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The Homeland Security Departments recently released Unified Agenda gives hope to U.S. tech workers that major, long overdue changes may be coming soon.

New DHS guidelines would provide relief to American tech specialists from the decades-long onslaught of overseas H-1B visa holders, L-1 visa international transfers and foreign-born Optional Practical Training (OPT) graduates with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees.

The H-1B, L-1 and OPT are visas that have displaced American workers or blocked them from employment consideration. The visas are popular vehicles for U.S. corporations and Indian IT services companies to add personnel and, at the expense of American workers, reduce their overhead.

A recent Forbes Magazine article, Trump Plans Far-Reaching Set of New Immigration Regulations, states that President Donald Trumps administrations specific goal regarding H-1B visas is to revise in other words, tighten the specialty occupation definition to better ensure that only the most qualified foreign nationals are granted visas.

To the surprise of many, some computer programming positions dont require foreign applicants to hold university degrees to qualify as a specialty occupation and receive an H-1B visa. The proposed H-1B ruling may be published this month.

The L-1 intracompany transfer visa, already approved in increasingly fewer numbers, is also under further review. Overseas employees, who may or may not have the alleged specialty skills they claim to hold, may be subject to more thorough scrutiny.

The L visa has no numerical cap, and employers are not required to prove that Americans are unavailable for the work. Neither do employers have to pay prevailing wage.

The Office of Inspector General found that the L-1 visa is particularly susceptible to fraud. Moreover, the L visa allows spouses and minor children to come to the United States on L-2 visas. In all, tens of thousands of L visa holders and their spouses work in the United States without any federal oversight. A September 2020 ruling is expected.

Another program that DHS hopes to corral is OPT that, without congressional approval, has morphed into the nations largest guest worker program. The term practical training should not be confused with actual on-the-job training, but rather means full-fledged work authorization.

DHS has allowed aliens who originally entered on student visas to stay over for years, without statutory authority, and take good jobs that might otherwise go to U.S. tech workers. As an additional incentive for students and their employers, both are exempt from payroll taxes.

Finally, the newest employment authorized but not congressionally approved work population, H-4 spouses of H-1B visa holders, are under renewed review. After years of intensive lobbying, spouses 90 percent Indian women holding H-4 visas were first granted work authorization documents during President Barack Obamas administration.

Trump has often expressed his intention to rescind work permission for the H-4 visa category, but has not achieved any notable progress. Whether H-4 spouses can legally be employed has been tied up in the courts for years. A DHS ruling may be issued in March 2020.

Immigration lawyers are apoplectic, and quite possibly unhinged, by the possible DHS overhaul. One prominent lawyer called Trumps employment-based visa revisions a white supremacist immigration agenda that would bar ... all immigrants of color. Other attorneys were equally outraged, but used more delicate language.

But hysteria aside, the H-1B, the L, OPT and H-4 have been relentless U.S. job killers, and all are unnecessary. No American worker shortage exists, only half of qualified STEM graduates find STEM careers, and no evidence exists of wage increases that would confirm worker shortages.

In their January report, Reforming U.S. High-Skilled Worker Program, authors Ron Hira and Bharath Gopalaswamy wrote that the current system undercuts opportunities for U.S. workers and enables exploitation of H-1B workers.

Since its creation in 1990, the H-1B program has never been fixed to meet Congress original promises to safeguard U.S. jobs. Instead, the program has been expanded to allow even larger numbers of H-1B workers, admitting them for longer periods, while its flawed governing rules have remained unchanged.

U.S. jobs should go to U.S. workers; to argue otherwise defies common sense.

Joe Guzzardi is an analyst and researcher with Progressives for Immigration Reform who now lives in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [emailprotected], or follow him on Twitter: @joeguzzardi19. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

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Joe Guzzardi: Proposed H-1B Revisions Offer Ray of Hope to U.S. Tech Workers - Noozhawk

A lighthearted look at the news of the day:

Oh, you better not shout, you better not cry, you better not pout, Im telling you why: Another Star Wars film is coming to town.

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Yes, friends, its a story that feels almost as old as Christmas itself (which is at least as old as the Millennium Falcon), and we are finally about to see installment No. 9 in a nine-part Skywalker saga. But fear not, with The Mandalorian on TV and Disney wallowing in money, we havent seen the last of the lightsabers. Anyone want a baby Yoda under the tree?

