Thread: “All you Americans are fired.”

THE HIDDEN WORKFORCE EXPANDING TESLA’S FACTORY

The automaker’s urgent upgrade of its Fremont facility benefited from cheap, imported workers, but did the companies involved flout visa and labor laws?

By Louis Hansen
lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com
Published May 15, 2016

When Gregor Lesnik left his pregnant girlfriend in Slovenia for a job in America, his visa application described specialized skills and said he was a supervisor headed to a South Carolina auto plant.

Turns out, that wasn’t true.

The unemployed electrician had no qualifications to oversee American workers and spoke only a sentence or two of English. He never set foot in South Carolina. The companies that arranged his questionable visa instead sent Lesnik to a menial job in Silicon Valley. He earned the equivalent of $5 an hour to expand the plant for one of the world’s most sophisticated companies, Tesla Motors.

Lesnik’s three-month tenure ended a year ago in a serious injury and a lawsuit that has exposed a troubling practice in the auto industry. Overseas contractors are shipping workers from impoverished countries to American factories, where they work long hours for low wages, in apparent violation of visa and labor laws.

About 140 workers from Eastern Europe, mostly from Croatia and Slovenia, built a new paint shop at Tesla’s Fremont plant, a project vital to the flagship Silicon Valley automaker’s plans to ramp up production of its highly anticipated Model 3 sedan. Their story emerged from dozens of interviews conducted by the Bay Area News Group, and an extensive review of payroll, visa and court documents.


GregGregor Lesnik, an electrician from Slovenia, was among scores of Eastern European workers who worked on a multimillion dollar expansion of Tesla’s Fremont factory in 2015. At the plant, Lesnik lifted heavy pipes, and installed them into the ceiling and through the roof of the paint shop. A typical workday was 10 hours at least six days a week.or Lesnik, an electrician from Slovenia, was among scores of Eastern European workers who worked on a multimillion dollar expansion of Tesla’s Fremont factory in 2015. At the plant, Lesnik lifted heavy pipes, and installed them into the ceiling and throuorkday was 10 hours at least six days a week.

On May 16, 2015, he climbed atop the paint shop roof and onto an unsecured tile, then fell nearly three stories to the factory floor. He broke both legs, some ribs, tore ligaments in his knee and sustained a concussion. Lesnik filed a lawsuit saying workers were paid as little as $5 an hour


Yet neither the contractors involved nor Tesla itself have accepted legal responsibility for the hiring practices, long hours and low pay. While most of the imported workers interviewed for this story said they are happy with their paychecks, their American counterparts earn as much as $52 an hour for similar work.

“There’s definitely something wrong with this picture,” said Rob Stoker, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County, who believes local sheet metal workers lost tens of thousands of work hours and millions of dollars in wages.

Critics say the U.S. government hasn’t done enough to halt such arrangements, and has become an unwitting partner by allowing the workers to enter the country on a nonimmigrant visa for tourism and business, known as a B1/B2. Replacing U.S. workers with foreign visa holders for construction work is an improper use of the business visa, they say.

Recruited by a small Slovenian company called ISM Vuzem, Lesnik, 42, and his co-workers were flown into the U.S. for months at a time, housed in nondescript apartments, and shuttled to the Tesla plant six and sometimes seven days a week, according to workers and the suit.

While foreign workers can obtain B1 visas for supervisory duties, the workers at the Tesla plant were simply installing pipes and welding parts — hands-on work banned by the terms of their visas, according to immigration experts and court documents. Workers interviewed by this news organization said they have worked on jobs under similar arrangements around the country.

Federal authorities are struggling to keep up. “We have concluded that there is widespread abuse of the B1 visa in the Bay Area,” said Michael Eastwood, assistant district director of the San Jose area office of the U.S. Department of Labor. He was unfamiliar with the allegations against Tesla contractors.

The labor practices contrast with Tesla’s image as the planet’s most innovative automaker, using technological ingenuity to manufacture cars in the heart of Silicon Valley. Tesla said it employs nearly 6,000 U.S. workers in the once-shuttered Fremont factory, all well-paying jobs that come with company equity. While bypassing American workers for low-cost foreign laborers may benefit automakers’ bottom line, Tesla said it had nothing to do with hiring the ones who built its paint shop.

It never employed Lesnik, did not control his work, and was not responsible for his pay or immigration status, the company said. “Tesla expects all its contractors and their subs ... to comply with all applicable pay laws.”

The company overseeing Tesla’s expansion project — Eisenmann, a German-based manufacturer of industrial systems — also denied in court that it had legal responsibility for Lesnik. Vuzem acknowledged that it hired Lesnik but denies his claims.

Tesla and Eisenmann won a preliminary effort to be removed from the lawsuit, but an Alameda County Superior Court judge has allowed Lesnik’s amended complaint against them to move forward.

Amid all this legal maneuvering, a question looms: How did so many workers on the other side of the world end up traveling 6,000 miles with suspect visa papers to the same job site in Fremont, California?

Lesnik comes to America

Lesnik in many ways is no different from the millions of foreigners who come to America to better themselves. But this newspaper’s investigation and legal documents show his path from the village of Velenje, Slovenia, to Silicon Valley was guided by companies that helped his visa process and sometimes provided contradictory or inaccurate information.

In late 2014, Lesnik was an unemployed electrician living with his mother and expecting a child with his girlfriend. A nearby construction company, ISM Vuzem, was looking for workers, and he signed up.

“There were no jobs in Slovenia,” he said through a translator. He needed to provide for “družina” — his family.

Vuzem provides teams of Eastern European workers to build manufacturing plants in Europe and the U.S. It counts Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Volkswagen, Ford and Saab as clients, according to its website.

The Slovenian firm was the low rung on the contracting ladder in a complex business arrangement. Eisenmann announced in March 2015 that Tesla Motors had chosen the company to expand the Fremont paint shop. Eisenmann hired subcontractors to fill out the work force for what it called the most valuable deal in the company’s 60-year history, with the first phase worth more than $100 million.

Stoker, the labor leader, said a local company lost the bid on the project in part because their labor costs and bids were higher. The job would have meant tens of thousands of work hours and valuable training for local apprentices. “It killed us,” Stoker said. “We had so many people — ready, willing and able — needing this.”

