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The majority of likely American voters says the United States does not need any more foreign H-1B visa workers to fill white-collar jobs, a new poll finds. A Rasmussen Reports survey reveals that 6-in-10 Americans say the U.S. “already has enough talented people to train and recruit” for white-collar jobs when asked whether Congress should increase the inflow of foreign workers, primarily those arriving through the H-1B visa program. Meanwhile, just 26 percent of Americans say Congress should increase the number of foreign visa workers taking white-collar jobs. Republicans and swing voters, in particular, say the U.S. has enough American talent for such jobs and does not need more foreign visa workers. The survey shows that 72 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of swing voters, and a plurality of 47 percent of Democrats say the U.S. has talented people who can be trained and recruited for open white-collar jobs. For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the fraud and abuse within the H-1B visa program where white-collar Americans are laid off and forced to train their foreign replacements, primarily from India and China. While corporations lay off Americans in white-collar jobs to import foreign H-1B visa workers, hundreds of thousands of young college-educated Americans enter the workforce every year looking for entry-level jobs with decent salaries. Annually, about half a million American graduates enter the STEM workforce looking for high-paying jobs with good benefits packages. Their chances of landing such a job are cut significantly with the annual inflow of tens of thousands of foreign H-1B visa workers who will compete directly against them in the white-collar labor market. In President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, the administration reformed the H-1B visa program to better ensure that companies were not wrongfully firing Americans only to hire foreign visa workers. By 2022, though, President Joe Biden gutted those reforms and allowed corporations that had been denied foreign H-1B visa workers by the Trump administration to reapply. John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .Warning labels for social media gained swift bipartisan support from dozens of attorneys general after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to establish the requirements earlier this year.In a small country cafe, a man in his 40s is scanning the room. Craig — who asked that we change his name to protect his privacy — has never stopped in this town before. His mind has been racing throughout the five-hour drive here: "It's an anxious environment." In the corner, he spots the two strangers he's looking for. "I know their first names, I don't know their surnames, where they work, or anything of that nature," he says. Craig and the couple awkwardly shake hands, before launching into an intimate conversation. "The discussion entailed details which I realised that people beside us were listening to and were quite uncomfortable with," he recalls. But they don't let the punters gawking over a cappuccino deter them. After 15 minutes of conversation, it's decided: Craig and these two strangers are going to make a baby. Craig met this couple in 2020, in a Facebook group designed for just this. Such groups are becoming increasingly popular as wait times and costs see more Australians turn away from traditional sperm banks. And they're catering to a growing audience: same-sex couples wanting to start a family and the self-described "single mothers by choice". For Craig, the appeal of going through Facebook was the ability to put a face to the parent of his donor child. The people powering Facebook's sperm exchange say they want options and they want control. But in this unregulated space, it's not always clear who's in control and who isn't. The 'known donor' movement Adam Hooper says his Facebook group "put the idea of men donating on the map". "You can do anything on the internet so it was like, well, why can't people find their donor on the internet?" With 20,000 odd members, Sperm Donation Australia is the largest group by far, dwarfing the group Craig chose. Over 10 years, Adam has turned the group into a sort of empire — he has a podcast and even undertook a FIFO "baby-making tour", donating his sperm to recipients to raise awareness of his movement. The gospel he's spreading is "known donation" — the alternative to the anonymised donors you find at a sperm bank. "If you're just picking numbers off a piece of paper [at the clinic] that's a bit blasé, it's a bit irresponsible, a bit reckless," he says. "Some people [in my group] want to meet up multiple times before they decide to pick you as a donor and really get to know the qualities that you have as a person that these children might inherit. "They're doing their due diligence." Go inside Facebook's thriving sperm exchange with Background Briefing in the special mini-series, "Births, Deaths and Marriages". Adam has donated to just over 20 families and he paints a utopian scene. The mothers meet up a few times a year and all the "diblings" (donor siblings) play in the park together. "[The kids] see children with similar circumstances to their upbringing — it normalises it for them. And they adore and love each other," he says. He sees benefits for the donor in staying in touch, too — he has his families in a Facebook group, and it warms his heart to see the Halloween and Book Week photos roll in. He thinks maybe if more men got to see what had become of their donation, it could address the crippling sperm shortage facing Australia, where women wait up to a year at some clinics. 