Trump to sign executive order on reform of H-1B visa system

April 18, 2017

Washington, Apr 18: US President Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order that would tighten the process of issuing the H-1B visas and seek a review of the system for creating an "entirely new structure" for awarding these visas, the most sought-after by Indian IT firms and professionals.

Trump1Trump is scheduled to travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the home state of House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, to sign the 'Buy American, Hire American' Executive Order.

This was a transitional step aimed at achieving a more skills-based and merit-based immigration system. The executive order would be signed a day after the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has completed the computerised draw of lots from the 199,000 petitions it received for the Congressional mandated 65,000 H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2018 beginning October 1 this year.

The lottery was held for the 20,000 H-1B visas for those applicants having higher education from US educational institutions. Opposing the traditional lottery system for H-1B visas, a senior administration official told White House reporters that these visas were being used by companies to bring in foreign workers at a low wage rate and displace local workers.

The official argued that there were enough qualified people within the country to meet the demand of technology professionals. "With respect to the H-1B visa programme in particular, which deals mostly with STEM jobs, we graduate about twice as many STEM students each year as find jobs in STEM fields.

"The issue of training workers for skilled manufacturing jobs is a different aspect of a policy then, say, the H-1B visa, which obviously is for STEM occupations," the official said. The official argued that the reality was that the US has large numbers of unemployed American workers. "Right now we're creating an environment with our guest- worker programmes where those workers are being bypassed," the official said.

"If you make it harder to abuse the guest-worker programmes, it creates more of a market for domestic workers, as well as more of a market for the kinds of job training and vocational training programmes that you're talking about," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Trump had made the alleged abuse and fraud in H-1B visa system a major election issue during his campaign.

The executive order signed by Trump today will call for the strict enforcement of all laws governing entry into the United States of labour from abroad, for the stated purpose of creating higher wages and higher employment rates for workers in America, the official said.

"It would further call on the departments of Labour, Justice, Homeland Security and State to take prompt action to crackdown on fraud and abuse, which should both be understood as separate problems, in our immigration system in order to protect workers in the United States and their economic conditions," the official asserted.

"As a practical matter, you're creating an entirely new structure for awarding these visas. I mean, it is a completely...total transformation of the H-1B programme," the official said. According to the senior administration official, these reforms were broadly supported by groups that represent American workers in the US, and that a lot of the driving action historically for these kinds of guest-worker reforms have been from groups that in fact even tilt Democratic.

"This (executive order) would apply across the board, but in particular, the executive order has an additional clause on the H-1B visa programme, and calls on those same four departments to put forward reforms to see to it that H-1B visas are awarded to the most skilled or highest-paid applicants," the official said. Noting that right now the H-1B visas were awarded by random lottery, the official said 80 per cent of H-1B workers were paid less than the median wage in their fields.

Only about five to six per cent, depending on the year, of H-1B workers command the highest wage tier recognised by the Department of Labour, there being four wage tiers, he said. "The highest wage tier, for instance in 2015, was only five per cent of H-1B workers. So 80 per cent received less than the median wage and only 10 per cent received the median wage," he noted.

"And, so only five per cent were categorised at the highest wage tier of the four wage tiers that are in place for the H-1B guest-worker visa," the official said. The result of that is that workers are often brought in well below market rates to replace American workers, sort of violating the principle of the programme, which is supposed to be a means for bringing in skilled labour, the official said.

"And instead, you're bringing in, a lot of times, workers who are actually less skilled and lower paid than the workers that they're replacing," he stated. The official said Trump has done more to bring a national spotlight onto the abuses in the H-1B guest-worker programme than anybody in the country has at any point in recent history.

"If you change that current system that awards visas randomly without regard for skill or wage to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers. These are not bringing in workers at beneath the market wage," he said. The top three recipients of the H-1B visas, the official said, were Tata (TCS), Infosys and Cognizant.

"Some companies oftentimes are called outsourcing firms. They're like the top recipients of H-1B visa. You know, are companies like Tata (TCS), Infosys, Cognizant. They will apply for a very large number of visas; more than they get. Like putting extra tickets in the lottery raffle, if you will," the official said.

"And then they'll get the lion's share of visas," the official said. As part of the executive order, the agencies have been asked to do everything they can, he said. "But you could be looking at things on the administration side like increasing fees for H-1B visas. You could be looking at things like if we could adjust the wage scale to have a more honest reflection of what the prevailing wages actually are in these fields," the official said.

