Unfortunately for the American people, the president cannot honestly campaign on his record of immigration enforcement to attract voters, though he promised a lot of policing in the beginning of [...]]]> Is President Trump depending on the general lameness of the 2020 Democrats — the Cuba-loving commie and the senile gasbag — to assure his re-election?

Unfortunately for the American people, the president cannot honestly campaign on his record of immigration enforcement to attract voters, though he promised a lot of policing in the beginning of his term. But his record is simply not strong.

He has depended on Mexico to keep out the thousands from Central America and beyond — a deal which appears to be weakening as a result of left-leaning judges.

There is no universal e-Verify (which would be more effective that the border wall), even though he had a Republican congress for two years but refused to poke the useless Speaker Paul Ryan into action on that issue.

Another unfulfilled Trump promise was ending the H-1b visa which has been used to replace thousands of well educated citizen tech workers with cheapie foreigners, often Indians.

Below, in 2015 former Disney employees Dave Powers and Leo Perrero told their stories of being summarily laid off by the company to make way for H-1b workers whom they were forced to train.

On Wednesday, Tucker Carlson examined the H-1b issue and the continuing pain it causes to American tech workers.

Perhaps President Trump will see the segment and do more to fix the harmful legislation — after all, this is an election year.

TUCKER CARLSON: President Trump travelled to India last week to meet with that country’s Prime Minister, Prime Minister Modi. One of the central issues at their meeting was the H-1b visa program. that program doles out roughly 85,000 visas a year to foreigners so they can move to this country and take American jobs.

I’m not exaggerating, that’s what it does: the vast majority of these visas are given to people from India. As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump called for ending this program entirely, but as president that hasn’t happened, though the Trump administration has made the visas slightly harder to get.

So why is the program still around? Why is it so durable? That’s an easy question to answer — it’s a favorite of tech companies which claim they simply can’t find any Americans skilled enough or smart enough to do tech work.

That’s a lie, a provable lie: companies routinely use H-1bs as a means to fire their existing American workers and replace them with lower paid foreigners. Often the fired workers are made to train their replacements before they’re terminated. The process for the replaced workers is painful and humiliating. Company executives tell them they’re being reassigned to a completely new company with a new role that consists of training people to do the job they once did. When they are not needed any more, they’re cast aside.

We recently spoke to some AT&T employees who are quote “rebadged” by the company to train cheaper replacements from India. Here’s their story:

ANONYMOUS FORMER AT&T EMPLOYEE: You’re just kind of numb. You just feel helpless, and you just accept it.

CARLSON: This former AT&T employee spent nearly two decades at the company. A few months ago AT&T informed her that she was no longer needed.

AT&T EMPLOYEE: I’m aware of at least 8,000. . .

CARLSON: Eight thousand workers?

AT&T EMPLOYEE: At least 8,000 — it could be more.

CARLSON: She is one of many former AT&T workers who found out on corporate conference calls that she was getting what they called “rebadged” to a new company where she’s forced to train a low-cost foreign replacement.

AT&T EMPLOYEE: Today it’s my job: tomorrow it could be yours.

CARLSON: She expects to be officially fired within a year.

AT&T EMPLOYEE: What can you do? Who can you call? Who do you talk to?

CARLSON: Many have turned to Sarah Blackwell, an employment lawyer who represents American workers.

SARAH BLACKWELL: What AT&T is doing is they’re firing them and having them work for the companies so they are working for AM Docs, Accenture, IBM and Tech Mahindra, and they’re training their replacements there.

CARLSON: One former employee who is currently training his replacement told us that the new workers are all from one place.

FORMER AT&T EMPLOYEE (MALE): They are all from India. Most of them are from Hyderabad; some are from Mumbai.

CARLSON: Our producers obtained shocking documents from the training courses — PowerPoint slides with the AT&T and Accenture logos inform workers about Indian cultural customs and warn that Indian men will not shake hands with American women.

FORMER AT&T EMPLOYEE: We’re an American company, and we are literally giving away our legacy. We are giving away our knowledgebase. We can’t get those things back once we outsource all this.

CARLSON: AT&T boasts about its corporate wokeness outside its corporate campus in Dallas, but the company gave it soon-to-be former employees a list of approved topics for discussion with Indian replacements and urges them not to discuss India’s human rights record or religious conflict in India with their future replacements.

