US allows more seasonal workers as Trump pushes 'hire American'

WASHINGTON - The US government cleared the way on Monday for thousands more foreign workers to enter the country under temporary seasonal visas, just as President Donald Trump declared this "Made In America" week and pledged to stand up for US workers.

Advocates of stricter limits on immigration criticized the additional visas, saying American workers should get job openings.

Trump, a former New York real estate magnate who has relied on seasonal workers at his hotels and resorts, campaigned on promises to restore American jobs. On Monday, he showcased "Made in America" products at the White House and made an impassioned defense of America First policies.

"We're going to stand up for our companies and maybe most importantly for our workers," the Republican president said. "Clearly it's time for a new policy, one defined by two simple rules: We will buy American. And we will hire American."

Federal officials said there were not enough qualified and willing American workers available to perform certain types of temporary non-agricultural work.

As a result, the government will allow 15,000 additional visas for temporary seasonal workers, meant to help American businesses in danger of suffering irreparable harm because of a shortage of such labor, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

"As a demonstration of the administration's commitment to supporting American businesses, DHS is providing this one-time increase to the congressionally set annual cap," Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said in a statement.

Many seasonal businesses such as resorts, landscaping companies and seafood harvesters and processors had sought permission to temporarily hire more immigrants.

Congress originally set the cap at 66,000 workers for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. In May, lawmakers gave Kelly authority to approve up to an additional 70,000 temporary visas and pleaded with him to use his authority to issue as many of them as he thought appropriate.

Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that supports immigration controls, said in a statement the decision "threatens to reverse the trend of reports emerging around the country of employers working harder and raising pay to successfully recruit more unemployed Americans for lower-skilled jobs."

 Beck said it was "yet another example of the administration and Congress failing to keep the Trump campaign promise of putting American workers first."

'MINIMAL RELIEF GRANTED'

Trump campaigned on an "America First" platform of favoring Americans for hiring. Trump's golf resorts in Florida have used the visas, however, to hire temporary guest workers (reut.rs/1R4pKma).

The clothing line of the president's older daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, uses foreign factories employing low-wage workers in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, a recent Washington Post report showed.

A group of US companies that use the visas, called the "the H-2B Workforce Coalition," praised the "minimal relief granted."

It said: "From landscapers in Colorado to innkeepers in Maine to seafood processors along the Gulf Coast to carnivals nationwide, we hope the visa expansion will help some businesses avoid substantial financial loss, and in some cases, prevent early business closures during their peak season."

A report on Monday by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, found, however, there was little evidence of worker shortages in H-2B jobs at the national level.

“Expanding the H-2B program without reforming it to improve protections and increase wages for migrant workers will essentially allow unscrupulous employers to carve out an even larger rights-free zone in the low-wage labor market,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the institute.

Kelly has acknowledged that many temporary workers "are victimized when they come up here, in terms of what they’re paid."

DHS said the government had created a tip line to report any abuse of the visas or employer violations.

Reporting by Doina Chiacu and David Shepardson in Washington; Additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Peter Cooney

source: news.abs-cbn.com

US could ask visa applicants for social media passwords

PASSWORD, PLEASE: US embassies could ask visa applicants for passwords to their own social media accounts in future background checks, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Tuesday.

Kelly said the move could come as part of the effort to toughen vetting of visitors to screen out people who could pose a security threat.

He said it was one of the things under consideration especially for visitors from seven Muslim majority countries with very weak background screening of their own -- Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

"We're looking at some enhanced or some additional screening," Kelly told a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee. "We may want to get on their social media, with passwords," he said.

"It's very hard to truly vet these people in these countries, the seven countries... But if they come in, we want to say, what websites do they visit, and give us your passwords. So we can see what they do on the internet."

"If they don't want to cooperate, then they don't come in" to the United States, he said.

Kelly stressed that no decision had been made on this, but said tighter screening was definitely in the future, even if it means longer delays for awarding US visas to visitors.

"These are the things we are thinking about," he said.

"But over there we can ask them for this kind of information and if they truly want to come to America, then they will cooperate. If not, next in line."

The seven countries were targeted in president Donald Trump's January 27 immigrant and refugee ban order, which has sense been at least temporarily blocked under court order.

pmh/mdl

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Facebook vulnerable to expected changes in US visa program

SAN FRANCISCO/ WASHINGTON - Among Silicon Valley’s top tech employers, Facebook Inc. could be the most vulnerable to US President Donald Trump’s expected crackdown on guest-worker visas, according to a Reuters analysis of US Labor Department filings.

More than 15 percent of Facebook's US employees in 2016 used a temporary work visa, giving the social media leader a legal classification as a H-1B “dependent” company. That is a higher proportion than Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. or Microsoft Corp.

That could cause problems for Facebook if Trump or Congress decide to make the H-1B program more restrictive, as the president and some Republican lawmakers have threatened to do.

Both Trump and Attorney General nominee Senator Jeff Sessions have opposed the program in its current form. They have also indicated that they are open to reforming it to “ensure the beneficiaries of the program are the best and the brightest,” according to a draft executive order seen by Reuters. Reuters could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the draft.

The Trump administration has not proposed any new rules that would target companies with the H-1B "dependent" classification. But the fact that Facebook alone among major tech companies falls into that category suggests it is the most exposed in the industry to any changes in H-1B visa policy.

Facebook declined to comment on the matter.

Trump administration officials could not immediately be reached for comment. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on Monday that Trump would target H-1B visas as part of a larger immigration reform effort through executive orders and Congressional action, but gave no details.

H-1B visas are intended for foreign nationals in "specialty" occupations that generally require higher education, which according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) includes, but is not limited to, scientists, engineers or computer programmers. The government awards 85,000 every year, chiefly through a lottery system.

Companies say they use them to recruit top talent. But a majority of the visas are awarded to outsourcing firms, sparking criticism by skeptics that those firms use the visas to fill lower-level information technology jobs. Critics also say the lottery system benefits outsourcing firms that flood the system with mass applications.

H-1B dependent status is mostly held by these outsourcing firms such as India's Tata Consultancy Services or Infosys. The status was introduced in the late 1990s in an effort to ensure that companies did not use the visas to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. The status requires companies to prove they cannot find US workers for the jobs.

Facebook listed itself as a dependent company in its applications for H-1B visas with the Labor Department last year.

Before he took office as president, Trump discussed changes to the H-1B visa program with top technology executives, including Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Those changes included possibly ending the lottery and replacing it with a system that would award the visas to the highest-paying jobs first, a move designed to reduce their issuance to outsourcing firms.

Such a move could soften the blow from any H-1B changes for Facebook and other major technology companies. The average salary offered for Facebook H-1B jobs was $145,550, according to its application filings last year. Tata, a traditional outsourcing firm, offered $67,950 on average, barely above the $60,000 floor set by law for the H-1B program.

The draft executive order did not mention specifics about the lottery. It did require the U.S. secretary of labor to provide the president with a report on “the actual or potential injury to U.S. workers caused, directly or indirectly, by work performed by nonimmigrant workers in the H-1B” visa program.

“We are hoping that the final draft will have more details,” said Russell Harrison, director of government relations at IEEE-USA, a group that represents U.S. engineers and favors that H-1B reform.

source: news.abs-cbn.com