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News Network
February 16,2020

Munich, Feb 16: Iran's foreign minister said Saturday that US President Donald Trump is receiving bad advice if he believes an American "maximum pressure" campaign against his country will cause the government in Tehran to collapse.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a group of top defense officials and diplomats at the Munich Security Conference that the information provided to the president has dissuaded Trump from accepting offers from other leaders to mediate between Washington and Tehran.

"President Trump has been convinced that we are about to collapse so he doesn't want to talk to a collapsing regime," Zarif said.

To support his argument, the Iranian minister cited Trump's decision to pull out unilaterally in 2018 from Iran's nuclear deal with the US and other world powers. Trump said the landmark 2015 accord didn't address Iran's ballistic missile program or regional activities and needed to be renegotiated.

Since then, the Trump administration's re-imposition of US sanctions in a campaign of so-called "maximum pressure" have taken a severe toll on the Iranian economy and sent Iran's currency plunging.

"I believe President Trump, unfortunately, does not have good advisers," Zarif said. "He's been wanting for Iran to collapse since he withdrew from the nuclear deal." Zarif also said the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3 was a miscalculation by Washington that has galvanized support for Iran instead of increasing pressure on the regime.

The Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, promised Iran economic incentives in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program. It was intended to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb, which Iran insists it does not want to do.

Since the US withdrawal, the deal's other signatories - Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China - have unsuccessfully struggled to come up with ways to offset the effects of the new American sanctions.

Washington has pressured the other countries - so far without success - to abandon the deal entirely US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the Munich Security Conference earlier Saturday that while there may be disagreements on what to do with the JCPOA, "when I talk to my counterparts here in Europe, everybody gets it."

"Everyone understands that these are folks who continue to build out their nuclear program," Pompeo said. "So there's a common understanding about the threat; we have tactical differences on how to proceed."

In recent months, Iran has steadily violated the limitations the deal placed on the amount of enriched uranium and heavy water it can stockpile, the number and type of centrifuges it can operate, and the purity of the uranium it enriches.

Iranian officials insist the moves are intended only to put pressure on the countries that remain part of the deal to provide economic help to Iran and that all the measures taken are fully reversible.

Zarif rejected Trump's suggestion of negotiating a new deal, saying the one negotiated during the Obama administration was the only vehicle for talks on Iran's nuclear program.

"There is no point in talking over something you already talked about. You don't buy a horse twice," he said.

"It's not about opening talks with the United States. It's about bringing the United States to the negotiating table that's already there," Zarif said.

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News Network
April 29,2020

Apr 29: US President Donald Trump doubled down on China for failing to tame the coronavirus at its very origin, saying it has led to 184 countries "going through hell", as several American lawmakers demanded steps to reduce dependence on Beijing for manufacturing and minerals.

Trump has been publicly blaming China for the global spread of the "invisible enemy" and launched an investigation against it. He has also indicated that the US may be looking at "a lot more money" in damages from China than the USD 140 billion being sought by Germany from Beijing for the pandemic.

Leaders of the US, the UK and Germany believe that the deaths and the destruction of the global economy could have been avoided, had China shared the information about the virus in its early phases.

"It's in 184 countries, as you hear me say often. It's hard to believe. It's inconceivable," Trump told reporters at White House Tuesday. "It should have been stopped at the source, which was China. It should have been stopped very much at the source, but it wasn't. And now we have 184 countries going through hell.”

The virus, which originated in China's Wuhan city in mid-November, has killed more than two lakh people and infected over three million globally. The largest number of them are in the US: nearly 59,000 deaths and over one million infections.

The massive outbreak in the US has put Trump under increasing pressure from American lawmakers to decrease US dependence on Beijing and they have also sought compensation from China.

Senator Ted Cruz and his colleagues have urged Defence Secretary Mark Esper and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to support the development of a fully domestic supply chain of rare earths and other minerals that are critical for manufacturing defence technologies and supporting national security.

“It is clear that our dependence on China for vital rare earths threatens our US manufacturing and defence-industrial base. As the October 2018 Defence Industrial Base Report states: ‘China represents a significant and growing risk to the supply of materials deemed strategic and critical to US national security.' [...] Ensuring a US supply of domestically sourced rare earths will reduce our vulnerability to supply disruptions that poses a grave risk to our military readiness," the Senators wrote.

