite the massive job losses in the broader economy, there are still vacancies in the tech industry that will have to be filled to move its economy forward. The US tech sector has said for years that the country doesn”t produce enough skilled workers and the industry will suffer without the intake of manpower through H-1B and L1 visa programmes. If it becomes more difficult for these companies to hire foreign workers, they would probably outsource more and more of these jobs to foreign destinations, including India.
It is an irony that, while Trump is trying to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, his nonimmigrant worker visa policy could force more high-paying service jobs offshore. What makes it doubly ironic is that this action which Trump has taken to try to save his job as President will not do so.
Given the current state of affairs, it is likely that on election day November 4, the American people will fire Donald Trump. After that, the decision on what to do with information technology visas in 2021 and going forward will be in someone else”s hands. And, Trump will have to find a new place of employment for himself.
The good news is Biden has already stated that his administration will lift the H-1B ban.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : The White House has said that it plans to cancel about $929 million in federal grant money for California’s high-speed rail project and announced that it would seek a return of $2.5 billion in funds that were already allocated for the project.
The announcement was made by the US Transportation Department in a letter on Tuesday, The Washington Post reported.
The development comes a week after Gavin Newsom, the state’s Governor, declared that the originally proposed rail project was too expensive for the state and that California would instead use the federal funds to complete a shorter segment of the rail through the Central Valley.
In the letter to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the Department said the state had failed to make “reasonable progress” on the rail project, which voters approved in 2008 and had a previously agreed-upon deadline of 2022.
The Department also said it would be “exploring every legal option to seek the return from California of $2.5 billion in federal funds”.
In a tweet earlier on Tuesday before the announcement, President Donald Trump asserted the failed project had record-setting costs “hundreds of times more expensive” than his proposed US-Mexico border wall.
He has targeted the project in the past too saying that it “wasted many billions of dollars” and that it was a “green disaster”.
In response to Trump and the announcement, Governor Newsom said: “It’s no coincidence that the administration’s threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the President’s farcical ‘national emergency’.
“This is clear political retribution by President Trump, and we won’t sit idly by. This is California’s money, and we are going to fight for it.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Ashok Easwaran,
As President Donald Trump went on another verbal rampage this week, decrying climate change, and the Federal Reserve chairman, one is reminded of John Adams, the second president, who said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Had the recent American midterm elections occurred in a normal election year, the incumbent President would have leveraged the booming economy, and robust job creation, in support of his party’s claims for re-election.
But the leader of the free world chose instead to spew hate on behalf of his constituents. Two issues consumed his support base — the recent Senate confirmation of US Supreme Court judge Brett Kavanaugh and the “caravan” of bedraggled refugees fleeing Central America’s violence and poverty, hundreds of miles away from the US border.
A ruthlessly efficient opportunist unfettered by morality or ethics, Trump defined the caravan, initially as “illegal aliens”, gradually raising the threat perception to “infiltrators” and finally to “invaders” with all its undertones of a demographic and cultural takeover, whipping up his core constituency into a hysterical frenzy.
Republicans managed to hold the Senate, partly due to Trump’s divisive campaigning.
Donald Trump’s governance strategy rests at the confluence of endangered White Privilege and subjugation of the truth.
With the midterm elections, the US Congress symbolises the fierce partisan division of America. The House of Representatives, now in the hands of the Democrats, represents the major cities and the suburbs, with its pool of diverse, educated voters. The Senate, in Republican control, represents the almost overwhelmingly white rural America, with its large number of non-college educated males.
The spectre of the recent Senate judicial confirmation hearing hung over the midterm elections. In 1995, US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called the Senate judicial confirmation hearings a “vapid, shallow charade”. The Senate confirmation of Kavanaugh as US Supreme Court judge elevated the process to a pantomime of the absurd.
Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school, was understated, anguished and, at times, almost clinically detached. Kavanaugh had been the picture of majestic serenity in earlier television interviews. But in the Senate, apparently primed by the White House, he was the embodiment, not of privileged entitlement, but of red-faced fury and injured betrayal.
