Social Biden Just Gave a Final Middle Finger to the Working Class on the Way Out

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President Biden may be on his way out of office, but his administration has used his final weeks in office to give one last kick in the pants to working-class Americans. As LandLine Magazine revealed last week, the Department of Homeland Security has made an additional 70,000 H-2B visas available for next year, doubling the number of the previous year, when 1,500 were given to transportation occupations like trucking. 130,000 visas might not sound like a lot in a country as populous as the United States, and 1,500 given to truckers even less so, but when you consider market conditions and just how bad the trucking industry has gotten, you start to see how much of a middle finger to truck drivers this really is.

How bad have things gotten for trucking? The online trucking industry magazine FreightWaves has an entire section of their website dedicated to nothing but trucking company bankruptcies and truck driver layoffs. A quick scan through the most recent dozen of 82 articles for 2024 alone show that over 4,000 truckers in the United States were laid off in October and November, and thousands more are at risk of being laid off as the companies they work for seek bankruptcy protection. This number doesn't include many self employed truckers whose business closures are much more difficult to track.

Given this fact, what on earth would cause DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to push for more visas for foreign truckers? He gave us a window into his thinking recently in a November press release. "There are employers across the country that would suffer greatly without H-2B workers," Mayorkas said. "Authorizing these supplemental visas helps U.S. employers fill those positions ... It helps fuel our economy and reduce irregular migration while also providing a safe and lawful pathway to the United States for noncitizens who are prepared to work."

It's always about the employers for Mayorkas.

Perhaps Mayorkas still believes in the debunked "driver shortage narrative" that corporate lobbying groups like the American Trucking Association have been pushing for decades in an effort to extract taxpayer subsidies for their in-house CDL schools. But there isn't a trucker shortage; there's a retention crisis, the result of plummeting wages that can be traced back to the deregulation of the business, brought to us by another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, and his Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Thanks to Carter, the average truck driver's salary today is half of what it was in 1980.

The Biden administration's latest slap in the face is exactly the kind of policy that has kept truckers' salaries in the toilet. Like so much else under the Democrats, when greeted with bad working conditions, their answer is, let's bring in more immigrants who won't complain. The trucking industry in America has come to rely on migrant labor instead of improving pay and conditions for American workers.

Biden gave one last FU to the working class by thousands of H-2B visas to further devalue the wages of truckers.
 


Hiring Foreign Truck Drivers is Risky: Even Worse When Tragedy Strikes

Recently, there has been an increase of accidents involving long haul trucks throughout the Chicagoland and Illinois area, resulting in an increase in truck accident investigation. Trucks play an important role in the US economy, responsible for transporting goods over long distances for a reasonable price. But, because of the large size and difficulty to maneuver, trucks get into many accidents. On top of this, truck drivers often are fatigued due to long work hours and are likely to get into an accident. Since 2010, there has been a steady increase of truck accidents on the road. RGH Investigations have noticed this trend as well, as we are getting more requests for truck accident investigation.

Truck Driving and Immigration

Truck driving is also a good profession for new immigrants. Nowadays, it’s reasonably easy to rent a truck and start taking shipments. There are also many small US companies that recruit drivers from other countries. Many of these immigrants are on the path of getting their legal paperwork, or are undocumented. Currently, the majority of truck drivers come from Mexico/Central America, Russia, and Africa. Though hiring immigrants to fulfill the lack of American truck drivers seems great, immigrants don’t know the rules of the road in America. This is one of the reasons why we see an uptick of truck accidents.

Foreign truckers are a hazard for regular people. They don't speak English well and don't understand road signs.
 
Trump what about isms incoming

Sticking your fingers in your ears at the exact same time that Elon and Vivek Ramadouchey are on Twitter calling American workers lazy and saying that they need to drastically increase the number of H-1Bs.

Also, can someone point me to the restrictions that Trump advocated for on foreign truckers when he "renegotiated" NAFTA?

That Newsweek editorial is hilarious. Blaming Democrats for a bunch of laws that Republicans also supported.
 
Sticking your fingers in your ears at the exact same time that Elon and Vivek Ramadouchey are on Twitter calling American workers lazy and saying that they need to drastically increase the number of H-1Bs.
Elon and Rama suck too. Just prefer pointing at the left because they're completely blinded by the dialectic. Thanks for proving my point.
 
Elon and Rama suck too. Just prefer pointing at the left because they're completely blinded by the dialectic. Thanks for proving my point.

Bro, the entire point of that editorial, which I'm not sure that you read, is claiming that Trump will be better on this issue when there's literally no evidence of that. He didn't address it in his first term, and it never came up on the campaign trail.

For all of Biden's faults, he bailed out the Teamsters' pensions. That gives him FAR more bona fides on the side of working class voters than any contemporary Republican.
 
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I am not going to pretend to know about current trucking trends, but since when the fuck are they having a hard time, besides employers trying to hire people for those jobs?
 