BLACKWELL: Their goal is to offshore as much as it can to low-cost countries.

CARLSON: Many companies say that the foreign worker visa program helps US companies deal with the worker shortage.

BLACKWELL: You would not be firing workers if you really had a shortage.

CARLSON: Many tech companies say that the H-1b hires are smarter than Americans and better workers too. One former worker wasn’t convinced.

FORMER AT&T EMPLOYEE: Some of the folks that we work with, they are very sharp, but we’ve got some of the dumber we would have to water them twice a week.

CARLSON: AT&T for its part isn’t going broke. To give you a sense of the company’s priorities, it’s spending a hundred million dollars on an extensive renovation of its headquarters.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson makes nearly $30 million a year — that’s nearly 366 times the average AT&T worker. The outsourcing helps to pay for all that.

FORMER AT&T EMPLOYEE: They said you do not get a severance package: you’re not eligible for one since we found you another job. That’s what we were told. We were also told that we would not get our annual bonus next year unless we agreed to work for Accenture.

BLACKWELL: When you’re watching so many people suffer at the hands of a few getting rich and no one’s protecting them, then people will stop thinking capitalism is the right thing to do.

CARLSON PRODUCER: Do you think that the people who run the company care about the workers?

FIRST FORMER EMPLOYEE: No.

CARLSON: A spokesman for AT&T denied that any of this is happening and assured us that anyone who’s been rebadged can return to AT&T at any time.

CARLSON PRODUCER: They say many of those employees have already been placed in new H-1b jobs.

FIRST FORMER EMPLOYEE: Wow. Where are they?

CARLSON PRODUCER: It hasn’t happened to you?

FIRST FORMER EMPLOYEE: It hasn’t happened to anyone, I don’t think. I think that’s a blatant lie.

CARLSON: It’s infuriating and deeply unsettling by our producer, Charlie Couger — when our leaders cared to put Americans first.

Here’s the photo included on the front page, with the caption “Venezuelans at the Rondon refugee center in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state, Brazil. [...]]]> On Friday, the Washington Post front-paged a story about the regional tumult caused by the failure of Venezuela, with the headline “Fleeing Venezuelans Transforming Region” on the paper version.

Here’s the photo included on the front page, with the caption “Venezuelans at the Rondon refugee center in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state, Brazil. Some locals are resentful of the migrants, accusing them of suppressing wages and changing the culture.” (Does that last part sound familiar?)

Yes, it is indeed stressful to the social fabric when many thousands of foreigners suddenly invade and impose their culture, values and cheap labor. We know that very well in America, but the Washington Post and other liberal media have been less kind to the issue of excessive immigration’s social disruption in this country.

For years, Los Angeles residents (for example) complained that they were “losing their city to people of a new culture, people they don’t know,” when liberal media characterized such remarks as racist and anti-diversity. But now the quote comes from Brazil, so it’s completely reasonable.

A Brazilian house-painter even opined, “Trump should be our president.”

Does the Post realize its hypocrisy?

Anyway, the story shows the normal human preference for an orderly community of people who share culture, values and language. Diversity is a failed ideology, right up there with communism.

The article was reprinted in the Daily Republic, a northern California paper, so click away for the whole article:

Millions of Venezuelans are fleeing to Latin American cities, By The Washington Post, August 31, 2018

BOA VISTA, Brazil — Settlers from across Brazil built this 20th-century city, creating an orderly urban space dotted with palm-fringed lawns and manicured parks. Its residents lived in relative isolation, with the most common outsiders being the anteaters wandering in from the Amazon jungle.

Then came the Venezuelans, streaming out of their country in Latin America’s largest migrant crisis in decades.

Waves of newcomers are overwhelming Boa Vista, inundating hospitals and sparking a 1,000-percent increase in emergency calls to police. Schools are scrambling to put up bilingual signs for Spanish-speaking students reaching Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Thousands of migrants are living on the streets, willing to work for a third of the wages of Brazilians. Refugee camps have sprung up in the urban core, giving rise to fears of long-term ghettos.

Boa Vista residents “are losing their city to people of a new culture, people they don’t know,” said the mayor, Teresa Surita. “If this continues, we will lose total control of this city.”

