90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Big H-1B and L-1 Users To Be Hit with Higher Fees for Visa Extensions

A piece of good news for those of us who think the H-1B program is over-used and displaces American workers: Starting in October one set of major users of the program will have to pay substantially higher fees when they want to extend the visas of H-1B and L workers currently on their payrolls, according to the San Jose Mercury-News.

This will raise $200 million a year for a fee-starved USCIS.

More importantly, it will serve as a price to be paid by these employers, one that may cause some of them — maybe — to rethink their policies of heavily relying on the two foreign worker programs.

The new fee structure — and this has happened before — will directly impact the big Indian outsourcing companies, Infosys, Tata, and the like, more than it will the big "solutions companies" like Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM.

This is the case because all of these two classes of foreign workers, when hired by the so-called "50/50" companies will be subject to the renewal fees; these are firms, like the outsourcers, with 50 or more workers and with 50 percent or more of them in the H-1B and L-1 categories. The big Silicon Valley firms (such as Microsoft) will not pay the new fees for their direct hires, but will do so for those they retain via the outsourcers.

Of the two programs, the larger one is the H-1B visa for college grad workers; the L program, is for foreign workers with professional skills, once employed overseas by multi-national corporations, who are subsequently transferred to this country. The new fee will be $4,000 for H-1B extensions and $4,500 for L extensions. Most H-1B workers are not newcomers, they are working on extended visas.

While a $4,000 or a $4,500 fee is substantial, it is dwarfed by the savings that the outsourcers will get by continuing to...

Turning Skulls Full Of Mush Into Marxists....

Five More Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Susan Rice

Ineptitude is the theme that runs throughout her diplomatic and national-security career.

Joe Biden is reportedly considering Barack Obama’s former national-security adviser Susan Rice to be his running mate. National Review’s Jim Geraghty recently told us “20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Susan Rice.”

I worked with Rice during the Clinton administration and have five more things the public needs to know.

1. Rice was obsessed with U.N. peacekeeping to solve world conflicts. Rice was a key architect of a disastrous Clinton-administration policy — Presidential Decision Directive 25. PDD-25, as the document was called, sought to implement “assertive multilateralism” to address all global conflicts with U.N. peacekeepers. This concept, the brainchild of Rice’s mentor Madeleine Albright, former ambassador to the United Nations, rested on the assumption that due to the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.N. peacekeepers could be used to address global conflicts instead of U.S. troops. PDD-25 was so radical that at one point an early draft advocated giving the U.N. the ability to tax international phone calls to pay for new peacekeeping missions. Assertive multilateralism was a spectacular failure since it led to the deployment of lightly armed, often poorly disciplined U.N. peacekeepers in war zones such as Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia, and Somalia, where many were killed or taken hostage.

2. Rice disliked hearing opposing views. As part of my duties as a CIA analyst covering U.N. issues, I briefed Susan Rice on classified and unclassified information related to her job. It was clear that she was not interested in — and objected to — hearing intelligence that contradicted her personal views. She and her NSC boss Richard Clarke were determined to ram through PDD-25 and tried to silence officers from other government agencies (including myself) who expressed skepticism about deploying U.N. peacekeepers to war zones and civil wars. Rice also made clear to me that she did not want to hear about U.N. waste and corruption. During the one occasion when I tried to brief her on an incident of serious U.N. corruption, she cut me off by saying, “Do you know how much a B-1 bomber costs?” Her point was she did not care how much money the U.N. wasted because she believed the U.S. government wasted more.

3. Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice did not get along because Rice refused to abide by the State Department’s chain of command. There were many reasons for tension between then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Rice, who at that time was U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Rice had been a close adviser to Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Clinton ran against him. Obama gave Clinton the post of secretary of state, but the two were not close. Rice, on the other hand, received the plum job of ambassador to the U.N., maintained her close relationship with Obama, and was given cabinet rank equal to that of...

Gas station in Potsdam from where the victim was dragged by migrant fiends into the forest.

A driver in the German city of Chemnitz, may have prevented a rape on Sunday evening. After hearing a scream, he approached the two suspicious dark-skinned men in a bush, who then fled, the police said.

The young woman said that the two dark-skinned men had spoken to and harassed her at a tram stop. One of the perpetrators is said to have touched her private parts. She was then dragged into the bushes by the two. During the attack, the suspects had spoken to her in broken German and to each other in an unknown language.

There had been repeated sex attacks in public places in the past few weeks in Germany. In Berlin, police record around a dozen sexual offenses every day, including an average of almost two rapes.

The police in Potsdam are still looking for a suspected rapist trio a week after the sexual assault. After the rape of a 23-year-old woman from Potsdam, the police said they would continue their search for the perpetrators. It is being investigated intensively, said a spokesman police department. He did not provide any further details. Instead, the mother of the 23-year-old who reported the case to the police, spoke about the case.

Her daughter had described the suspects as “southern”. “Yes, I know that’s a problem. But it makes no difference whether it was a German or a foreign perpetrator. I and my daughter don’t care,” said the mother.

“My daughter has bruises and abrasions on her body. When she was examined, the injuries were clearly visible and are documented.”

The young woman had been shopping at a gas station on Saturday night and, according to her a group of masked men spoke to her in a language she did not understand.

When the woman didn’t respond, she was grabbed from behind and dragged into a...