'Huge risk' Peter Illingworth, the medical director of IVF Australia, can see why people would want to build a relationship with their donor. But he cautions there is a "huge risk" in "building a life-long relationship with a virtual stranger" from the internet. "We regularly come across men whose motivations are not right, who may be looking to insert themselves into a family down the track," he says. "Clinics act as a boundary for the parent having the child." He adds that some of the donors on Facebook have been rejected by clinics. "At the clinic, there is a detailed counselling process. The donor has been assessed by a team of health professionals. "The evidence [as to whether] they've donated before has been recorded and submitted." Dr Illingworth encourages women who want to bypass clinics to approach someone they've known and trusted for years, as "children live a long time, and the motivations of people might change". But many donors don't want to donate to someone they're likely to see often. It's why Craig chose to drive 500km to that country cafe to meet a couple far removed from his own family. Like Adam, Craig wanted to know he'd "done the right thing for the right people". He felt Facebook would give him control over where his donation wound up. Only the further he got, the more he felt that control over the process was an illusion. Taking the plunge It was a conversation with his wife that started Craig's donor journey. "My wife was asking whether or not I wanted to get a vasectomy," he recalls. They'd had their kids young, and those kids had grown up. Craig had thought that was it. But in this conversation, he had a moment of clarity. "I thought, I would like to have more children. But there's no way I wanted to go through the whole process of raising children again. It was so taxing," he says. And he started thinking about the times he'd been asked to be a donor over the years. At the time, he'd been dead against it. "I had very strong family values. I did not want to be cheating on my wife, and that's how I saw it at the time. And legally, gay couples weren't allowed to be married." Once same-sex marriage was legal, Craig saw a role for himself. "Marriage is the starting of a family, so there had to be people to provide the [sperm] donations," he said. His wife tentatively agreed, but didn't want to know anything more — and to this day, she doesn't. So, Craig found a group and started surfing profiles. And then he took the plunge. He put up a post and a tsunami of messages swept into his inbox. "About 30 couples reached out to me. I thought, 'wow'. I was surprised by this." Among those messaging him was the couple he would go to meet at the country cafe. "It just seemed like a perfect match in terms of what they were looking for," he says. But for the women in his inbox, things weren't always so fortuitous. Scrolling through their posts, he began to notice a trend that disturbed him. "Women are putting up messages, and then there are men that are hitting the site saying that they will help them, but they will only do it if they get sex. "And it's disgusting because they're seeing an opportunity of need and abusing that situation." 'We were ambushed' Vanessa was one of the women putting up these hopeful posts, sharing her and her partner's dreams of growing their young family. "We both have children from a previous relationship, but we would just like one together," she explains. When a donor slid into their inbox within days of joining Adam Hooper's group earlier this year, Vanessa was elated. "Everything was going smoothly," she says. She explained up-front that, like most women in this space, they only wished to do "artificial insemination" (AI) — what previous generations colloquially called "turkey basting". The donor agreed. Then came the planning. Behind the "miracle of life" is a web of complex logistics for donors and recipients, who frequently live in different areas. For Vanessa, this high-stakes mission had to be timed with her ovulation, and the donor lived 400km away. "We had arranged a babysitter and we had arranged time off work and we were looking at staying at a hotel," she says. Vanessa was packing her bags when a message popped up from the donor. Forty-eight hours out from the meeting, he was changing his terms: "I'm only donating if it's [natural insemination]." Natural insemination (NI), meaning sex. Vanessa felt "a little bit heartbroken and shocked ... a little bit betrayed as well." "At the same time, I can't say anything because I'm getting a gift from somebody. I felt like I was stripped away from something that, you know, essentially wasn't even mine." Two days later, a second donor approached them. They thought this time it would be a better experience. This donor also lived far away, and so Vanessa and her partner once again scheduled time off work and a babysitter. Again, 48 hours beforehand, they got a message saying the donor had changed his mind about doing artificial insemination. "We were sort of ambushed in a way ... pressured into doing [natural insemination]." Around this time, the first donor came back and said he was willing to do AI after all. "We gave him a second chance, we booked everything," Vanessa recalls. Last minute, he backflipped again. At this point, Vanessa considered going through with NI, rationalising "we're just getting what we need to make a baby". By the time they'd hit Facebook, they'd already spent months being bounced around IVF clinics — they say one quoted $13,000 for sperm. "It's hard to explain the feelings that you go through because you're so hopeful, you're so wanting it. And sometimes you will do things that you're not really proud of to, you know, get that," says Vanessa. But her partner was adamant: sex wasn't part of the plan. "And I was very grateful for that support," Vanessa says. 