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An anti-immigration non-profit in the US has accused two successive governments of inaction on curtailing the H-1B visa programme, which it says has cost 1.2 million jobs to Americans.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump have deep-seated biases towards migrant and illegal workers, which has created a blind spot for them, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has said in a blogpost on Dec. 23.

I suspect that neither president, for different reasons, can identify with the victims, the citizen and green card college grads who have been shouldered aside by the two programs just identified, CIS fellow David North wrote. Trump, though the holder of one Ivy League degree, rightfully thinks that most US college grads are not his supporters, and Obama, holder of two Ivy League degrees, may have a hard time seeing a relatively well-off, largely white population as a group of victims. Further, Trump, who in his business life used nonimmigrant (and illegal) workers, can identify with the employers and Obama (who spent some of his early years in Asia) might identify with the largely Asian workforce.

As per CIS, Americans have lost out 900,000 jobs to migrants on H-1B visas, and 300,000 jobs to those on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme during the tenure of the two presidents.

The H-1B visa, which allows high-skilled foreigner workers to live and work in the US for up to six years, is doled out to 85,000 people each year. OPT lets new college alumni work for up to three years in the US.

Although North is dismissive of employers and lobbyists arguing that there is a shortage of high-tech workers in the country, these claims have to be taken with a pinch of salt considering CIS is classified as an anti-immigrant hate group.It has longpublished works by white nationalist and anti-semitic writersandhyped the criminality of immigrants, among other things.

In fact, other experts are of the opinion that talent from abroad plugs many gaps, especially in cutting-edge fields such as cloud, big data, and mobile computing.

More than half of the countrys top artificial intelligence talent base is composed of foreign nationals. US technology firms currently rely heavily on temporary-hire foreign workers to fulfil critical shortages in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) occupations, a report from theCenter for a New American Security (CNAS) argues, advocating that the H1-B visa cap be raised for all and removed entirely advanced-degree holders.

Many of the biggest American corporations, including Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Pepsi, have been helmed by Indian leaders. Over half of the unicorns in America as of October 2018 had an immigrant founder.

Theres even monetary benefits at play: In the decade leading up to 2012, the federal government has distributed about $1 billion from H-1B visa fees to fund programmes to address skills shortages in the US workforce, think tank Brookings Institute noted.

Even the OPT programmethat North criticises for being a government subsidised setup that lets employers avoid social security, medicare, and federal unemployment trust funds they wouldve had to pay if an American was hiredis actually helping the American economy.

Scaling back the OPT programme would result in the loss of 443,000 jobs over the next decade, including 255,000 jobs held by US-born workers, a December 2018 study by Business Roundtable found. Eventually, wages and US GDP would suffer due to increased slack in the labor market and fewer productivity gains.

Original post:
US think-tank says Trump and Obama ignored nearly a million victims of H-1B - Quartz India

There are many lenses through which to look at books in the decade just past. But one thing is certain: Women writers were a powerful force.

Early in the decade, bestseller lists were dominated (sorry) by E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which sold 35 million copies in the United States making the novels the three bestselling books of the decade in any genre.

As the decade ends, the current book-selling champ is Michelle Obama with her memoir, Becoming. With more than 10 million copies sold worldwide (fueled by an unprecedented rock-star book tour), it was the bestselling book of 2018 and might take the 2019 title. Another contender is Delia Owens, a 70-year-old wildlife biologist whose first novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, is an unlikely phenomenon, selling more than 4.5 million copies and spending 30 weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

What these books have in common, and what they share with many other notable books of the decade, is that they were written by women. According to the NPD Group, a market research company that analyzes fields including book-selling data, women wrote eight of the 10 bestselling books between 2010 and 2019. (The only men on the list are John Green with The Fault in Our Stars and Stieg Larsson with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo both, by the way, books about female characters.)

Its not just a matter of copies sold, either. Many of the decades major book prizes were won by women. Take fiction awards: Five of the 10 National Book Awards went to women Jesmyn Ward won two, for Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing as well as seven of nine National Book Critics Circle awards (but only two of nine Pulitzer Prizes).