Vuzem helped Lesnik secure a B1/B2 visa that allowed limited business and tourism in the U.S., but not the kind of hands-on work he said he performed at the Tesla paint factory.

Eisenmann also helped with the paperwork. Court filings show Lesnik’s visa application included a letter to the U.S. consulate from Robert Keller, Eisenmann’s Chicago area-based U.S. purchasing manager who was also listed as Lesnik’s U.S. contact.

Workers generally can earn more money in the U.S. than at home. While Lesnik’s lawsuit sa they were paid less, the Eastern European workers were the equivalent of about $200.

WHAT IS THE DRAW FOR WORKERS
Foreign workers generally can earn more money in the U.S. than at home. While Lesnik’s lawsuit says they were paid less, the Eastern European workers were promised the equivalent of about $2,000 a month. 1,550 euros. The average monthly wage for a worker in Slovenia last year,or about $1,700, 750 euros. The average monthly wage for a worker in Croatia last year, or about $850.

12.6 percentUnemployment in Slovenia in February
17.2 percentnemployment in Croatia in February
(you have to wonder why EU needs "refugees" or the US needs refugees & foreign workers?)

Keller wrote that Lesnik would be working for yet another European subcontractor with “specialized knowledge” of Eisenmann’s equipment to build a new paint shop for BMW in South Carolina. The visa application included a reservation at a Days Inn in South Carolina, and listed Lesnik as a “supervisor of electrical and mechanical installation.”

“His assignment will involve multiple border entries,” Keller wrote, “but in no way adversely affect the employment of citizens of the United States.”

Keller didn’t respond to this newspaper’s request to ask about the contradictions between his letter and Lesnik’s job. A lawyer for Eisenmann declined to comment.

A U.S. Consular Affairs spokesman said letters are typical in companies’ efforts to import workers on B1/B2 visas.

Once Lesnik secured his visa, a few days before his trip, he learned he would be going to California instead of South Carolina.

It didn’t matter to him, Lesnik said through an interpreter. It was all new.

In March 2015, he joined about 140 other foreign Vuzem construction workers in Silicon Valley and began installing an industrial heating and cooling system at Tesla Motors, according to sworn testimony from his lawsuit.

Gregor Lesnik simply seized an opportunity. It nearly killed him.

‘Unregulated visas’

Eastern European workers at the Tesla plant weren’t covered by the visa best known in Silicon Valley — the H-1B. It allows a limited number of highly skilled workers — 85,000 this fiscal year — into the country. Prominent tech companies have fought for an expansion of the program, saying the U.S. is not producing enough workers with advanced skills.

By contrast, the B1/B2 visa secured for Lesnik is far more common — the U.S. issued 6.2 million business visas in fiscal year 2014. It allows foreigners to enter the country for pleasure and limited work purposes — for example, to negotiate contracts, supervise or train U.S. workers in a specialized skill, or attend a conference — but it broadly bans the holder from performing hands-on jobs that U.S. workers can do. The visa allows workers to stay in the U.S. for up to six months at a time.

“We have concluded that there is widespread abuse of the B1 visa n the Bay Area.”Mchael Eastwood,assistant district director of the SanJoseareaoffice of the U.S. Dpartment of Labor, who was unfamiliar with the allegations against Tesla contractors

Critics say the B1 system appears to be broken. While consular officers check to see that workers will return home, less attention is paid to the work they perform in the U.S.

“It’s the wonderful world of unregulated visas,” said Daniel Costa, an immigration law and policy researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank funded partly by labor unions.

Jay Palmer, a former manager and whistleblower on his Indian technology and outsourcing company Infosys, said an employment contractor can make more profit on B1 workers compared to higher paid H-1B visa holders. For example, a company can charge its client $100 an hour for each laborer under a B1 visa, and pay the worker a fraction of the amount, he said. “It’s extremely simple,” said Palmer, now a consultant who advises companies and whistleblowers. “It’s low risk and high reward.”


Jay Palmer, a whistleblower against Infosys, an Indian firm that was fined $34 million for H1-B and B-1 visa infractions, poses for a portrait in New York in 2014. Palmer, a former Infosys manager, says an employment contractor can make more profit on B1 visa holders.

Efforts to police the questionable use of B1 visas have been spotty, at best.

In 2003, an Alabama sheet metal workers union protested Eisenmann hiring a contractor that brought in Polish workers to complete a Mercedes-Benz paint shop. The company was cleared of any wrongdoing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Officials with the agency declined to answer questions about the investigation and denied a Freedom of Information Act request for materials related to the probe. Eisenmann declined to respond to written questions about the case.

Ten years later, ICE fined Infosys a record $34 million for circumventing H-1B and B1 regulations and unlawfully using visa holders for skilled work around the country, among other offenses, according to a court settlement.

This month, Bitmicro Networks Inc. of Fremont was fined about $168,000 for giving substandard wages to workers brought in from the Philippines.

Crackdowns on wage violations
The Department of Labor has cracked down on at least three Bay Area businesses since 2013 for wage and hour violations involving visa holders.

May 2016 Bitmicro Networks of Fremont was fined about $168,000 for giving substandard wages to workers brought in from the Philippines.

October 2014 Electronics for Imaging, or EFI, brought in workers from India to Foster City and Fremont. The company paid $44,000 in back wages and fines for ordering employees to work as many as 122 hours per week for as little as $1.21 per hour.

February 2013 Bloom Energy of Sunnyvale was fined and ordered to pay nearly $64,000 in back wages for 14 employees brought in from Mexico to work in the U.S. The employees were paid in pesos, for the equivalent of $2.66 per hour.

Source: U.S. Department of Labor

At United States consulates around the globe, consular officers probe visa applicants about their intent to return to their native country. Questions are tailored to each individual, and companies often support applications with a letter, said William Cocks, spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Some foreign workers may be allowed to perform temporary construction work to install or repair equipment made outside the country, he said. It is unknown how much of the Tesla project’s equipment and materials were shipped from overseas. Visa holders may supervise or train U.S. workers, Cocks said, but they generally may not perform hands-on work.

Cocks said the goal is to “facilitate legitimate travel and prevent non-legitimate travel. That’s the battle that every consular officer has.”