As their numbers skyrocket, Venezuelans fleeing hunger and repression in their collapsing socialist state are reshaping cities and towns across the Western Hemisphere. The sound of Caracas slang is now ubiquitous in some Miami neighborhoods. Thousands of miles to the south, the scent of Caribbean cooking wafts through streets in Santiago, Chile. In English-speaking Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuelans make up a new working class.

Aid groups estimate that between 1.6 million and 2 million Venezuelans will leave their nation this year, escaping hyperinflation and desperate shortages of food and medicine. Those numbers are on top of the 1.5 million Venezuelans who left between 2014 and 2017. Roughly 1 in 10 Venezuelans will have left their country in a four-year span.

Compared with the European nations receiving Syrian refugees in recent years, Latin American countries have few resources to cope with the deluge of migrants. In recent weeks, Peru and Ecuador started insisting that arriving Venezuelans have passports, not just national ID cards, effectively closing their borders to many.

Brazil has kept its doors open. But this week, President Michel Temer signed an emergency decree sending additional troops to the northern border to reinforce a military contingent there. The sudden migrant influx is raising concerns about crime and lawlessness, as well as deeper questions about identity in a country that was long culturally walled off by its distinctive language and habits.

As that change accelerates, initial sympathy for the migrants is turning to shock, and shock is turning to rage – bringing the global debate over immigration to perhaps its most remote outpost: the Amazon region.

“Trump should be our president,” said Marcos Pereira da Silva, 43, a house painter who joined an anti-migrant protest in Boa Vista one Saturday in mid-August. That day, hundreds of angry Brazilians in the border town of Paracaima went on a rampage, bulldozing a makeshift migrant shelter and burning its occupants’ belongings after the stabbing of a local merchant.

“We need a wall,” Pereira said. (Continues)

The latest money-saver for corporations is the biggest container ship ever to land in North America, the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin, a French-owned ship, which docked on Saturday at the Port of Los Angeles. [...]]]> Here’s a postcard from the expanding globalized economy: outsourced manufacturing requires mega-shipping to transport the cheaply-produced goods back to American consumers.

The latest money-saver for corporations is the biggest container ship ever to land in North America, the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin, a French-owned ship, which docked on Saturday at the Port of Los Angeles. Built in Red China, the Franklin can carry up to 18,000 containers, which holds a lot of TVs from Asia.

Below, an aerial photo of the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin. Those boxes that may appear tiny are large: they go straight from ships to the back of semi-trucks. (In later incarnations, some are cleverly turned into housing, as Popular Mechanics has detailed.)

The largest container ship to visit a North American port, the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin, arrived at the Port of Los Angeles on Saturday morning, December 26th. The ship will leave for Oakland on Wednesday.

Here’s Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti crowing about what a big ship it is and how he saw “one crane operator who’s unloading about 40 boxes in an hour” — a speed made possible because of increased automation in ports these days, a job-killer fact the mayor didn’t mention:

Globalization has caused Americans to lose “six million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories” in the first decade of the 21st century as a result of government policies, according to Pat Buchanan.

So it’s pretty dense of politicians like Garcetti to praise an element of America’s economic downfall where millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost while just a couple hundred transportation positions result.

Here are some stats: The ship’s crew numbers 26 and around 150 longshoremen are unloading the ship. The job loss shouldn’t be celebrated, but then lying is what politicians do.

Megaship Arrives at Port of Los Angeles, KABC, December 27, 2015

The largest container ship to ever dock in North America arrived at the Port of Los Angeles Saturday morning.

The CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin is 1,306 feet, which is longer than the Empire State Building, and rises out of water nearly the size of a football field. Its width matches than of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, port officials said.

The French vessel can transport 18,000 containers, which is a third more cargo than most ships at the port. It’s even too big to pass through the Panama Canal.

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke at the arrival.

“This ship is called the Benjamin Franklin because it embodies the relationship that has existed between our nation and France…,” said Garcetti. “Here we have this great French ambassador visiting America and repaying the favor.”

The ship was expected to be unloaded at the port over the next four days.

It was scheduled to return to Southern California, docking at the Port of Long Beach sometime in early 2016.