News/opinion items for Rep Chuck Martin's Workforce Development subcommittee #STEM

US economy will soon start losing 175,000 jobs a month, Bank of America warns New YorkCNN Business, October 10, 2022)

The Federal Reserve’s fight to squash inflation will cause the US economy to start losing tens of thousands of jobs a month beginning early next year, Bank of America warns.

Although the jobs market remained surprisingly strong in September, the Fed is working hard to change that by aggressively raising interest rates to ease demand for everything from cars and homes to appliances.

The pace of job growth is expected to be roughly cut in half during the fourth quarter of this year, Bank of America told clients in a report Friday. Here.

* Better.com planning fourth layoff in less than 9 months (Techcrunch.com August 25, 2022)

It is unclear at this time how many people in total will be laid off in this latest round, but one impacted worker estimated that it would be “at least 250 or more” and that they “will all be from the U.S. side.” Another source said the company seemed to be “going for higher corporate salaries.” And: “In less than nine months, the company has let go thousands of workers, seen numerous senior executives step down and delayed a SPAC that it recently said it was still working toward.” Here.

* Major Tech Companies Are Freezing Hiring And Rescinding Job Offers. What You Need To Know (Forbes, August 8, 2022)

“Nicole López-Conti interviewed with a mid-sized tech company in May. After meeting seven staff members, completing three rounds of interviews, submitting work samples and doing a project, the company informed her it was no longer hiring for the role.

“It’s truly been a disappointing and bizarre interaction from the beginning,” she says. López-Conti estimates she spent about 16 hours preparing and participating in the interview process.

Despite reports of nationwide job growth, López-Conti isn’t the only applicant who’s hit a dead-end. The tech industry has seen a wave of hiring freezes in the past few months, with several large companies citing concerns over an economic downturn.

According to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks layoffs in the tech industry, more than 65,900 tech employees have lost their jobs this year…. More here.

* Why are Atlanta tech companies laying off employees?

Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, is preparing employees for “the worst downturn that we’ve seen in recent history,” according to The New York Times. Netflix Inc. is cutting hundreds of jobs. Carvana cut 2,500 employees from its payroll.

July 11, 2022

bizjournals.com

* Mass immigration will not solve inflation or labor market issues

There are 14 million available American workers to fill 11 million job vacancies

July 13, 2022

Washington Times

* Study: Millions of Americans Still on Job Market Sidelines, Weighed Down by Mass Immigration

July 11, 2022

The rise of Americans on the job market sidelines coincides with record-setting levels of illegal and legal immigration to the U.S. — adding immense foreign competition against employable Americans.

Breitbart

* Fact: “In fiscal year 2021, the top six H-1B visa employers — Cognizant, Amazon, Tata Consulting Services, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook — sought to outsource nearly 57,000 American tech jobs to foreign H-1B visa workers primarily from India and China.”

* More Workers than Ever Are on the Sidelines
Unemployment rate doesn’t include those
who’ve dropped out of the job market (CIS)

Center for Immigration Studies

DREAMers’ are just the bait; “citizenship for all 11 million, or however many” illegal aliens there are here is the hoo

By Andrew R. Arthur on November 17, 2022

On November 16, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) held a press conference in front of the Capitol in which he called for amnesty for “DREAMers”, aliens brought illegally to the United States as children. As he did so, however, he pulled back the curtain on his end game – to “get a path to citizenship for all 11 million, or however many undocumented, there are here”. The DREAMers are the bait, while a full and total amnesty is the hook.

DREAMers, In Brief. Amnesty legislation for aliens who arrived in their youth has a long, but not particularly successful pedigree. Here’s a brief recap.

In August 2001, then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced a bipartisan “DREAM Act”, which included 18 cosponsors. That bill would have granted amnesty to aliens unlawfully present for five years who entered under the age of 21, and who met certain work and educational requirements.

The timing of that bill could not have been worse, because less than six weeks later, the September 11 attacks showed how foolhardy such blanket amnesties were. Nonetheless, similar “DREAM Acts” were subsequently introduced in later Congresses.

One bears special note. In March 2009, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) offered up the “DREAM Act of 2009” during the 111th Congress.

At that time, Barack Obama was president, Democrats held an overwhelming majority in the House, and from September 24, 2009 (when Democrat Paul Kirk was appointed to fill the seat of the late Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy) through February 4, 2010 (when Republican Scott Brown was elected to fill Kennedy’s seat), Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats in the Senate.

Obama’s fellow Democrats could have passed any bill they wanted – including and in particular the DREAM Act of 2009 – without any Republican votes at all. But that bill went nowhere. Cosponsor and then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) did not even bring it up for a vote in committee.

That said, two Republican senators – Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) – were cosponsors of the DREAM Act of 2009, so they probably would have blocked a filibuster even during the months Democrats only controlled a measly 59 seats in the upper chamber.

Obama blamed Republicans for the failure to pass a DREAM Act, but the fault really lies with him and congressional Democrats alone – DREAM Act legislation simply was not a priority for a party that held a hammerlock on the legislative process.

The popularity of legislation to “protect” the DACA population has been a key talking point for years (I was the punching boy for Democrats at a House hearing on the issue in March 2019), but let’s face it – if it really were all that popular, it would have been a shoo-in in the 111th Congress.

DACA. The failure of DREAM Act legislation led to a program called “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” or DACA. It grants quasi-legal status to aliens who entered the United States while under the age of 16 before June 15, 2007, who are currently under the age of 41, who meet certain educational standards, and have not been convicted of certain crimes.

DACA was not created by Congress, or even by executive order or executive action (for what that is worth). It’s the product of a memo issued by then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on June 15, 2012. In my considered legal opinion, Napolitano lacked the authority to create DACA (the Fifth Circuit ruled in October that the program is unlawful, but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in), but in any event, it sets a bad precedent.

Want proof? Here’s what the editorial board of the Washington Post had to say when President Obama was considering expanding DACA to include parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents in 2014:

The president should think twice. Some of the same Democrats and pro-immigrant advocates urging him to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation would be outraged if a Republican president took a similarly selective approach to enforcing the laws — say, those that guarantee voting rights or prohibit employment discrimination.

Obama ignored the Post editorial board and created something called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). DAPA proved to be a bridge too far for Texas and several other states, who successfully sued to block its implementation.

Despite all of this, DACA continues, and the Biden administration recently issued a new rule, effective October 31, “to preserve and fortify” the decade-old program.

A Sympathetic Population. The DACA population is admittedly sympathetic. The vast majority of the approximately 650,000 current DACA beneficiaries were removable a decade ago, but in the intervening years they have been living in a quasi-legal status thanks to some questionable administrative actions.

Even President Trump, in his 2018 State of the Union address, offered up a plan to legalize not just DACA recipients but also a total of 1.8 million “DACA-eligible” aliens – more or less the same individuals covered by the DREAM Act…. please read the rest here at the CIS website.