Sticking your fingers in your ears at the exact same time that Elon and Vivek Ramadouchey are on Twitter calling American workers lazy and saying that they need to drastically increase the number of H-1Bs.

Also, can someone point me to the restrictions that Trump advocated for on foreign truckers when he "renegotiated" NAFTA?

That Newsweek editorial is hilarious. Blaming Democrats for a bunch of laws that Republicans also supported.
Do you know what H-1B visas are? They aren't jobs you can just as easily get any American to do like driving a truck or any of the other labor jobs democrats want to import poor people to replace, they require specialized qualifications that Americans aren't getting. STEM fields are like 25% of the workforce, but only 18% of college grads because American kids are taking out huge loans to major in sociology and political science or some other useless liberal arts major that won't conflict with their party schedule. Hell, even a huge chunk of the 18% are either foreign born themselves or their parents are, and then when you get to masters and doctorate degrees in STEM fields, literally a majority are foreign.

Are they supposed to hire art history majors to be engineers? Russia and China can keep all the best engineers and technology specialists, but if Central America or Haiti have some more unskilled poor people and gang members they'd like to send our way, we can never have too many of those.





STEM-Graphic-1-HD.png
 

President Biden may be on his way out of office, but his administration has used his final weeks in office to give one last kick in the pants to working-class Americans. As LandLine Magazine revealed last week, the Department of Homeland Security has made an additional 70,000 H-2B visas available for next year, doubling the number of the previous year, when 1,500 were given to transportation occupations like trucking. 130,000 visas might not sound like a lot in a country as populous as the United States, and 1,500 given to truckers even less so, but when you consider market conditions and just how bad the trucking industry has gotten, you start to see how much of a middle finger to truck drivers this really is.

How bad have things gotten for trucking? The online trucking industry magazine FreightWaves has an entire section of their website dedicated to nothing but trucking company bankruptcies and truck driver layoffs. A quick scan through the most recent dozen of 82 articles for 2024 alone show that over 4,000 truckers in the United States were laid off in October and November, and thousands more are at risk of being laid off as the companies they work for seek bankruptcy protection. This number doesn't include many self employed truckers whose business closures are much more difficult to track.

Given this fact, what on earth would cause DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to push for more visas for foreign truckers? He gave us a window into his thinking recently in a November press release. "There are employers across the country that would suffer greatly without H-2B workers," Mayorkas said. "Authorizing these supplemental visas helps U.S. employers fill those positions ... It helps fuel our economy and reduce irregular migration while also providing a safe and lawful pathway to the United States for noncitizens who are prepared to work."

It's always about the employers for Mayorkas.

Perhaps Mayorkas still believes in the debunked "driver shortage narrative" that corporate lobbying groups like the American Trucking Association have been pushing for decades in an effort to extract taxpayer subsidies for their in-house CDL schools. But there isn't a trucker shortage; there's a retention crisis, the result of plummeting wages that can be traced back to the deregulation of the business, brought to us by another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, and his Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Thanks to Carter, the average truck driver's salary today is half of what it was in 1980.

The Biden administration's latest slap in the face is exactly the kind of policy that has kept truckers' salaries in the toilet. Like so much else under the Democrats, when greeted with bad working conditions, their answer is, let's bring in more immigrants who won't complain. The trucking industry in America has come to rely on migrant labor instead of improving pay and conditions for American workers.

Biden gave one last FU to the working class by thousands of H-2B visas to further devalue the wages of truckers.
This is it.
 
I am assuming the majority of the visas are for farm workers?
 
Do you know what H-1B visas are? They aren't jobs you can just as easily get any American to do like driving a truck or any of the other labor jobs

H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers​

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-th...y-workers/h-2a-temporary-agricultural-workers

Specifically, there are two immigration routes that our clients utilize to hire foreign truck drivers. Number one, the H-2B visa which is a temporary worker visa, and number two, the EB-3 Visa which is a permanent visa, also known as green card. The H-2B visa process — a temporary visa type — can allow an employer to bring drivers within two to three months, whereas the EB-3 visa — a more permanent solution — can take anywhere from 12 to 24 months.

https://www.jeelani-law.com/immigration-options-for-truck-drivers/
https://www.jeelani-law.com/immigration-options-for-truck-drivers/
 

H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers​

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-th...y-workers/h-2a-temporary-agricultural-workers

Specifically, there are two immigration routes that our clients utilize to hire foreign truck drivers. Number one, the H-2B visa which is a temporary worker visa, and number two, the EB-3 Visa which is a permanent visa, also known as green card. The H-2B visa process — a temporary visa type — can allow an employer to bring drivers within two to three months, whereas the EB-3 visa — a more permanent solution — can take anywhere from 12 to 24 months.

https://www.jeelani-law.com/immigration-options-for-truck-drivers/
https://www.jeelani-law.com/immigration-options-for-truck-drivers/
<WhatIsThis>

Neither of those are H-1B.
 
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