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Actually, a new study says baby Yoda is more popular in Utah than in any other state. Maybe people here are hoping it can use the Force to help some of our local ball teams.

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Love it or hate it, though, everyone agrees a new two-hour Star Wars movie in the theater beats even a minute of an impeachment hearing on TV.

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Several weeks into this thing, Americans remain about 50-50 on impeachment, with a solid majority saying they would rather watch reruns of any canceled show from this television season than another lecture on the meaning of a high crime and misdemeanor.

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Just as the House prepared to pass articles of impeachment, both parties agreed on terms for a new U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement on trade, then worked out a long-hoped-for budget deal, and then the president agreed in terms to a deal that may signal an end to the trade war with China. We may be just one indictment away from immigration reform and a new health care plan.

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The house that Hollywood once used to depict the Clampetts mansion in The Beverly Hillbillies just sold for $150 million. With oil currently trading at under $60 a barrel, ol Jed might not have found enough Texas tea in them hills to pay for it all today.

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The house has a reported tax bill of $1.3 million per year. It also includes an underground garage big enough for 40 cars and tall enough for someone to sit on a rocking chair in the back of a car without hitting her head, and it has a secret tunnel that runs from the house to the cement pond.

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Well finally see the end of the Star Wars saga. Well ... maybe - Deseret News

During the ceremony, which will take place on Sunday, December 15, at 2 p.m. at the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, the University will award more than 700 undergraduate and graduate degrees.

December, 13, 2019

Kica Matos, a national advocate for immigration reform who served as deputy mayor for the City of New Haven as part of the administration of Mayor John DeStefano, will be the featured speaker at the University of New Havens Winter Commencement on Sunday, December 15. The ceremony will begin at 2 p.m. at the Toyota Presents Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford.

As part of the ceremony, the University will award more than 700 undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Matos, who has lived in New Haven for nearly 20 years, is the director of the Center for Immigration and Justice at the Vera Institute. She joined Vera earlier this year after spending seven years as the director of immigration rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C.

In addition to her role with the DeStefano administration, Matos previously spent five years as executive director of Junta for Progressive Action, New Havens oldest Latino community-based organization. During the ceremony, Matos will be presented an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

The University will also award an honorary Doctor of Business Administration degree to Marilou M.L. McLaughlin, who served as the dean of the Universitys College of Business from 1981 to 1994. Under her leadership, the College expanded into new programmatic areas vital to the Universitys growth and development.

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Social Justice Advocate to Address Graduates at University of New Haven's Winter Commencement - University of New Haven News

Read: The nationalists take Washington

The question, then, is whether this larger worldview Carlson is espousing each night, encompassing restrictionism, protectionism, and anti-interventionism, has currency with GOP voters absent a race-based appealin other words, whether an economics of meaning alone can sustain a populist revolution on the right. Carlson says it does, and it can.

His programming tells another story. On his December 6 broadcast, one day after our interview, Carlson featured Pete DAbrosca, a North Carolina congressional candidate campaigning on an end to immigration. DAbroscas plan appears rooted in his belief that white Americans are being replaced by third world peasants who share neither their ethnicity nor their culture. Hes been lauded by the white-nationalist website VDare and is strongly supported by the so-called Groyper movement, an offshoot of the alt-right led by Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old who has, among other things, denied the extent of the Holocaust and argued that the First Amendment was not written for Muslims. DAbrosca went on Carlsons show to advertise his proposed 10-year moratorium on immigration. I think that theres a new Republican Party in town, DAbrosca said.

Carlson knows failure. This, in his view, is why, despite going to the same schools, working in the same towngaming the same systemas the elites he rails against, he doesnt share their narcissism. When you get fired in TV, you know, especially when youre running a show with your name on it, its impossible to evade responsibility for it, he told me, referencing his MSNBC show, Tucker, which in 2008 was canceled during its third season. When your show goes under, it goes under because people dont like you. Like, youre a loser I wouldnt recommend it to anyone, but it certainly is the only way you ever learn anythingby being humiliated, and crushed.

Yet Carlson also knows success. And if the lesson of failure is that its time to learn a new trick, he explained, the message of success is sometimes to sit still.

Talking with Carlson reminded me of a moment from my interview with President Trump earlier this spring. He was reminiscing about his first evening in the White House residence. Ill never forget, he told me. I came into the White House, I was here for my first night, and I said, Wow. Four years is such a long time.

