Romney: Obama immigration policy impedes permanent citizenship

MILFORD, N.H.—Mitt Romney said he believes President Obama's decision to allow as many as 800,000 young illegal immigrants to apply for work permits and temporary legal status will ultimately make it harder for immigrants to gain permanent citizenship.

Making a short statement to reporters after a campaign event here, Romney said he believes Obama's executive order is merely a temporary fix.

"I believe the status of young people who came here through no fault of their own is an important matter to be considered and resolved on a long term basis so that they know what their future will be in this country," Romney said. "I think the actions the president took today make it more difficult to reach a long term solution because an executive order is, of course, just a short term matter than can be reversed by subsequent presidents."

Romney, who spoke to reporters for just over a minute, said he "agrees" with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has called for a "long-term solution," and vowed, if elected, to offer "clarity" to immigrants who came here through "no fault of their own" but by their parents' action.

Romney ignored shouted questions from reporters, who asked if he would roll back Obama's policy if elected or if he views his Democratic opponents as motivated by politics.

The Republican nominee's statement came after reporters repeatedly pressed the campaign for a reaction to Obama's news. His campaign initially offered no reaction and suggested Romney would remain silent on the issue. But the candidate had a change of heart after today's second stop on his bus tour, offering a brief statement to his traveling press corps.

Romney immediately walked away from the microphone when he was done making his remarks, but didn't enjoy an immediate escape. As reporters shouted questions, the Republican nominee fumbled with the door of his campaign bus, but he was locked out. Aides immediately rushed to knock on the door to alert his driver to allow the candidate back in, as his staff awkwardly laughed.

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Netflix's unlimited employee vacation policy; why it works

Netflix employees have one less things to keep track of: the amount of vacation days they take. Co-founder Reed Hastings recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that Netflix has an unlimited vacation policy.

In an effort to separate itself from bureaucratic corporations, Netflix, with its 900 employees, abandoned the typical vacation allotment to opt for a sky's-the-limit plan. Keeping vacation unlimited, said Hastings, requires mature, responsible employees who care about high-quality work.

[More from Mashable: Millions of Americans Cut the TV Cord [STUDY]]

Netflix has a "freedom and responsibility culture," Hastings told the publication in an article entitled, "How To Set Your Employees Free." Hastings said Netflix gauges success by focusing on what employees get done, not on how many days they worked. The CEO does make sure to be a good role model and takes vacations, where he can do some creative thinking.

Hasting explained how the idea evolved: "My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures. We thought that was a good thing, but it killed freedom and responsibility. After the company was acquired, I reflected on what went wrong."

[More from Mashable: IBM’s Big Data Challenge: A Telescope That Generates More Data Than the Whole Internet]

The pressure to hang onto one's job in a bad economy, and smaller staffs at some organizations, have caused many workers to push themselves to burnout mode. Now, it seems, there may be a growing focus on employees regaining a work-life balance.

SEE ALSO: Sheryl Sandberg Leaves Work at 5:30 Every Day — And You Should Too

Netflix isn't the only company that has jumped on the all-you-want vacation bandwagon. IBM has a famously flexible time-off policy -- letting employees leave early and take a day off on short notice, just so long as they have a handle on their workloads. Numerous startups and innovative companies working in the tech space are beginning to see the benefits of ditching vacation limits and promoting personal responsibility.

What do you think about unlimited vacation policies? Does your employers offer a flexible or unlimited vacation policy? Tell us in the comments.

?Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Crisma?

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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W.H.: N Korea policy 'absolutely not' a failure

The White House denied Friday that North Korea's rocket launch showed that President Barack Obama's efforts to engage the isolated country's secretive Stalinist regime had been a failure.

"Absolutely not," Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama headed from Washington to Florida, on his way to a summit in Colombia.

Mitt Romney said Thursday that the rocket launch, which Washington said was actually an attempt to test an intercontinental ballistic missile, reflected Obama's "incompetence" in dealing with the North Korean regime. Romney accused the president of having "emboldened the North Korean regime and undermined the security of the United States and our allies."

"First of all, what this administration has done is broken the cycle of rewarding provocative actions by the North Koreans that we've seen in the past," Rhodes countered, arguing that President George W. Bush had provided "a substantial amount of assistance" to the Hermit Kingdom and noting that Bush had removed Pyongyang from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

"Under our administration we have not provided any assistance to North Korea," Rhodes said, adding that the Obama administration had imposed "unprecedented sanctions" on the isolated regime and made clear to that it would lose planned food aid if it went ahead with the launch. White House officials said late Thursday that the food aid was now on hold.

"We have not provided them with any assistance, and it's impossible to see how we can move forward with the February agreement given the action that they've taken," Rhodes said.

Rhodes said the United States will now press the United Nations Security Council for "a universal message of condemnation from the international community" over the launch, which failed when the rocket broke up and fell back to earth shortly after lift-off.

"They have to understand that they will only deepen their isolation by going down this road," he added.

Amid concerns that North Korea may be looking to conduct a nuclear test, Rhodes warned that "if they continue to take additional provocative actions, we, of course, have to continue to look at ways in which we could tighten sanctions on the North Koreans and take additional steps to apply pressure on the regime."

Asked whether scrapping food aid amounted to punishing the starvation-hit North Korean people for the actions of their government, Rhodes said, "It's the North Korean government that is holding its own people hostage because, frankly, we can't trust them to implement an agreement and to make sure that the assistance gets to those who need it."

He went on to say, "They have an economy that is desperately in need of integration with the world and that they have people, again, who would be far better off if the government spent their resources on investing in North Korean citizenry and not on these types of technologies."

Update, 5:28 p.m. ET: This post was changed to clarify that Rhodes spoke while Air Force One was en route from Washington to Florida.

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Summary Box: Sallie Mae changes policy on loan fee (AP)

THE NEWS: Private student lender Sallie Mae is changing how it handles a fee that struggling borrowers must pay to temporarily suspend payments.

THE BACKGROUND: A three-month reprieve on payments comes with a $50 fee that Sallie Mae previously did not apply to the loan balance. Now Sallie Mae says it will credit the money toward the loan if borrowers resume on-time payments for six months straight.

WHY NOW: A petition on Change.org asking the company to drop the fee had more than 77,000 signatures as of Thursday. The company said that confirmed its thinking that a change was needed.

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