It appears U.S. officials engaged in that battle in Slovenia. In February 2014, the U.S. Embassy in Ljubljana issued a special notice on its website to commercial and industrial workers seeking business visas: “You are not eligible for this visa if you are applying to perform building or construction work, whether on-site or in-plant,” it read. It noted an exception that allowed for supervising or training workers “but not actually performing any such building or construction work yourself.”

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs said the embassy wanted to ensure visa applicants could show the U.S. the work they would perform was permitted on a B1 visa, but the Ljubljana embassy was not aware of any applicants obtaining B1 visas for unauthorized work.

Lesnik obtained his visa from Ljubljana.


A Tesla vehicle is driven on a test track next to the Tesla Motors complex in Fremont, where foreign workers with questionable visas built a paint shop.

The economic equation

Even though the foreign workers who enter the U.S. on B1/B2 visas are paid a fraction of what U.S. workers would earn, the equation is still simple for Eastern Europeans — work in the United States generally pays more than in their home countries. The average monthly wage for a worker in Slovenia last year was about 1,550 euros, or $1,700, and unemployment reached 12.6 percent in February, according to government statistics. It’s even worse in Croatia: monthly wages are the equivalent of $850 and unemployment has reached 17.2 percent.

The U.S. economy is a powerful draw. The State Department in fiscal year 2014 issued 1,500 nonimmigrant work visas in Slovenia and 12,500 in Croatia
.
Some visa holders ended up in a tidy Milpitas apartment complex where Vuzem put up workers, four to six men in 2- and 3-bedroom apartments.

“Wherever there’s an auto industry, we’re there,” said Drazen, one of the workers who agreed to be interviewed if the newspaper only used his first name. The 45-year-old Croatian spent his third Christmas working in a U.S. factory. He expected his next stop for the Slovenian subcontractor ISM Vuzem to be at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee.

Drazen and a second Vuzem employee, Dalibor, who also agreed to be interviewed if only identified by his first name, said the workers were skilled at welding, pipe fitting and other trades necessary to install the industrial ventilation at the Tesla paint plant. Immigration officials granted the workers stays of three or six months, they said, and the men regularly flew home and returned weeks later to obey visa rules.
Customers wait in line to put a $1,000 deposit on the Tesla Model 3, outside the Tesla store in Santa Monica.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveils the Model 3, the company’s highly anticipated electric car for the masses. Demand for Tesla vehicles so is strong that Musk said the company will expand production to 500,000 vehicles annually by 2018.

They worked five or six days a week, sometimes seven when deadlines were tight, they said, speaking through an interpreter. They usually spent at least 10 hours on site, and Dalibor said it was suggested that they work every other weekend. Company vans shuttled the men back and forth and made regular trips to grocery stores.

Workers were not paid overtime, according to the men and the complaint.

While the pay was better than back at home — Drazen and Dalibor said they received a little more than $10 an hour — it wasn’t much compared to American standards. The prevailing wage for a sheet metal worker in Alameda County is $52 per hour in pay plus another $42 an hour toward pension and other benefits, according to the California Director of Industrial Relations.

Drazen said he has spent several years with Vuzem. Pulling out his phone, he showed photographs of his house in Croatia — a large, two-story home on a hill with a BMW parked in front. The wages he earns in the U.S. have created a good life for his family, he said.

“Whatever we’re doing here,” Drazen said, “it’s not so bad.”

Both men knew about Lesnik’s accident but declined to talk about it.

Dalibor, 47, has worked for several construction companies in Europe and the United States and said Vuzem was a fair employer and paid a decent wage. “In any company,” he said, “you have satisfied and unsatisfied workers.”

A disastrous fall

Lesnik spent his days at Tesla lifting heavy pipes, sometimes 12 feet long, and installing them into the ceiling and through the roof of the paint shop. His typical workday, he said in sworn testimony, lasted 10 hours for at least six days a week. Lesnik also worked four Sundays.

His job at the Fremont factory ended May 16, 2015, a Saturday afternoon. He climbed atop the paint shop roof and onto an unsecured tile, then plunged nearly three stories, bouncing off scaffolding, to the factory floor. The fall broke both his legs and ribs, tore ligaments in his knee and gave him a concussion.

When he awoke, according to sworn testimony, he was surrounded by Vuzem workers and paramedics. One of his broken legs jutted out at a right angle. People were cutting his clothes off. He recognized no one.

The lawsuit asks for unspecified damages and penalties for Lesnik and other workers.

Among the claims:

• Eisenmann USA wrote letters to the U.S. Embassy on behalf of Lesnik and as many as 200 foreign workers stating they would supervise employees at a U.S. auto plant. Most of the Vuzem workers were nonsupervisory laborers and tradesmen.
• Tesla issued company security badges to the foreign workers, recorded their time on site and shared responsibility for setting safety conditions.
• Vuzem required foreign employees to regularly work between 60 and 70 hours a week. Vuzem paid Lesnik an average of 800 euros per month, or about $900, for a rate of less than $5 per hour. Lesnik was promised an equal amount when he returned home, but the company never paid the balance.
• The companies violated wage and employment laws and benefitted from the cheap labor of foreign workers. Workers were promised $12.70 an hour based on a standard workweek. The suit estimates they are due $2.6 million in overtime and premium pay.

“That’s not how people are supposed to be treated in the U.S.,” said Lesnik’s lawyer, William Dresser.

In a statement to this news organization, Tesla said it never employed Lesnik, and the claims in the suit are between the Slovenian worker and the subcontractor. “To our knowledge,” the company said, “Mr. Lesnik was injured when he allegedly failed to wear the proper safety harness provided by his employer.”

Eisenmann also denied direct responsibility, noting that Vuzem and another subcontractor hired and paid Lesnik. Vuzem lawyers said in court documents the company vigorously disputes Lesnik’s version of the accident.

Representatives and lawyers for the Vuzem and Eisenmann companies declined multiple requests to comment on the case or answer written questions about employee pay, visas and work conditions.

While the companies haven’t explained their justification for importing foreign workers, an immigration attorney who represents multinational firms suggests the U.S. government has a motivation to tolerate the practice.

William Stock, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said consular officials balance the protection of U.S. jobs with the preservation of free trade. For example, if federal regulators deny foreign workers entry to complete a turnkey project, other countries may ban U.S. workers on similar exchanges, he said. Such cases, he said, “are very close to the line as to what should be allowable.”

