Leading up to next week's pivotal primaries in Florida and Ohio, Presidential Hopefuls from both parties added some clarity to their immigration positions during debates this week in South Florida. While most of the Republican Hopefuls tried to balance continued levels of immigration with the electorate's angst over mass immigration, the Democratic Hopefuls all but called for open borders.
One of the top headlines on the front page of this morning's New York Times reads "Foreign Labor Fills Vacancies at Trump Club." The story details the Mar-a-Lago resort's preference for hiring foreign workers through the H-2B visa program over hundreds of American workers who were referred to the club for jobs. It's interesting to see the story in the Times' after it ignored the fact that the massive omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December quadrupled the H-2B visa program for FY2016.
There are few areas where Democratic Presidential Hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders differ on immigration, but Thursday night's debate put two of them on display.
No one was quite sure how the absence of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump would affect Thursday night's Fox News debate stage, but his absence allowed the debate moderators to focus most of the immigration segment on Sen. Marco Rubio's role in the Gang of 8 -- the mass amnesty bill that ultimately died in the House after passing through the Senate at Rubio's urging.
While the first two Republican debates showed that the large field of GOP Hopefuls are mostly split on the issue of immigration, the Democratic Hopefuls stood mostly together during the Party’s first debate on Tuesday evening. There was agreement among the five Hopefuls on the issues of amnesty, in-state tuition, and eligibility for taxpayer funded health care, and no mention of protecting American workers from a massive wave of foreign workers.
When House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race for House Speaker, it opened it up to a new field of Republican Representatives being touted for the position. Here's a look at the Speaker candidates and where they stand on immigration . . .
John Burns Real Estate Consulting, a home-building analysis firm, blamed, in part, the “increasingly restrictive immigration policies” since 2007 on what the believe is a shortage of workers in the construction industry. It raises two questions. First, what immigration restrictions, and second, have they looked at unemployment data recently?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report on Friday in advance of Labor Day weekend, and BLS reports that nonfarm employment increased modestly by 173,000 in the month of August. The number looks good, but it represents a 30% decrease in new jobs from the previous two months.