The decade has seen an extraordinary run of literary fiction by women, starting in 2010 with Jennifer Egans amazing A Visit From the Goon Squad. It was followed by such standout books as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Americanah, Donna Tartts The Goldfinch, Lauren Groffs Fates and Furies, Elizabeth Strouts My Name Is Lucy Barton and many, many more.

And, of course, there is the comeback novel of the decade, Margaret Atwoods darkly stellar The Handmaids Tale, published in 1985 but suddenly relevant. Atwood followed it up this year with a timely sequel, The Testaments.

Popular fiction by women included juggernauts like Gillian Flynns Gone Girl, Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train and Veronica Roths Divergent series. Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games was published in 2008, but it ranks as the No. 4 bestseller of this decade with 8.7 million copies.

Women wrote major works of nonfiction as well. The decade had barely begun when Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; the same year saw publication of Isabel Wilkersons The Warmth of Other Suns. Other nonfiction standouts include Elizabeth Kolberts The Sixth Extinction, Katherine Boos Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Jane Mayers Dark Money.

There have been a number of stunning memoirs by women since 2010, including Patti Smiths Just Kids, Helen Macdonalds H Is for Hawk, Margo Jeffersons Negroland, Cheryl Strayeds Wild, Roxane Gays Hunger, Valeria Luisellis Tell Me How It Ends and Tara Westovers Educated. The true crime genre is exploding in popularity, and much of it is written by women, such as Ill Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara, Furious Hours by Casey Cep and American Fire by Monica Hesse.

Women arent just writing more; they read more. According to the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of women report having read one or more books in the last year, while only 68 percent of men have.

The surge of womens writing shows no sign of slowing. Among the most anticipated books of 2020: Zora Neale Hurstons Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick, Hilary Mantels The Mirror and the Light, Louise Erdrichs The Night Watchman and Emily St. John Mandels The Glass Hotel. And thats just between January and March. Looks like a promising decade.

More here:
From Michelle Obama to E.L. James, women ruled the decade in books - Tampa Bay Times

President Donald Trump, as a private individual before he ran for political office, was not a fan of the automotive bailout that occurred under his predecessors watch.

When automotive companies were given large sums of government loans to help them during the Great Recession, Trump was initially in favor of doing so, NBC News reported. You have to save the car industry in this country, Trump said at the time.

But once President Barack Obama came into office and pushed the idea and once Trump himself started contemplating a run for president himself he was decidedly against it.

Trump derided the bailout as being costly, and even dubiously said it was being used to create jobs in China, not in the U.S. (a Chrysler vice president of design responded to Trump by saying he was full of s). But as costly as the auto bailout was for the United States, Trumps own bailout for farmers has cost more than twice as much.

The auto bailout, according to The American Independent, cost the U.S. about $12 billion when things were all said and done. The bailout for farmers under Trump, which began due to his trade wars with China, have cost $28 billion so far.

Additional bailouts arent scheduled to happen for farmers, but its also not outside of the realm of possibilities, as the trade war is at a standstill presently, even with a so-called phase one deal moving forward.

Helping farmers keep their farms afloat is seen by many as a cost thats worth the expense cited above. But another problem with Trumps bailout abounds: its mainly going to wealthy farmers, and not to those in more dangerous situations.

The bottom 80 percent of income earners on farms across the nation received, on average, just over $5,000 per farm from Trumps bailout, Bloomberg reported. Thats a paltry sum, compared to what the top 1 percent of farms, mainly factory farms owned by large agri-businesses, earned. Among those wealthier owners, the average farm received $177,000 each.

Whether the farm bailout is doing good or not, is hard to tell, though it seems clear that its doing too little for farming families that are struggling the hardest. What is clear is that the bailout itself could have been largely avoided had Trump not attempted to begin a trade war in early 2018, one that he said was going to be easy to win and yet still persists to this day.

Read more from the original source:
Trump Derided Obama's Auto Bailout, But His Farm Bailout Has Cost More Than Twice As Much - HillReporter.com

Michelle might be well on her way to joining her husband with the distinction of a Grammy Award for the Best Spoken Word Album. It comes as her standing for president in the upcoming 2020 US elections looks less likely with every day, though fans of the ex-FLOTUS will be made up that she might enter a separate hall of fame.

Michelle was nominated for the Grammy award late last month for the audiobook version of Becoming her 2018 memoir about life as a black woman in America and The White House.