Stoker, the Alameda County labor leader, said he sees it in simpler terms: “Unfortunately, Tesla made the decision to award the paint line contract to a contractor that abuses our country’s visa program and imports workers who earn a fraction of the area standard wages.”

Seeking justice

In the days following the accident, Lesnik drifted in and out of consciousness in his bed at the Regional Medical Center of San Jose. He was visited by a childhood friend who now lives in the Bay Area and by Vuzem supervisors.

The supervisors translated conversations between Lesnik and his doctors, and according to his friend, told him to ignore medical advice, the suit says.

After a week in the hospital, the suit said, Vuzem employees arrived at Lesnik’s room with a wheelchair. One claimed to be a nurse and insisted Lesnik get out of bed, travel to the airport and fly back home.

Lesnik hired a lawyer instead.




His lawyer had his hospital room switched twice to avoid harassment from Vuzem supervisors. Lesnik underwent multiple surgeries, spent weeks in the hospital ***and months in rehabilitation.

In November, he returned to Slovenia and met his baby daughter, Erin. Vuzem executives made a surprise visit to his home in Velenje, he said, and urged him to drop his suit.

Lesnik refused to settle. He said he’s seeking “pravice” — justice — for himself and other workers.

A year after his accident, Lesnik still grunts his way through physical therapy. He walks without a cane, but has yet to return to work

Halfway around the globe, the new high-end paint factory he helped build for Tesla Motors will put the final touches on the world’s most-anticipated electric vehicles — made in Silicon Valley.

Response from Tesla

“Tesla proudly employs nearly 6,000 American workers from the Bay Area on the floor of the same factory that had previously been shuttered by NUMMI. These are well-paying jobs, each of which comes with equity in Tesla, and which have helped to transform the automotive industry and revitalize this region's important role in it. Separate from its thousands of employees, Tesla sometimes brings in third party general contractors to do short-term construction projects at the factory where Tesla does not have the expertise or ability to do the project on its own. In these situations, Tesla enters into contractual agreements with its general contractors, which allow them to select the resources they need for the job while also requiring them to hire and pay their workers appropriately.”

http://extras.mercurynews.com/silico...mported-labor/

Staff Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report
Contact Louis Hansen 408-920-5043. Follow him at Twitter.com/HansenLouis.

I'm telling you all, we need an immediate 10 to 20 Year Moratorium on All Immigration. Immigration is cheating Americans out of their jobs, their lives, their futures and country.

STOP IT NOW.

It would be nice if our MSM cared enough about the United States to spend a year covering the issues of immigration and free trade to inform the public about what's going on, but no, they're too busy covering some tweet that called a woman a bimbo or writing stories about a boss telling a worker "You like your candy."

Disgusting and pathetic.

Great article covering IMPORTANT NEWS by Mercury News. Thank you.

Intel Lays Off 12,000 After Seeking Visas to Import 14,523 Foreign Professionals Since 2010
Reuters by Warner Todd Huston21 Apr 2016

Technology giant Intel announced April 19 it will fire 12,000 skilled U.S.-based professionals — after already swelling its workforce with 14,523 requests in Washington D.C. since 2010 for visas to import foreign professionals through the controversial H-1B and Green Card programs.

The company said the layoffs were part of a restructuring plan to help shift its focus from desktop PCs to mobile devices. But the company is very profitable, and first-quarter 2016 profits were 14 percent above predictions.

Amid the layoffs, Intel is one of the nation’s largest users of the H-1B outsourcing program which allows companies such as Disney and Abbot Laboratories to replace white-collar American professionals with cheaper professionals from India, China, and other countries.

Intel has insisted that it cannot find enough skilled American workers to fill its needs. From 2010 to 2015, it filed requests for up to 8,351 H-1B visas, plus 5,172 applications for permanent Green Cards for its foreign employees, according to MyVisasJobs.com. That data shows the company sought to hire 14,523 foreign professionals instead of many Americans eager to work at Intel.

The MyVisaJobs.com site, which presents data prepared by government agencies, also shows that the company even sought work visas for 445 people who arrived in the country as students carrying F-1 visas.

The number of foreign professionals hired is uncertain. However, the MyVisaJobs.com data shows that 2,654 Green Card requests were approved in the five years between 2015 and 2011. Also many of the H-1B requests were made when the economy was stalled, and so many were likely granted. If one-third of its H-1B visa-requests were granted, then Intel was able to hire 3,000 H-1B workers from 2010 to 2015.

Intel’s press aides declined to respond to calls and emails from Breitbart.

Intel’s hires are not lower-status “tech workers,” such as software-testers or software-maintenance programmers. Instead, Intel imported foreign college-graduates for prestigious jobs such as electronics engineers, industrial engineers or computer and information research scientists. These H-1B workers can stay for six years, or longer, and some get Green Cards, which grant lifetime work permits.

There’s no shortage of U.S. engineers looking for jobs at Intel.

The U.S. marketplace includes many Americans — often older and experienced, but who ask for higher wages to pay for their families — who are eager to work at Intel’s outsourced jobs. For example, on April 21, Indeed.com offered resumes of 16,576 people seeking jobs as electronics engineers in Santa Clara, Calif., the company’s home town. They included Robert Hill of Cupertino, Calif., Ray Chen in San Mateo, Calif., and Aubrey Calder in Mountain View., Calif.

Nationwide, companies and universities employ roughly 800,000 lower salary white collar guest workers. That total is roughly equivalent to the number of Americans who graduate each year with degrees in business, medicine, technology, computers, and architecture. The resident population of white collar guest-workers includes roughly 100,000 lower wage professors, doctors, scientist and other professionals employed by U.S. universities and their affiliated business partners. These guest-workers help lower first-year salaries for American graduates, so lowering the Americans’ lifetime earnings.

The H-1B visa program isn’t the only program used to import foreign workers into the country. Late last year the Obama administration expended the Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa program, which is allowing 120,000 foreign students to work with companies, many of whom rely on the universities for hires.

Because of corruption, agencies are trying to crack down on fake universities that import foreign fake students for work at U.S. companies, and companies that use the H-1B system to get foreign workers for rent to American companies.