'The number one mistake' Not all women have this support and reinforcement. Ferah — who asked that we use that name to protect her privacy — felt isolated in Australia. She and her partner were from Sri Lanka. He was medically infertile, but as Catholics, IVF was off the table. So, Ferah turned to Facebook. She quickly found a potential donor. He was smart and from South India: they had led parallel lives, and it was important that her child have a similar ancestry to her. They spoke online frequently over a six-month period during the pandemic and she grew to trust him. "My number one mistake was dragging that emotion into it all," she reflects. It made her see past the red flags. "He is Hindu and from the start it was obvious that he was a lot more sexually experienced than my partner and I," she says. "He started sending me private sex photos and videos of him with another woman. I don't think he should have done that. "It seemed like something you'd pick up from Cosmo or a 'bad girl's Bible' — things that are quite taboo in my home." Sexual assault support services: She thought perhaps this was just the reality with men and she'd led a sheltered existence due to her faith. She says she told him to stop but he continued and began requesting nude photos. "He kept pushing for NI [natural insemination], over and over," she says. "My main instinct in sticking through it was because we seemed to have a lot in common because of our geography. So I put up with it." Ferah flew to Adelaide alone in January 2021. She was meant to stay with her donor for the six days surrounding her ovulation date to give her the best chance of conception. According to Ferah, he pushed for natural insemination, but the sex was painful for her and so they had to stop. She says he became furious and tried to put her on the overnight coach home. She flew home devastated and didn't get out of bed for two weeks. "I got back to work with the support of some good friends, I recovered." A month after he demanded she leave, Ferah says she got a text from the donor: "I hope you didn't get pregnant." Ferah reported the experience to Adam Hooper — while it hadn't happened in his group, she saw him as a point person for the broader known donor movement. He told her this was the risk of going through less moderated groups than his. Adam told Background Briefing he had given Ferah a welcome pack when she briefly joined his group that warned against other communities online. "When you go into these other groups, you're putting yourself at risk," he "Some people can't help themselves. They're putting themselves in a position that, as an adult, you should not be putting yourself in. "We've got to put the desperate side aside and we need to actually go in there with a focus on doing what's right for our children and ourselves first." The Background Briefing team brings you Births, Deaths and Marriages, a special three-part series looking into what happens when milestone moments go wrong. The donors who pressured Vanessa to switch to NI were swiftly banned from Adam's group. But the harm had already occurred. Asked whether this solution is reactive, Adam says it's the best they can do, given sexual harassment of women is a society-wide phenomenon. "We get updated very often with complaints or even things that seem like red flags," he says. "And we have a great community that is very good at updating us with that." It's not clear how frequently donors attempt to pressure women into sex, but Deakin University Associate Professor, Dr Neera Bhatia, suspects it's under-reported. "Women are being exploited. Because they are desperate to create a family, many acquiesce," she says. "Some are single women, a lot are lesbian women, which is a whole other betrayal of their sexuality when they relent and have sex with men." Do you know more? Ultimately, Dr Bhatia says, this is an exploitation of women's financial vulnerability, as fertility clinics can cost thousands of dollars. In the most extreme example of what's at stake, a woman alleged to the Victorian reproductive industry regulator that she had been sexually assaulted by an informal donor. The regulator said it referred the report to police in May 2021, but Victoria Police was unable to provide an update to . 