Half of U.S. farmworkers — a million people or more, by some estimates — are believed to be undocumented. Democratic lawmakers from the House and Senate unveiled bills on Thursday to give them “blue card” status to work legally in the United States and gain the chance to become permanent residents, with an eventual path to citizenship.

Although a similar proposal died during the last session of Congress, Democrats now control the House. Republican lawmakers, for their part, have focused on overhauling an agricultural guestworker program. President Trump, who advocates deporting undocumented immigrants, told the largest U.S. farm group on Monday that “I’m going to make it easier” for farmworkers to enter the country, though he provided no details. The administration said last May that it would modernize the H-2A visa for seasonal farmworkers.

Agricultural employers say it is vital to have a legal and reliable workforce, which could require the reform of agricultural visas for short-term laborers and the adjustment of legal status for undocumented workers already in the country. Congress has been unable to agree on either of those steps. Demands for border control often overwhelm attempts at immigration reform.

The bills sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, both from California, would allow undocumented farmworkers to apply for a blue card if they have worked in agriculture for at least 100 days in the past two years, pay any fines and processing fees, and pass a law enforcement check. After three to five years, they could adjust to permanent resident status, the “green card.”

“Farmworker communities across the country are living and working in fear due to President Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant enforcement and deportation agenda,” said Lofgren. Feinstein said, “We must protect the families who help put food on our tables.”

A dozen senators and five dozen representatives, including House Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler of New York and House Rules chairman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, were cosponsors of the bills. Feinstein is the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The first stop for the bills would be the Judiciary committees, which have jurisdiction over U.S. laws.

Workers in all types of agricultural sectors, from growing crops, tending livestock, and lumbering to packaging and processing raw commodities, would be eligible for blue cards. Cardholders could seek permanent resident status after three years if they work at least 150 days — five months — annually. If they work at least 100 days a year for five years, they could apply for a green card.

The United Farm Workers and the advocacy group Farmworker Justice support the bill. The Western Growers Association, representing fruit and vegetable farmers, welcomed attention on the shortage of farm labor. “Solving the immigration crisis is a priority and necessity for the agricultural industry, and we need legislation that will create a new guestworker visa program and provide a workable path to legalization for our existing workforce and their families,” said its chief executive, Tom Nassif.

https://thefern.org/ag_insider/powerhouse-democrats-propose-blue-card-for-undocumented-farmworkers/

From 2009, been at it a long time. Pay to Play

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moves in a rarefied world of high society and high-level politics — and nothing underscores that fact quite like her plans for the August recess.

Pelosi will spend next weekend quietly tending to top party donors and political allies at a series of private events in Northern California.

The two-day “issues conference” starts next Friday night with a dinner for roughly 170 guests on the back lawn of Pelosi’s multimillion-dollar home in the fashionable Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco.

The following day, Pelosi will shepherd her guests to a Napa Valley winery with buildings designed by world-famous architect Frank Gehry; the speaker and her husband, investor Paul Pelosi, own a nearby vineyard worth between $5 million and $25 million, according to her annual financial disclosure report.

There’s nothing unusual about leaders using recess to fund- and friend-raise. Before leaving town last week, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor raked in $1.1 million for fellow Republicans at a lobbyist-heavy fundraiser on Capitol Hill.

And Pelosi’s staff notes that her California session will involve more than just schmoozing with the wealthy and well-connected. The speaker will lead policy discussions on health care, energy reform and the economy, among other topics. Scheduled to speak are Obama adviser David Axelrod, CNN commentator and former Clinton adviser James Carville and Mark Zandi, an economic adviser to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign who has been providing advice to the Obama White House.

More than a dozen other House Democrats will be in attendance, too, including Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, a key player on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee; Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller of California, Pelosi’s closest ally in the House; Xavier Becerra of California, vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus; and Joseph Crowley of New York and Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, two up-and-coming Democrats who have previously found themselves in Pelosi’s doghouse but are moving to get back into her good graces.

The weekend event is technically not a fundraiser. In the parlance of fundraising pros, it’s known as “donor maintenance,” a “thank you” from Pelosi to those who have given generously to her and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. To be invited, one must have raised money for the DCCC, been a longtime friend of Pelosi’s or contributed $30,4000 to the DCCC this cycle. The maximum an individual may give to a national party committee in any one year.

A donation to the DCCC of that size qualifies a donor to be part of the “Speaker’s Cabinet,” a fundraising program that gives supporters expanded access to Pelosi. In addition to the annual Napa weekend, Pelosi also will personally provide at least one more private briefing for these maxed-out donors.