Intel’s critics say Intel has used illegal methods to reduce white-collar salaries in California’s Silicon Valley. Intel was a defendant in a 2011 class action lawsuit filed against a group of tech companies, including Apple and Google. The lawsuit was settled in 2015 for $415 million.

For its part, Intel claims that the H-1B visa program is a good thing for the country and, according to Intel spokesperson Lisa Malloy, “sustains our national competitiveness, drives economic growth, and creates jobs in the process.”

Along with other companies, such as Microsoft and Qualcomm, Intel was part of the group of business giants that allied with Democrats and with Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio to pressure GOP politicians to accept the 2013 “Gang of Eight” immigration bill. The unpopular bill, which included a huge increase in the importation of immigrants and H-1B guest workers, as well as a blanket amnesty for millions of illegals already here, failed when GOP voters ejected GOP House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, in his June 2014 primary election.

Since then, political outsider Donald Trump has put himself on track to the GOP’s 2016 nomination by promising to reform the nation’s immigration and guest worker systems to help Americans. For example, he has said he would reduce the inflow of H-1Bs by raising the minimum wage for H-1B workers, and has called for one year “pause” in legal immigration. Trump’s main rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, has also called for a pro-American reform of the labor market, saying it will drive up Americans’ wages and spur technology development.

Their failed GOP rivals — including Gov. Jeb Bush and Gov. Marco Rubio — declined to call for pro-American immigration reform. In fact, Bush’s economic platform called for increased outsourcing of U.S. jobs to imported foreign professionals.

Currently, four million Americans turn 18 each year, and the nation’s government annually imports roughly one million new legal immigrants and workers, plus hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and roughly 700,000 temporary guest workers, including the six-year H-1B professionals.

In 2013, the inflow of foreign labor helped reduce wages and boosted the stock market.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...rs-since-2010/

Obama’s 2013 Immigration Shock Hit Middle Class, Gave $5 Trillion To Wall Street

by Neil Munro4 Oct 2015

Summary: In 1968, 3.7 million Americans were born, just three years after the 1965 update to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Almost five decades later, 3.5 million of their children turned 18, and entered 2013’s weak, post-recession job market.

But that long-ago immigration law had been quietly, steadily, decade-by-decade, expanding the inflow of foreign workers. In 2013, it flooded the weak job market with an astounding tsunami of three million additional new workers.

That’s a shocking 85 percent increase in the new labor supply. That’s six imported workers competing side-by-side with every seven children of the 1968 Americans. That’s almost one foreign worker for each one child of the ’68 generation.
Of course, Americans’ participation in the workforce dipped, wages flatlined and company profits peaked. Of course, the Down Jones stock-market index boomed by 26 percent, delivering almost $5 trillion in gains to America’s richest families.

Of course, only seven percent of Americans want more immigration, and, of course, President Barack Obama, progressives, business groups, journalists and many establishment Republicans want to repeat that 2013 immigration disaster again and again and again.

The 1968 Generation And their 1995 Children
In 1968, 3,760,358 new Americans entered the world. They grew up during the 1970s and 1980s, and mostly ignored the inaugurations of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Few noticed the slow-growing 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act that would eventually have a huge impact on themselves and their future kids.
By 1981, these ’68 babies were teenagers. They paid their $3.00 tickets to watch “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Back to the Future” and “Dirty Dancing.” They wore ankle-warmers and shoulder pads, or parachute pants and “Members Only” jackets. They went to work in 1986’s fast growing economy, got married, and bought houses at an average price of $123,000 in 1990. In 1995, these 68′-ers birthed 3.5 million babies at an average maternal age of 26.9.

That 1995 generation of 3.5 million babies entered the world as Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich took the House gavel from the Democratic Party. They were little kids when President George W. Bush stood on the ruins of the Twin Towers, and teenagers when the real-estate bubble burst. In 2013, these 3.5 million Americans entered the labor market to look for jobs — and they found it radically different from their parents’ 1986 labor market.

Their 2013 labor market was deeply shaped by the real estate crash six years earlier — but it was also fundamentally transformed by the ever-expanding 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

The immigration law had modest impact in 1986, when their parents were looking for jobs. Back then, the 3.7 million Americans sought jobs in a fast-growing economy that was annually absorbing roughly 900,000 working-age immigrants, guest-workers and illegals. That was a ratio of four new American workers for every added foreign worker in 1986.

But by 2013, President Barack Obama and his business allies were running the immigration act at breakneck speed — and it enabled him to deliver almost one extra worker into the labor market for each of the 3.5 million children of the 1968 babies.
That’s an extra three million immigration-enabled workers in one year.
That’s an 85 percent increase above the natural supply of new Americans workers.

America is a nation of Americans, but it is increasingly a workplace of non-Americans.

Of course, the huge supply of new foreign labor glutted the labor market. The percentage of American men and women with jobs stopped growing, even though it was six years since the housing market crashed.

The percentage of 1968 parents who had jobs fell five percent from 2007 to 2011, rose by 0.5 percent in 2012 — and stopped rising in 2013. The percentage of working Americans aged between 20 and 40 actually fell, despite small gains in 2012. The percentage of Americans younger than 20 who joined the workforce nudged up by 0.5 percent, partly because college attendance dropped.

By the end of 2013, the number of native-born Americans aged 16 to 65 with jobs had nudged up by only 700,000, to 113.5 million. In fact, fewer-working-age Americans had jobs at the end of 2013 than had jobs in 2000.

In contrast, the number of foreign-born people in the workforce rose from 17.1 million in 2000, up to 22.4 million at the end of 2013. That’s a gain of 5.3 million, amid a loss of 1.3 million Americans’ jobs.

That shift away from Americans meant that foreign-born people held one-in-six jobs at the end of 2013, compared to one-in-eight jobs in 2000.

Amid Obama’s flood of new foreign labor, median weekly wages for full-time workers were flat all year, at $334 in constant 1982-84 dollars. Inflation-adjusted weekly wages earned by African-Americans dropped by a dollar to $270, while Latinos saw their wages rise by a dollar to $248.

The opposite trend happened under pro-American President Bill Clinton, when a fast-growing economy ran out of workers, and employers had to raise the salaries of even the least-skilled workers to keep them from going to another company. Combined, illegal and legal immigration added only about 1 million new workers to the economy each year during Clinton’s tenure, ensuring he left office with high poll ratings.