Four years ago, Paul Ryan, the GOPs boy-wonder champion of entitlement cuts and immigration reform, was grudgingly settling into the speakership, having been drafted as the best hope of uniting his conference. Four years ago, the governor of Alabama was stumping on behalf of John Kasich in the GOP presidential primary. Four years ago, pundits were still calling Donald Trump a fluke.

Now we are here in this studio, where Carlson is reaping praise for a blistering segment on a Republican mega-donor, Paul Singer, that showcased how the billionaire hedge-funder had sapped a small Nebraska town of jobs after helping engineer the takeover of a sporting-goods chain that was headquartered there. Hes listening as Jeanine Pirro calls the impeachment of Donald Trump hogwash and reads passages from The Federalist Papers by way of explanation. In a few minutes, hell excoriate the think tank that served as the ideological bedrock of George H. W. Bushs administration and was predicted to be Paul Ryans employer post-Congress.

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What Does Tucker Carlson Believe? - The Atlantic

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In February 1980, Herman Baca, a Chicano activist from San Diego, wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter demanding he put an end to border madness. In the letter Baca detailed how officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were detaining Mexican migrant children in local jails and immigration facilities. In particular, he denounced the detention of a 12-month-old baby as barbaric and inhumane. While Baca urged Carter to enter into discussion with policymakers, he believed that ultimately the detention of migrant children would only end with the abolition of the INS.

Continuing this activism, in 1981, Baca organized the first community-based call for the abolition of the INS. The call cited the detention of migrant children as an example of the abuse the organization would never cease committing. Such abolition advocacy, which is captured in Bacas papers held at the University of California San Diego Special Collections and Archives, shows that the movement to abolish institutions of immigration policing did not emerge recently in the face of the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy. While scholars have grounded the movement to abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the ideological history of abolitionism, most have focused on prison abolitionism, overlooking previous movements to eliminate immigration policing. A closer look at Chicano activism in the late 1970s and early 1980s shows that immigration police have long targeted migrant children and that activists have been denouncing related violence for decades. Recognizing that the fight to abolish immigration policing is not new helps to better imagine a just world without immigration policing.

In 1979 Bacas organization, the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR), began to speak out against the detention of migrant children. Baca and friends formed the CCR in 1971 to fight violence Chicano and migrant youth faced as the era of undocumented immigration led to increased policing. As members of the Chicano Movement, these activists viewed open borders as an end goal. We didnt cross the border, the border crossed us, student activist Salvador Reza told me, reflecting on the borders connection to Mexicos loss of land to the U.S. in 1848. Basically, we had the right, somos un pueblo sin fronteras. Believing individuals of Mexican descent to be a people without borders, activists like Reza and Baca protested and advocated forpolicy change as part of a campaign to denounce immigration policing and its inherent denial of the communitys right to move freely in the borderlands.

Baca began to raise awareness about the detention of migrant children in 1979 to inspire resistance to the policing of Chicanos and migrants. While Baca had been fighting immigration policing for several years at this point, the communitys particular concern for migrant youth played a crucial role in his ability to drum up mass support for abolitionism. Baca presented information about migrant detention at the CCRs Chicano National Immigration Tribunal held in April 1981.Designed to put policies of immigration policing on trial, the Tribunal gave victims the opportunity to act as prosecutors: Individuals presented testimony in over 50 cases of violence committed by local police and the INS.Activists from the CCR listened to this testimony with the intention of using it to construct policy demands in the form of a Chicano position paper.

At the Tribunal, Baca highlighted how the detention of migrant children connected to the racist criminalization of non-white youth. Bacas testimony, coupled with local newspaper reporting, revealed that as immigration policing militarized the border throughout the 1970s, it became common for undocumented migrants, especially children, to hire smugglers to help them cross the border. While in 1965 only 40 percent of migrants used a smuggler, by 1975 over 70 percent of migrants did. However, traveling with a smuggler did not ensure successful settlement in the US. The Border Patrol, the enforcement arm of the INS, working to stop both human and narcotic smuggling, often apprehended migrants during their crossing.

In the 1970s, the U.S. government intensified its prosecution of smugglers.While at this time the INS quickly deported undocumented migrants, the agency treated smuggling as a criminal act that merited a trial. As part of this prosecution, officials detained migrants who crossed the border with a smuggler and forced them to serve as material witnesses in the cases.Migrants being held until giving their witness testimony formed a substantial portion of the tens of thousands of migrants the INS detained annually in San Diego. In 1979, 14,346 migrants served as witnesses in cases against smugglers in San Diego, around 600 of whom were children.

