Immigration Politics Georgia

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Fast Facts

FAST FACT: Chamber of Commerce: ‘Crucial’ to Import Foreign Workers While 30M Americans Unemployed

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Image: Getty, via Breitbart News

United States Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donahue says it is “crucial” that businesses be allowed to continue importing foreign visa workers even as 30 million Americans remain unemployed due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

Donahue sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking that he not halt foreign visa worker programs — such as the H-1B visa, the L visa, the H-2B visa, and the OPT program — claiming businesses need the foreign workers to fill American jobs. Read the rest here at Breitbart News.

FAST FACT: A majority of H-1B employers use the program to pay migrant workers well below market wages

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Photo: New Indian Express

H-1B visas and prevailing wage level

Key takeaways

H-1B is a flawed visa program:

  • DOL lets H-1B employers undercut local wages. Sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. While H-1B program rules allow this, DOL has the authority to change it—but hasn’t.
  • A small number of employers dominate the program. While over 53,000 employers used the H-1B program in 2019, the top 30 H-1B employers accounted for more than one in four of all 389,000 H-1B petitions approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2019.
  • Outsourcing firms make heavy use of the H-1B program. Half of the top 30 H-1B employers use an outsourcing business model to provide staff for third-party clients, rather than employing H-1B workers directly to fill a special need at the company that applies for the visa.
  • Major U.S. firms use the H-1B program to pay low wages. Among the top 30 H-1B employers are major U.S. firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Google, Apple, and Facebook. All of them take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill.

Read much more here from the Economic Policy Institute.

 

Fast Fact: Foreign nationals required by federal law to carry proof of alien registration

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“This is where the requirement to carry registration evidence comes in.   Section 264(e) of INA requires every individual over the age of 18 to carry their “registration” documents with them at all times.   Specifically, section 264(e) reads:

e) Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d)

[where the government issues a “registration certificate” after each foreign national’s registration]. Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.”

Fast Fact: More than 90% of illegal aliens arrested by federal agents in the United States last year had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges

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More than 90% of illegal arrested arrested by federal agents in the United States last year had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, including 56,000 assaults and thousands of sex crimes, robberies, homicides and kidnappings.

Many had “extensive criminal histories with multiple convictions,” according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) year-end report. The 123,128 illegal aliens arrested by the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in 2019 had 489,063 criminal convictions and pending charges, representing an average of four crimes per alien, highlighting the “recidivist nature” of the arrested aliens, the agency writes, noting that sanctuary cities nationwide greatly impeded its public safety efforts.

Appellate Court: Not lawfully present, illegal aliens with DACA are illegal aliens – Georgia issuing public benefits based on disputed status

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Image: Istockphoto.com

Ruling likely will lead to additional legal action on public benefits

DACA recipients are “inadmissible and thus removable” under federal law.

Illegal aliens who have been awarded deferred action on deportation proceedings through the DACA amnesty by both the Obama and Trump administrations are illegal aliens and do not have “lawful presence” says the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision was handed down March 6, 2019.

The ruling was in response to a suit brought by several illegal aliens in Georgia who are challenging the Board of Regents policy that requires lawful presence for instate tuition purposes and admittance to some USG universities.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Georgia is home to more illegal aliens than is Arizona. Statistics from the Washington DC – based Migration Policy Institute highlighted by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute indicate that Georgia has more illegal aliens than green card holders.

Image: GBPI.org

A group of DACA recipients sued the leaders of the Georgia higher education system in 2016, which bars aliens who are not “lawfully present” from enrolling in some Georgia colleges and universities, even if they would academically qualify for admission. “The students argued that they were lawfully present under federal law, which preempted  state law. They also claimed that the admissions bar violated their right to equal protection, as Georgia treats aliens who are paroled into the U.S. or granted asylum as “lawfully present” reported the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

The Eleventh Circuit rejected all of the students’ claims. The court noted that  “lawfully present” is not a standalone immigration classification, and it is not defined anywhere in the (Immigration and Nationality) Act” *(opinion here).

The ruling is consistent with an official October 2017 statement to this writer from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that “current law does not grant any legal status for the class of individuals who are current recipients of DACA. Recipients of DACA are currently unlawfully present in the U.S. with their removal deferred.”

Decision may lead to additional legal action on access to public benefits

The court’s decision likely portends more legal action. Georgia’s public benefits law, OCGA 50-36-1, requires “lawful presence” for non-citizens to access a host of public benefits, including drivers licenses, official ID Cards, health benefits, food stamps, insurance licenses and unemployment benefits. While it goes largely unreported by the Georgia media, various official agencies have been quietly issuing these benefits to DACA recipients since 2012 based on the applicant’s oath on affidavits that they are a “qualified alien.”

The monetary cost to Georgia taxpayers for benefits to the illegal aliens with deferred action on deportation, both in and outside of DACA is unknown.

Updated, 4:50PM March 8, 2019