“Incomes have grown by 9.9 – 11.7 percent for every quintile [or fifth] of the income distribution [chart]. For the bottom three quintiles, this is the strongest growth since at least the 1970s,” said Gene Sperling, the chief economic aide for President Bill Clinton. Incomes rose because “expanding businesses in search of workers have had to recruit and offer training to people they would never even have looked twice at in a shorter or less robust expansion,” he told an audience at the National Press Club in October 1999.

Correspondingly, Obama’s 2013 labor shock — and companies’ accelerating automation, such as cost-cutting computers, machines and robots — boosted corporate profits, not Americans’ wages. “Corporate Profits Are At An All-Time Record Peak And Expected To Grow in 2014,” Forbes reported in November 2013.

So the stock market boomed. The Dow Jones Index rose by 26.5 percent in 2013, which was the largest-one year jump since the 1995 children were born. The huge gain translated into a $5,000 billion boost for stockholders. Most of that growth went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americas who own roughly 70 percent of stocks.

The drop in wages and rise in stock values widened the “wealth gap” that Democrats complained about during the 2012 election campaign. According to an October 2014 article in the Wall Street Journal, “the gains in wealth have especially accrued to just the top 3% of families in recent decades… Those families held 54%of wealth in 2013, up from 45% in 1989. The bottom 90% now hold 25% of wealth, down from 33%.”

Obama’s extra supply of labor in 2013 even coincided with a flattening of mid-recession productivity growth, perhaps because companies were able to hire more low-risk disposable labor rather than invest inproductivity-boosting machinery. Obama’s aides tried to deny any connection, but the cheap-labor explanation for flat productivity is compatible with long-term records, which show that U.S. productivity gains slowed after 1965 once extra foreign workers reduced marketplace pressure for high-tech investment, following 40 years of low immigration and high productivity growth.

In contrast, Japan has adopted a different economic strategy, which supplements its shrinking domestic labor supply with robots rather than culturally discordant foreign workers.

The 2013 Inflow of Foreign Workers

The three million immigration-added workers flowed into the U.S. labor market via numerous large and small channels — few of whom are counted and totaled by journalists, economists or politicians.

Children of Pre-1995 Immigrants: 568,000

The first group consists of American-born children of legal and illegal immigrants who arrived from 1986 to 1995. They grew steadily after the immigration act was signed in 1965. These foreign-born couples birthed 568,000 Americans kids in 1995 who turned 18 in 2013. Yes, they’re American, but they are also children of the 1965 migration law.Children of Post-1995 Immigrants: 300,000

Many immigrants arrived after 1995, bringing with them children born overseas. Roughly 300,000 of these child immigrants turned 18 in 2013. They too are American, but they are added to the labor supply by the immigration act.

New Green Card Recipients: 350,000

Another obvious single category of new workers were new legal recipients of green cards, or residency permits. After several years, green cards holders can request to become American citizens. The federal government says 990,553 foreigners received green cards in 2013. Most of them were poor and unskilled, but were allowed in because they were parents and siblings of recently naturalized American citizens. But half of the green card recipients had arrived in prior years, and were already eligible to work. That means 459,751 new green card recipients arrived in 2013. Roughly two-thirds of them joined the workforce, boosting the labor supply by roughly 350,000 workers.

Foreigners Given Work Permits: 750,000

The next major category were the 1,301,308 foreigners who got work-permits from the Obama administration. Many of these work-permits can be renewed indefinitely and they put people on a path to residency, Green Cards and citizenship.

This data was pulled from Obama’s administration by the Center for Immigration Studies. “These statistics indicate that the executive branch is operating a huge parallel immigrant work authorization system outside the bounds of the laws and limits written by Congress. Millions of work permits are being issued to illegal aliens and aliens admitted legally, but in a non-work authorized category…. [this is] an abuse of executive authority that inevitably reduces job opportunities for Americans,” CIS concluded.

This huge group came in four sub-groups and at least 42 sub-categories.

The first group includes 310,986 people who get temporary work permits and are not put on a fast-track to permanent residency. Some of the 27 sub-categories in this group are tiny and uncontroversial, such as visiting artists and entertainers, foreign journalists, the spouses of diplomats, or ship crews. Other subcategories are larger and controversial, such as foreign graduates from U.S. colleges or people who first arrived in America to work as guest-workers.

In total, this first group included people who would likely work in the U.S. for one to several years. But almost 25,000 were family members, including kids. Also, some — such as diplomatic employees — are offset by reciprocal benefits to Americans. So this first group probably contributed 250,000 new workers to the U.S. labor market.

The second group consists of 156,788 people who are on track to permanent residency, Green Cards and citizenship. This group includes 69,854 refugees from chaotic cultures, and 27,301 people given asylum. Many people in this categories are young or old, so this second group probably contributed 100,000 work-ready adults would will stay permanently.

The third group was huge. It consisted of 333,761 people in categories that rarely get work permits. But in 2013, Obama’s easy-migration policies provided work-permits to 211 stowaways, 16 people who suspect of committing document fraud, 3 people who had been denied asylum plus a huge wave of 329,403 people who had “entered without inspection.” This subgroup of 329,403 people who “entered without inspection” were mostly illegal migrants who were given work-permits under Obama’s semi-legal amnesty for younger illegals, dubbed the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” non-enforcement program.

Obama announced he would formally stop enforcing immigration laws against younger illegals, and give them work permits, in June 2012 as the election campaign heated up. But most of the documents were not distributed until 2013. Many of these illegals had jobs before Obama’s quasi-amnesty, but they tended to be lower-end jobs. Obama’s amnesty freed them to compete for normal jobs sought by Americans. But if Obama and prior presidents had actually enforced immigration laws, few of the illegals would be be able to find jobs, and most would return home. So, as a rough guess, Obama’s combination of mini-amnesty and lax enforcement likely added the equivalent of 200,000 adults to the legal labor-market where American would want to work.

The fourth and last group among the 1.3 million work permits are 316,893 people who got work-permits for “unknown or unreported reasons.” This probably include many younger illegals who got work permits under DACA, and some of the roughly 50,000 Central American women, male youths and children who crossed the Texas border in 2013. “The [Central Americans] get into the country pretty much unimpeded,” Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, chief of U.S. Southern Command, said in October 2014. With some caution, this category adds another 200,000 working-age people to the labor market.