Should she win, Michelle will join several other former White House occupants and Grammy winners, all of whom have triumphed in the spoken-word category.

Barack won a Grammy for his audiobook recording of Dreams From My Father in 2006, and another in 2008 for his The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

On hearing that she had been nominated, Michelle tweeted: So thrilled to receive a GRAMMYs nomination!

A third added: Congratulations Mrs. Obama and well-deserved!

Your book and audio are wonderful and certainly a winner!

Best wishes and good luck on the GRAMMY Awards.

Thanks for you and your beautiful familys service to the US!

There are several other nominees in the Best Spoken Word Album section.

Others include Michael Diamond, Adam Horovitz, Scott Sherratt and Dan Zitt, Eric Alexandrakis, John Waters and Sekou Andrews and The String Theory.

Former President Bill Clinton grabbed his first Grammy in 2004 in the spoken word category album for children, for his narration of the book Wolf Tracks and Peter and the Wolf.

Then, in 2005, he won the spoken world album category for his memoir My World and Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy, respectively.

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Michelle Obama shock: Ex-FLOTUS on her way to joining Barack with illustrious award - Express.co.uk

Barack Obama repeatedly abused his executive power as president. That is worth noting because we now have House Democrats and their buddies in ideological clothing insisting that abuse of power is sufficient grounds for impeachment. They are talking about President Donald Trump, of course, and have cleverly selected a transgression equivalent to saying you are guilty because you abysmally do what all presidents do.

Back in the days when the founders were arguing about constitutional content, some wanted to be able to impeach a president for such things as maladministration. James Madison, who agreed that the right to congressional impeachment was crucial for governmental stability, said heaven help us. Where would you draw the line, he wanted to know. Would any kind of administrative stumble be enough for action?

We therefore ended up with a Constitution saying impeachment required treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors with some saying that phrase at the least implies malfeasance as serious as treason and bribery.

You dont get that in Trump delaying military aid to Ukraine and asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Vice President Joe Biden. Ukraine got the aid and, according to the U.S. secretary of defense, at no military disadvantage. Biden never got investigated, though his own conflict of interest was twice as startling as that of Trump, who had plenty of reason to be concerned about corruption even if Biden is now striving to be president.

But on to Obama who never talked about fake news but proved himself more quiver-worthy to free press principles by his administration spying on reporters and, in national security cases, threatening reporters with jail if they did not reveal their sources. The administration also set records on refusing requests for governmental information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Obama, please remember, made appointments requiring congressional acquiescence without congressional acquiescence. It has been noted that he worked things so that, in the Chrysler bailout, creditors did not get the money due them under law. A bunch of it went to Democratically beloved unions instead. As other seekers of the truth also report, he started regulating the internet despite congressional requirements that he do no such thing.

In implementing Obamacare, he rewrote Obamacare in concert with his congressional talents, and there were 22 times he said he could not constitutionally give reprieves by himself to illegal aliens, nevertheless finding it convenient to do as much during an election campaign.

Obama made a deal with Iran that let it keep the means of producing nuclear weapons and enabled it to keep inspectors outside of military bases while the administration said some of its violations in trying to buy nuclear technology were not violations because the tricksters were caught. The power abuse was refusing to submit the deal to Congress for treaty verification just possibly leading to something less threatening.

Back in the states, it turned out that the Internal Revenue Service was denying tax breaks to certain non-profit conservative organizations while giving them to non-profit liberal organizations. The department came up with excuses that wouldnt fool a first-grader, but, then, we the people are all in kindergarten.

Also, pretending the Founders never wrote a Constitution, Obama unilaterally gave us a court-snubbed Clean Power Plan that would have changed state laws while raising utility rates sky high and deterring climate change by an undetectable speck.

Remember, by the way, how the administration illegitimately told universities they could forget federal funds if they indulged in due process in going after men accused of sexual misdeeds? Standards of fairness do not apply to men because, well, they are men and therefore in need of abuse of power.

Obama was among our most autocratic presidents, especially when you consider how he also set records for new liberty-shriveling regulations, but I am not saying he should have been impeached. I am saying that some of his offenses were as bad as Trumps.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com.

Read more:
Should Barack Obama have been impeached for abuses of power? - Grand Island Independent