The US is 100 percent import-dependent for rare earths as well as 13 other metals and minerals on the US Government Critical Minerals List and more than 75 percent import reliant for an additional 10 minerals.

Congressman Brian Mast on Tuesday introduced a legislation to hold China accountable for its "coronavirus deception". The resolution would empower the US to withhold payments on debts owed to China equal to the costs incurred by the US in response to COVID-19.

“China's total lack of transparency and mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak has cost tens of thousands of lives, millions of jobs and left untold economic destruction. Congress must hold China accountable for their cover-up and force them to pay back the taxpayer dollars that have been spent as a result,” Mast said.

Cruz, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced his intention to introduce a legislation to cut off Hollywood studios from assistance they receive from the Department of Defence if those studios censor their films for screening in China.

This legislation is part of Sen. Cruz's comprehensive push to combat China's growing influence over what Americans see and hear, which includes legislation targeting information warfare from the Chinese Communist Party across higher education, sports, films, radio broadcasts, and more.

Indian-American Congressman Ami Bera and Congressman Ted S. Yoho, both members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, will lead a bipartisan virtual Special Order to highlight the importance of US global leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If we abdicate our place as a leader in global health, there is another country eager to take the reins. China has not been subtle in asserting itself on global health issues, and often not for the benefit of other nations. China's recent coronavirus debacle should be evidence enough that their communist regime cannot be trusted to lead with accountability, transparency, or pragmatism, traits that are essential when fighting widespread disease,” Yoho said.

“As for how China would fare as a global health leader, look no further than the disastrous initial response by the WHO to coronavirus, one that was clearly influenced by Beijing. Information was slow-walked, warnings from nations like Taiwan were ignored at crucial turning points, and cooperation with outside health experts was spurned until it was too late. And it has resulted in the largest public health disaster the world has seen in over a century,” he said.

In an interview to Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio alleged that if China had acted when those warnings were being made, instead of silencing the people that were talking about it, they could have limited the spread.

“So there was no doubt that that was a deliberate decision made on their part. The one way to hold them accountable is to do what we should be doing anyway. That is moving the means of production to become less and less dependent upon them. What you're going to see after this pandemic is that more and more countries are going to prioritize their healthcare manufacturing capabilities and other industries,” he said.

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News Network
July 17,2020

Jul 17: US President Donald Trump has said that he wants to do everything possible to keep peace for the people of India and China, according to his spokesperson

Over the past several weeks, the Trump administration has come out in support of India against China.

“He (Trump) said I love the people of India and I love the people of China and I want to do everything possible to keep the peace for the people,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters at a news conference here on Thursday.

She was responding to a question on Trump’s message to India, which recently had a standoff with China in eastern Ladakh along the Line of Actual Control.

Earlier in the day, White House Economic Advisor Larry Kudlow described India as a great ally, saying President Trump is a great friend of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that India has been a great partner of the US.

“India has been a great partner… They are an important partner of ours. I have a great relationship with my foreign minister counterpart. We talked frequently about a broad range of issues. We talked about the conflict they had along the border with China. We've talked about the risk that emanates from the Chinese telecommunication infrastructure there,” Pompeo told reporters in response to a question.

Travelling in Europe, US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien told reporters that China has been very aggressive with India.

O’Brien said that India is a democracy and is a great friend of the United States. Prime Minister “Modi and President Trump have a super relationship,” he said.

“In fact, it was the last foreign trip that I took with the president before the COVID-19 crisis hit, was to India, and we had a great reception of the Indian people there. We have a lot in common with them, we speak English, we're democracies. We've got a growing, very strong relationship with India,” O’Brien said.

Welcoming the White House statement, Al Mason, co-chair of the Trump Victory Indian American Finance Committee, said that unlike his predecessor, President Trump has come out openly in support of India.

“Most of the Indian-Americans have observed that every earlier president - be it a Democrat or Republican, like Clinton or Bush Senior or Bush Jr or Obama have been very scared to side with India openly, for fear of hurting China.

“Only President Trump has had the courage to say that… I love India, America respects India… US stands with India - and that also, to over one billion Indians in India at the Namaste Trump rally held in India… and that too… near India’s neighbour China,” Mason said in a statement.

“And he is consistent in his love for India and Indian-Americans,” he added.

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