According to campaign reports filed by the DCCC, at least 170 individuals, as well as a handful of Native American tribes, reached that maximum donation threshold as of June 30. San Francisco and Bay Area bigwigs are prominent among the collection of big DCCC supporters, including Ann Getty Earhart, an heiress to the Getty oil fortune; Elizabeth Fisher, whose in-laws founded The Gap, the retail clothing giant; and Eugene Eidenberg, a former Carter White House staffer who is now a San Francisco venture capitalist. Paul Pelosi owns up to $50,000 in stock in the investment firm that Eidenberg helped co-found, Granite Ventures, according to Pelosi’s annual disclosure report.

https://www.politico.com/story/2009/08/pelosis-plan-wine-dine-big-donors-025859

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has reportedly raised $25.9 million in 2017 through hosting 124 lavish fundraising galas across the country to boost the campaign coffers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Herein lies the primary reason she has kept her leadership position despite her unpopularity with voters and even her own colleagues, who have lost faith in her ability to lead. In a recent survey of 20 House Democratic candidates, only one would vocally support Pelosi. This survey comes just weeks after several congressmen spoke out about the need for leadership change. “President Putin probably has a better approval rating in Georgia than Nancy Pelosi,” said David Kim, a candidate in Georgia’s Seventh Congressional District, in an interview with McClatchyDC.

Since the 2016 election, Pelosi has made several gaffes and contradicted the Democratic Party’s messaging as she fights to preserve the party establishment’s status quo.

In December 2016, she reduced calls for reform by saying in an interview, “I don’t think Democrats want a new direction.”

During a CNN town hall in February 2017, she condescendingly told a millennial who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, “We’re capitalists, that’s just the way it is,” in response to a question about why Democrats don’t embrace Sanders’ policies. She went on to explain that Democrats should strive for compassionate capitalism.

After Georgia special congressional election candidate Jon Ossoff lost partially due to Republicans aligning him with Pelosi, several Democrats began speaking out about the need for change in party leadership. Pelosi’s abrasiveness toward progressives and Sanders supporters inspired a primary challenger, Stephen Jaffe, to face her in the 2018 Democratic primaries.

Recently, Pelosi’s obliviousness to the party’s problems have been even more apparent than usual. She essentially reduced the Democrats’ new platform and Better Deal slogan to a marketing campaign when she said the change is “not a course correction but a presentation correction.”

On July 30, she told Fox News that she is “a master legislator.” Her actions and rhetoric demonstrate that she favors maintaining her own political power and that of the Democratic establishment over entertaining the possibility that her poor leadership has been poisoning the party. “We have unity in our own party. You saw it with the fight on the Affordable Care Act in the House and in the Senate,” Pelosi insisted.

The only unity Pelosi has been able to achieve is with the party’s donors. In November 2016, she attended a closed door conference with donors to perform an autopsy of the 2016 election. In 2017, she has used her super PAC, the Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund, to raise money for herself and the DCCC. The fund is similar in structure to Hillary Clinton’s controversial Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee with the DNC, which Politico reported was used to essentially launder money to the Clinton campaign. So far this year, about $1.2 million has passed through the Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund. Another committee, Nancy Pelosi for Congress, has received over $1.2 million in campaign contributions in 2017. Her leadership PAC, called PAC to the Future, has received over $300,000 so far this year, including $2,500 from Blue Cross/Blue Shield’s super PAC.

The Washington Post reported that Pelosi racked up million-dollar fundraising hauls at “a trio of ‘Speaker’s Cabinet’ VIP events this year in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.” Some of the top donors listed donations of $16,200 each via employees from the investment bank Moelis & Company, private venture capital firm Ambex Venture Partners, Regis Management Investment Advising Firm, Klein Financial, Francisco Partners Private Equity Firm and DFJ Venture Capital. Max contributors and Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund donors include DNC Treasurer William Derrough, lobbyist Michael Berman, oil tycoon heirs Gordon and Ann Getty, former Bill Clinton adviser Tom Werner, billionaire George Marcus and former White House Press Secretary under Obama and now Amazon Senior VP James Carney.

The fact that Nancy Pelosi, one of the top Democratic Party leaders, is courting donors in the same manner that has poisoned the Democratic Party’s reputation confirms that Democrats have learned nothing from their losses. Instead of revamping the party through grassroots organizing and fundraising, Pelosi travels the country with billionaires and corporate executives. Nothing in the Democratic Party will ever change until politicians who prefers donors over voters are removed from leadership roles.

https://observer.com/2017/08/democratic-party-nancy-pelosi-victory-fund/