The current composition of the US Senate may even be considered a repudiation of the vision of James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, who had envisaged the Senate as a more deliberative body than the House. Madison, the fourth American President, expected the Senate to act as a check so that Congress would not “yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passion and be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions”. He added that “a body (the Senate) which is to correct this infirmity, ought to be free from it”.
The expectations of the fourth President, and the realities foisted on the nation by the 45th President, would perhaps go down as one of the enduring ironies of history.
In his 2016 election campaigning, Trump and his acolytes spoke against “political correctness” which quickly morphed into a dismantling of accepted civility in public discourse, even a negation of history regarding the civil rights movement. From there it was but a short step to making racism and xenophobia chic.
Perhaps no other action of the Trump administration has caused as much anguish and revulsion as the recent separation of children from their parents at the US border. The then Attorney General Jeff Sessions quoted Apostle Paul to say that the action had biblical sanction. An almost immediate response came from New York Cardinal Timothy M Dolan, who said, “For one, St. Paul always says we should obey the law of the government if that law is in conformity with the Lord’s law, all right? No pun intended but God’s law trumps man’s law, all right?”
As the recent victory of the Democratic party demonstrated, there is a resurgence of the political Left in the American body politic. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, the American electorate has got a “clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with error”.
In America, as in the rest of the world, the rise of nativism has led to the decimation of the political center. Even as the Right remains strident, Democrats, exhilarated by their recent victory, nevertheless face pressure from the Far Left. As civility has disappeared, nuances in political discourse too seem endangered.
The long term ravages of Trump’s administrative actions too could linger awhile. Indeed, the full consequences of such actions as the rolling back of climate change regulations and the ever-widening income inequality could be in play years after Trump leaves office.
It is one of the tragic legacies of history that millions should suffer for the sins of a few. Two former Indian prime ministers, Manmohan Singh and Inder Kumar Gujral were fond of quoting the poet Muzaffar Razmi:
Ye jabr bhi dekha hai
Taareeq ki nazron ne
Lamhon ne khata ki thi
Sadiyon ne saza payi
(A freewheeling translation: History has been witness to this injustice, for the mistakes of a moment, generations have paid the price.)
(Ashok Easwaran is a Chicago-based journalist who has reported from North America for over two decades. The views expressed are his own. He can be contacted at ashok3185@yahoo.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
George Papadopoulos
By Michael Hernandez,
Washington: Former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in prison Friday after pleading guilty to lying to federal investigators.
In addition, Papadopoulos was ordered by a Washington court to pay a $9,500 fine and serve 200 hours of community service as well as 12 months of supervised release.
He is the first aide to U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign to be sentenced on charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Papadopoulos pled guilty last October to lying to the FBI. He told the court Friday that he is “deeply embarrassed and ashamed” for lying to investigators.
During sentencing, Papadopoulos’ lawyer, Thomas Breen, reportedly insisted that “the President of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever did.”
Trump earlier Friday sought to distance himself from his former advisor, telling reporters on Air Force One “I don’t know Papadopoulos.”
“I saw him sitting in one picture at a table with me. That’s the only thing I know about him,” he said. “They got him, on I guess, on a couple of lies.”
—AA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : The White House said on Friday that US President Donald Trump will travel to France, Ireland, Argentina and Columbia in November for bilateral and multilateral issues.
According to a statement issued by the White House press secretary, Trump will travel to Paris, France, to participate in a November 11 commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting in World War I, Xinhua reported.
Trump’s “participation in this event will highlight the sacrifices that Americans have made, not only during World War I but also in the century since,” the White House said.
While in Europe, Trump also will visit Ireland to “renew the deep and historic ties” with the country, read the statement.
Later in November, Trump will attend the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“The G20 Summit will be an opportunity for the President to highlight his pro-growth economic policies on an international stage and meet bilaterally with other key world leaders,” the White House said.
The US leader will also travel to Columbia, where he “looks forward to discussing with the Duque administration opportunities for even greater collaboration on security, counter narcotics, and regional affairs.”
In addition, Trump has asked Vice President Mike Pence to travel to Singapore in November to attend the United States-Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit and the East Asia Summit and then to Papua New Guinea for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings.
Pence will highlight the US regional vision, and meet with leaders of US regional allies and partners to advance security and prosperity, among others, the White House said.
—IANS