'What have I done?' It's not just women facing the challenge of how to maintain boundaries in this emotionally charged process. Craig, too, had to navigate how to respect the limits he'd agreed to as his feelings evolved. A few months after Craig met the couple in the cafe, he drove hundreds of kilometres to their home to hand over his donation. He found the experience mortifying — the awkward chitchat, handling what he calls "the specimen". But by the next month, it became normalised. Nine months rolled by and Craig heard nothing. He wasn't sure if they'd stayed pregnant, miscarried, or even moved on to another donor. Then one day, he got a text out of the blue. "I was just driving in the driveway and my phone buzzed. I was in the car with my family," he says. "And it was that the child had been born probably a week earlier." It was a strange feeling being the last person to know. I thought I would have found out a bit earlier. But that's their prerogative." But this distance would see Craig begin to spiral. "[The text message] came as a shock and it started to traumatise me," he says. "I'm thinking, 'My goodness, what have I done?' "You'd be going to bed thinking, 'There's a child out there and I hope it's OK,' and all the paternal type of thoughts that would go through your mind. "Trying to maintain a distance between those thoughts and your family life, it made you feel a little bit distant from your own family." Craig says it took a lot of discipline not to ask for more involvement, in a way that wasn't agreed upon: "There's that natural desire that you may want to get involved". Unlike with traditional sperm banks, "there is a chance that the recipient may be contacted by the donor, particularly with that information that they've had available in terms of contact details," he adds. Because the child had been born through artificial insemination, the couple were more legally protected against Craig asserting any custody or visitation rights. But in cases of natural insemination, it could be easier for the father to later argue he is entitled to parenting rights. Under the "donor agreement" Craig had drawn up with the recipients, he wasn't entitled to anything beyond notification that the child had been born. Both parties had wanted this agreement: "They were scared of custody arrangements, I'm scared of financial implications," Craig says. The fear for Craig was that the parents could request child support, or the child could one day stake a claim to his estate. (In a statement, the Department of Social Services clarified that donors who use artificial insemination are not liable for child support, but those using natural insemination may be.) For years, sperm donors believed their identity would remain secret, but the explosion of online DNA databases changed everything. Craig says: "If there was a dispute in future, [the donor agreement] would be a document to rely on." But in the end, it's just a piece of paper. As Adam Hooper puts it, "you can't contract parenthood" in a way the Family Court considers binding. He says donors should speak to a lawyer about how to protect their financial interests including through their will. Craig still feels vulnerable as a result of his donations. "There needs to be protection for those that are honestly involved in just contributing to society," he says. "I don't feel like I was protected. I think that our governments should hang their heads in shame with the way that they've provided protection [in order] for lesbian couples to have children." Besides clarifying the legal obligations of donors, Craig thinks governments could offer safer pathways for known donation besides for-profit clinics. "I think the services are already there. It would just take [some] people in an office to vet donors and bring them together with recipients," he says. A 'life-changing' gift After 18 months of intrusive, anguished thoughts, Craig turned a corner. It wasn't moving on from donating that freed him from the spiral: it was donating again. The couple asked him to help them conceive a sibling, and Craig once again drove for hours to their family home. Stepping in the door, the anxiety he'd carried for so long dissipated. "It had a large lounge room with a beautiful woodfired heater going. It was beautifully furnished. "It would be an ideal place to raise a family." The house hadn't changed, but the women had. "This young woman had matured into a mother. It was really pleasant to see." They went upstairs to do the donation and suddenly he heard the baby he'd fathered crying down the hallway. He froze — he hadn't expected the baby to be there, "because it's a pretty private experience". Craig debated whether to ask to see the child he'd been thinking about for 18 months. But he resolved it could do more harm than good. "It was not my place to be able to bond or build a relationship." Still, just hearing the baby safe in this warm environment put him at ease. "I was able to just put the whole lot behind me." The second child was born, but Craig has blocked out its name, and the surnames of the parents. He keeps his donor agreement in the attic, so he's not tempted to reach out to them. "You have to move on and just accept that you've helped bring joy to someone else's family," he says. Despite the anguish, he says his donations are the most valuable thing he's done in his life. He reads a text message from the mother of his donor child — though he hasn't saved their name in his phone. "You've had a massive impact on our life. She's the most content and happy little girl. She's honestly our dream come true. Thank you for being such a selfless and amazing human being." As the mother writes, the gift of a sperm donation has the power to change lives. And that's what makes everyone involved so vulnerable. It's the potential reward that makes Vanessa willing to put aside her negative experiences with the first two potential donors and try again: "The success stories [from this group] far outweigh the negative comments," she says. She's found a new guy in Adam Hooper's group who's been "a successful donor to other people". Vanessa and her partner are planning to drive the 400km to the donor, stay at a hotel, and receive their donation. "These groups are life-changing because not everybody is in the same position," she says. "And sometimes, these are people's only options to have a baby." Reporter: with additional research by Illustrator: Digital producer: Executive Producer: Read more from Background Briefing: RN in your inbox Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter. Related stories Parenting Fertility and Infertility Fertility and Infertility Related topics Australia Fertility and Infertility Parenting Social Media