The children waited for the trial of their smuggler at three detention centers in San Diego. The INS held some children at their two facilities in the region: El Centro and San Ysidro. However, they sent most to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) which had a relationship with the U.S. Marshalls, an agency with a history of facilitating the detention of migrants. The MCC opened in 1974 as part of the ongoing war on crime. In revealing that police held material witnesses at the MCC alongside individuals charged with criminal offenses, Baca demonstrated how immigration officials criminalized migrant children who had an ancestral right to exist in the borderlands.

Although designed as an adult facility, the INS used the MCC to hold children like 15-year-old Jose, who came to California from Durango, Mexico. While police incarcerated some children with their mothers, they separated most, including Jose, from their parents. At 15, Jose was one of the oldest children in the facility. The INS imprisoned Rosa Rivass 6- and 1-year-old children without her. When the INS brought a mother back into custody after giving birth, they even incarcerated a newborn.

While Baca previously criticized perceived links between Mexican teenagers and criminality, he made a strategic decision to turn his attention to younger children in his letter to Carter and at the Tribunal. Baca believed that focusing on young children would dramatize immigration policing and demonstrate how it criminalized innocent youth. Baca, like other activists past and present, trusted that no one could dispute the cruelty of incarcerating a newborn and that this common sympathy would garner criticism of immigration policing as a whole.

Abolition Advocacy

Bacas was correct: The Chicano community agreed with him about the brutality of incarcerating children. In spearheading mass outrage over the detention of migrant youth, Baca connected his work to protect migrant children with his ideological emphasis on open borders.

Baca first proposed the abolition of the INS to fellow activists at a conference in 1980. The resolutions passed at the end of the gathering stated: That this conference go on record in calling for the abolishment of the INS/Border Patrol. A year later, at the Tribunal, Baca fostered more unified Chicano support for this demand. As Baca recalled, by the end of the Tribunal, Everybody was on the same page of the INS/Border Patrol have got to go...Its an agency that was placed there to make sure we stay in our place. And thats what were fighting against.Having learned about the INS detaining children, community members concluded that the organization existed to impede the right of Mexican youth to live and migrate safely. As a result, the documents produced at the Tribunal affirmed the need for the abolishment of the INS/Border Patrol in order to end the detention of migrant children, among other practices.

By this point, support for the idea of abolition was spreading. For the first time, a large portion of the Chicano and migrant community in San Diego expressed the need for the complete elimination of the INS. As a journalist from La Prensa San Diego reported in 1981, when Baca announced his demand for the disestablishment of the INS, the audience of 800 individuals roared with approval.By that year, CCR leaders and community members together concluded that the INS needed to be completely and permanently abolished to allow free and safe movement in the borderlands.

Noting this mass support for the abolition of the INS, Baca vowed from then on to not deal with anyone who doesnt call for the abolishment of the Border Patrol, the INS.While Baca remained steadfast in his dedication to abolition, and today is outspoken against ICE, after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 many former allies shifted their focus to assisting undocumented migrants in applying for amnesty.

In 2003, the U.S. government dissolved the INS, which had been part of the Department of Justice, and replaced it with ICE, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security. Today, as people speak out against ICEs detention of migrant children, who now mostly come from Central America, this country has once again seen a rise in calls for the elimination of institutions of immigration policing as they currently exist.

The history of pro-migrant activism that began in the Chicano community in the 1970s and 1980s helps position todays abolition advocacy as grounded in traditions of Chicano activism. Besides valorizing a long-ignored historical actor, exploring Bacas work urges a recognition of the principles that guided nascent pro-migrant abolition advocacy. It is imperative that present-day Abolish ICE supporters contemplate the desire for open borders that underpinned the first calls for the abolition of ICEs predecessor, the INS. For instance, returning immigration policing to the Department of Justice, as Bernie Sanders recently proposed, fails to recognize Bacas belief that the mere existence of immigration policing is a threat to the borderlands community. Only by embracing these historical antecedents can we build bold and inclusive resistance to the policing of migrant youth.

Erin Mysogland is the Program Coordinator of the Center for Community Action and Research at Pace University where she works with undergraduates to connect academia and activism. She has a MA/MSc in International and World History from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. She researches and writes on themes of migration, race, and gender in U.S. and Latin American history.

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Fighting Border Madness, from 1980s Chicano Activism to the Abolish ICE Movement - NACLA