Illegals: 350,000

Obama has almost stopped repatriations of illegals detained within the United States, except for some of the illegals who are actually convicted of felonies. Understandably, the laxity has given a green light to new illegal migrants, and roughly 350,000 illegal migrants crossed the borders in 2013. This analysis does not count the roughly 11.5 million other illegals in the country, of whom roughly 8 million are in the workforce.

Guest Workers: 700,000


Obama’s administration also admitted roughly 700,000 guest-workers, who can stay for only a few months or up to six, seven or even 10 years.

The federal government doesn’t provide good numbers for this category. For example, the government does not release the number of foreign college grads who get H-1B six-year permits — but simply announced how many of those people fly into the United State each year. That’s a useless measure because many of these H-1B workers fly to and from their home country multiple times each year. However, the Center for Immigration Studies tracks the numbers from multiple agencies and estimates that 691,000 guest-workers arrived in 2012. The number rises each year, so the flow of guest-workers probably reached 700,000 in 2013.

Roughly one-tenth, or 70,000 of these guest-workers are field-hands in the agricultural sector.

At least 200,0o0 are college grads carrying multi-year H-1B or L visas. They are doctors, designers, teachers, programmers, college teachers, therapists, accountants, sports coaches, pharmacists, and they work in every decent-sized city or university around the country. Some get paid decent wages in American dollars, some get paid in home-country currencies at home-country wages. But they nearly all work in white-collar jobs that are sought by the many Americans who were born in 1995, or in 1968.

This analysis ignores the impact of graduate guest-workers who arrived before 2013. That resident population is roughly 1 million.

As intended, these guest-worker graduates help reduce starting-pay for American graduates, and to reduce lifetime payroll costs for many companies. For example, annual increases in salaries for health workers, architects, and physical science professionals — engineers, scientists, mathematicians — fell from roughly 3.5 percent in 2009 to only 1 percent in 2013, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

Most of the remaining guest-workers are blue-collar workers employed in slaughterhouses, vacation resorts, restaurants, retail stores, fish processing plans, trucking companies and landscaping firms. Many of those jobs once paid enough to allow a middle-class lifestyle for Americans. But the flood of new labor has dropped wages, so many Americans and immigrants are now reliant on taxpayers for incomes that employers once provided.

Alternative Views

The one-to-one is Obama’s labor shock inflicted on the 3.5 million children of the 3.7 million Americans born in 1968.

Basically, the 3.7 million Americans born in 1968 had 3.5 million kids in 1995 — and those youths were hammered by a tidal wave of at least three million immigration-delivered, new rival workers in 2013. That’s basically one extra immigration-added worker for every one of those 68-ers’ kids.

If 2013 is considered the starting point for immigration, then 4.4 million Americans — the 3.5 million children of the 68′ babies, plus all the 900,000 children of subsequent immigrants — turned 18 in 2013. That class of 4.4 million Americans was hit by Obama’s 2013 wave of 2.1 million new foreign workers. In effect, Obama delivered two foreign workers for every four young native-born or immigrant Americans who turned 18.

That two-for-four measure is the most charitable calculation of Obama’s 2013 migration shock against Americans.

But a less-charitable calculation looks at what Obama could have done to reduce the labor shock.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows he could have easily shifted the impact from two-for-four to perhaps one-for-nine.

For example, in 2013, he could have slowed Green Card approvals and tightened border security. If that policy reversal had delayed and reduced the new arrivals by only 50 percent, he would have reduced the new foreign workers in 2013 by 350,000 in one year.

He could have reversed his choice to award or renew work-permits issued to illegals, refugees and other inflowing groups. That would have opened up to 1.5 million jobs for Americans in 2013.

If Obama had wanted, he could have told his deputies to use agency funds to pay migrants to go home (as Israel does), and to prosecute employers who provide illegals with jobs. Obama also could have ordered his deputies to deport all migrants convicted of law-breaking.

But those reversals didn’t happen. In 2013, Obama’s immigration agencies “encountered more than 700,000 aliens who could have been removed… Most were found in jails. But they took action against fewer than 200,000,” according to the Center for Immigration Studies. During the last year of President George W. Bush’s tenure, Bush’s managers allowed agents to repatriate only 171,540 migrants arrested far inland from the border. Under Obama, the number fell to 110,781 in 2013. If actual enforcement of immigration policies had solved only five percent of the illegal migrant problem in 2013, Obama would have created another 400,000 open jobs for Americans

The president could have reversed his current campaign to ease and increase the annual flow of guest-workers. He could have raised wage-formulas, shrunk exceptions, increased regulatory oversight, extended background checks, and stigmatized companies that hire guest workers. If that policy reduced the number of guest workers by just over one-third, that would have opened 250,000 new jobs for Americans.
Those steps would have the reduced the flow of foreign labor by up to 2,650,000 in 2013. That would have meant that only 500,000 foreign workers would have arrived to compete for jobs against the 4,400,000 Americans who turned 18 in 2013.

So Obama could have reduced the 2013 labor shock down to one-for-nine, compared to what he did deliver — almost two-for-one or one-for-one.

The numbers would be even better for Americans if Obama had tried to enforce immigration law from 2009 onwards. In fact, from 2009 until early late 2014, his deputies handed work-permits to 4.7 million foreign workers, plus entry permits to roughly 10 million guest-workers, plus Green Cards to 5 million immigrants. That adds up to an inflow of roughly 20 million short-term and long-term foreign workers and immigrants.

But Obama didn’t reverse his standard pro-migration policies in either 2009 or 2013. So of course salaries were flat in 2013. Of course the percentage of Americans with jobs stalled. Of course profits rose. Of course the stock market boomed.

Caveats

Yes, not all 1995 kids went straight into the labor market in 2013. Many went to college rather than the labor market. But an equivalent number of their older college-grad peers replaced them in the lousy 2013 job market.

Yes, this analysis looks just the supply of new labor in a national labor market of 155 million workers. But the impact of doubling the new labor supply from 3.5 million to 6.5 million in 2013 is visible in the wage, workforce and stock-market data, and will shape employers’ estimates of supply and demand over the lifetime of many American workers.