ABILENE, Texas (AP) — Leonardo Bettiol scored 22 points as Abilene Christian beat Texas Southern 69-65 on Saturday night. Bettiol added six rebounds for the Wildcats (8-5). Quion Williams added 21 points while shooting 8 of 15 from the field and 4 for 5 from the line while they also had 11 rebounds. Hunter Jack Madden went 4 of 15 from the field (1 for 10 from 3-point range) to finish with nine points. The Tigers (1-10) were led in scoring by Kavion McClain, who finished with 19 points, seven rebounds and two steals. Texas Southern also got 17 points and three steals from Zaire Hayes. Kenny Hunter had 10 points, six rebounds, two steals and two blocks. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .By TRÂN NGUYỄN SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California, home to some of the largest technology companies in the world, would be the first U.S. state to require mental health warning labels on social media sites if lawmakers pass a bill introduced Monday. The legislation sponsored by state Attorney General Rob Bonta is necessary to bolster safety for children online, supporters say, but industry officials vow to fight the measure and others like it under the First Amendment. Warning labels for social media gained swift bipartisan support from dozens of attorneys general, including Bonta, after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to establish the requirements earlier this year, saying social media is a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people. “These companies know the harmful impact their products can have on our children, and they refuse to take meaningful steps to make them safer,” Bonta said at a news conference Monday. “Time is up. It’s time we stepped in and demanded change.” State officials haven’t provided details on the bill, but Bonta said the warning labels could pop up once weekly. Up to 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 say they use a social media platform, and more than a third say that they use social media “almost constantly,” according to 2022 data from the Pew Research Center. Parents’ concerns prompted Australia to pass the world’s first law banning social media for children under 16 in November. “The promise of social media, although real, has turned into a situation where they’re turning our children’s attention into a commodity,” Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who authored the California bill, said Monday. “The attention economy is using our children and their well-being to make money for these California companies.” Lawmakers instead should focus on online safety education and mental health resources, not warning label bills that are “constitutionally unsound,” said Todd O’Boyle, a vice president of the tech industry policy group Chamber of Progress. “We strongly suspect that the courts will set them aside as compelled speech,” O’Boyle told The Associated Press. Victoria Hinks’ 16-year-old daughter, Alexandra, died by suicide four months ago after being “led down dark rabbit holes” on social media that glamorized eating disorders and self-harm. Hinks said the labels would help protect children from companies that turn a blind eye to the harm caused to children’s mental health when they become addicted to social media platforms. “There’s not a bone in my body that doubts social media played a role in leading her to that final, irreversible decision,” Hinks said. “This could be your story.” Common Sense Media, a sponsor of the bill, said it plans to lobby for similar proposals in other states. California in the past decade has positioned itself as a leader in regulating and fighting the tech industry to bolster online safety for children. The state was the first in 2022 to bar online platforms from using users’ personal information in ways that could harm children. It was one of the states that sued Meta in 2023 and TikTok in October for deliberately designing addictive features that keep kids hooked on their platforms. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, also signed several bills in September to help curb the effects of social media on children, including one to prohibit social media platforms from knowingly providing addictive feeds to children without parental consent and one to limit or ban students from using smartphones on school campus. Federal lawmakers have held hearings on child online safety and legislation is in the works to force companies to take reasonable steps to prevent harm. The legislation has the support of X owner Elon Musk and the President-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr . Still, the last federal law aimed at protecting children online was enacted in 1998, six years before Facebook’s founding.
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