Yes, this article does not count the many foreign workers who left the United States in 2013. That number may be above 500,000. If that deduction is included, Obama’ labor shock becomes roughly one additional foreign worker for every three new native-born or immigrant 18-year-old American workers.

It is absolutely true that extra immigrants create extra jobs. Each new immigrant has to buy furniture and food, entertainment and health-care, so creating a myriad jobs for Americans and other immigrants. But the migrants don’t create more jobs for Americans than they absorb, even after several years.

For example, two years after 2013, the percentage of working-age Americans and immigrants who held jobs dropped from 59.4 percent down to 59.2 percent in September 2015. In 2001, the percentage slid down from its high of 64.7 in 2000 because of the recession after the 9/11 jihad attack, and it crashed in 2008 because the housing bubble burst. The percentage has not significantly improved since 2009’s low-score of 58.3 percent because Obama’s government is importing almost as many lower-wage foreign workers as the economy can create, leaving more and more Americans on the sidelines. In fact, the percentage of employed adults dropped down to 58.2 percent in October 2013 as the economy tried to absorb Obama’s 2013 labor shock.

Immigrants’ average productivity and wages are far below American’s levels, ensuring that they get subsidies from taxpayers. In fact, 51 percent of immigrant-headed households admitted using at least one welfare program in 2012, far above the 30 percent of native-headed households that relied on a welfare program. Legal immigrants aren’t much more productive than illegal migrants — they account for 75 percent of welfare payments made to immigrants.

If migrants were good for Americans, the evidence should be clear in California, which has received the most migrants. But 57 percent of young workers in California are stuck in low-wage jobs, which pay a median wage of $9.04, down roughly 10 percent loss since 2000. According to a federal gauge, the state is now the least-equal in the nation.

In short, unskilled immigrants drag down Americans’ average productivity and wages, especially in low-end jobs, such as cook, trucker and meat processor.

But middle-class and university-trained Americans also have their income reduced by the extra taxes used to support low-skill migrants. Roughly speaking, each household headed by a college-graduate pays enough taxes to fund the welfare and aid given to a household headed by an low-income immigrant. For example, Obama’s attempt in November 2014 to provide an amnesty for 4 million illegals would have imposed a 50-year, $2 trillion penalty on college graduates. That adds up to a $22,000 fee for every new college graduate over the next 5o years, assuming graduation rates don’t increase.

Long-term Impact
The long-term outlook isn’t good. “Earnings assimilation is considerably slower for Hispanic (predominately Mexican) immigrants than for other immigrants… although Asian immigrants and their descendants appear to do just as well as native-born whites… at least among men, they tend to earn somewhat less than third+ generation non-Hispanic whites with the same level of education,” said a September 2015 National Academies report.

Many of the 2013 foreign workers were short-term workers who must go home after a year. Many stay longer, creating a pool of roughly 1 million long-term resident guest-workers.

Some of the work-permit workers may leave without getting green cards, many illegals will go home, and even some immigrants will return home. But most arrivals are going to stay, and they’re going to drive down the cost of labor for decades — in a future where robots and other machinery may dramatically reduce the demand for lower-skilled labor.
The 2013 stock-market winners have kept their $5 trillion, and reinvested their cash to generate new gains — and will do so for many years.

In contrast, the loss of income by wage-earners and salary-earnerswill persist for years because they start each year at a lower salary than otherwise. The multi-year loss can be huge. A 2009 report by a Yale academic compared recession-year 1983 graduates to luckier 1981 graduates, and found that “17 years after college those groups have a $100,000 difference in earnings.”


Moreover, Obama, progressives, business groups and many Republicans are still trying to increase the inflow of foreign workers. For example, through 2013 and 2014, they pushed for passage of the 2013 “comprehensive immigration reform” bill which would tripled the annual distribution of Green Cards up to roughly 3 million.


Obama is certainly trying to maximize the inflow. In 2014 and 2015, he declared an amnesty for 5 million migrants, allowed guest workers to get work-permits for their spouses, allowed roughly 200,000 Central American migrants to cross the border, started two programs to bring deported migrants back into the United States from Mexico, and admitted 1,519 participants in at least 10 wars on five continents. In 2015, his deputies opened a new regulatory door to bring in hundreds of thousand of foreign graduates, and also allowed another 50,000 Central American migrants into the country.

Why?
Obviously, very few Americans want higher rates of immigration. A January 2015 Gallup poll shoed that only seven percent of Americans want more immigrants, despite intense media pressure to welcome “vibrant diversity” and despite the media’s refusal to describe the scale of annual immigration. Other polls show even more lopsided opposition, much of which is fueling Donald Trump’s populist run for the presidency.
But business and Wall Street barons want cheap workers and they want more immigrant customers to bring taxpayer-funded aid and welfare payments into their stores and restaurants. If asked, they say it openly. In developed societies with low birth-rates “most stock markets assume modest growth, so how are you over a couple of decades to deal with the fact that one third of your customers are going to go away?” Google chairman Eric Schmidt asked aloud in March 2015. “Well, one [way] is produce more customers through immigration,” he told his D.C. audience.

More importantly, Obama and his fellow progressives are true believers in — and beneficiaries of — transformative migration.
On numerous occasions, Obama has made himself crystal clear that he believes Americans do not have the right to block migrants from entering the United States. In November 2014, Obama declared that “there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.”
“Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently… that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration,” Obama said in the same Chicago speech.
Obama knows that immigration hurts lower-skilled Americans, especially African-Americans. “The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century,” Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” his 2006 autobiography. “If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole… it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net,” he acknowledged.
But that’s all O.K, says Obama, because the pain and poverty caused to Americans by government-imposed immigration will be forgotten once immigrants are harnessed to the progressives’ decades-long campaign to fundamentally transform raucous, uncooperative and exuberant America into their vision of Sweden-on-the-Mississippi.
“In my mind, at least,” Obama wrote in his autobiography, “the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a coalition that could help America live up to its promise.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...n-wall-street/

This all happened under Obama and Socialist Democrats and it needs to be fixed. IMO

Every corporate manager who signed off on these layoffs or approved them in a board or other meeting that involved firing an American to replace them with a foreign worker needs to be hunted down, prosecuted and sent to federal prison for many, many years. The corporation owes every American back-pay for every day they were fired along with punitive damages for their pain and suffering. This is our law. Enforce it.