With help from Andrew Hanna, Ian Kullgren and Timothy Noah

DACA NEGOTIATIONS HEAT UP: Top Republican and Democratic lawmakers head to the White House Wednesday to discuss a long-term spending bill and a possible immigration deal that could provide protections for DACA enrollees, POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney reports. Before it left town for the holidays, Congress passed a stopgap funding bill that keeps the government running until Jan. 19. That bought negotiators a few more weeks to discuss a deal. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will attend the White House meeting.

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“The meeting … was initially expected to include President Donald Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly,” Cheney reports, “but a White House spokesman said legislative affairs director Marc Short and budget director Mick Mulvaney would represent the president.” Trump set forth his DACA demands on Twitter last week, but it’s possible the administration has more. “The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc.,” Trump tweeted Dec. 29. “We must protect our Country at all cost!”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) are crafting legislation that would offer protections to DACA enrollees. Flake signaled last week that he’ll press Trump to give the bill serious consideration. “We can fix DACA in a way that beefs up border security, stops chain migration for the DREAMers, and addresses the unfairness of the diversity lottery,” Flake tweeted after Trump spelled out his demands. “If POTUS wants to protect these kids, we want to help him keep that promise.”

Of course, any fix will need to pass the House, too. POLITICO Playbook reported that a group of key House Republicans visited the Oval Office on Dec. 19 to discuss DACA with Trump. The attendees included House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (Texas), Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (Va.), Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (N.C.), Rep. Raúl Labrador (Idaho) and Rep. Martha McSally (Ariz.). Negotiations could move quickly: According to Playbook, some congressional Republicans would prefer to tackle the issue in early January to control the terms of the debate. More from POLITICO’s Cheney here and Playbook here.

WELCOME BACK! It's Tuesday, Jan. 2, and this is Morning Shift, POLITICO's daily tipsheet on employment and immigration policy. Send tips, exclusives and suggestions to thesson@politico.com, ikullgren@politico.com, ahanna@politico.com and tnoah@politico.com. Follow us on Twitter at @tedhesson, @AndrewBHanna, @IanKullgren and @TimothyNoah1.

TODAY: ACOSTA TO MEET WITH TRUMP, PENCE: Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta will meet President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence at the White House for a 12:30 p.m. lunch, according to a White House schedule released Monday night. The Labor Department and White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

2018 WATCH LIST: Here’s what we at Morning Shift have our eyes on in the new year:

NLRB: The board now has an even split — two Republicans and two Democrats —pending nomination of a replacement for Republican Philip Miscimarra, whose term expired in December. Trump reportedly plans to nominate management-side attorney John Ring to fill the board’s fifth spot. Bloomberg Law reported in late November that Ring was going through a final background check.

Following several big decisions at the end of the year on joint employment and so-called micro unions, the pace will slow down until Miscimarra’s replacement is confirmed. The president tapped Marvin Kaplan to succeed Miscimarra as board chairman on Dec. 22, just hours after Kaplan was named acting chairman.

Nominations: The start of a new year means President Trump must re-submit nominations for several key Labor Department posts. A nomination can be carried over from one Senate sessions to the next, but that requires unanimous consent, which means a single senator can block it. From Bloomberg BNA’s Tyrone Richardson: “Trump will have to renominate Patrick Pizzella for DOL deputy secretary; Scott Mugno for DOL assistant secretary, Occupational Safety and Health Administration; William Beach for Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner; and Cheryl Stanton for Wage & Hour Division administrator.” Some DOL nominations will carry over, including Chai Feldblum and Daniel Gade as commissioners for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Janet Dhillon as chairwoman. More from BNA here.

In the Homeland Security Department, Trump must renominate acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, assuming the White House still wants him to take the job permanently. McAleenan, an Obama administration holdover, was nominated in March and cleared the Senate Finance Committee in December with little opposition. Two other nominations for top DHS positions were carried over into 2018: Thomas Homan, for permanent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, and John Mitnick, for DHS general counsel.

TPS for El Salvador: The Homeland Security Department faces a Jan. 8 deadline to decide whether to renew temporary protected status for roughly 263,000 Salvadorans — 60 percent of the total from all nations covered under TPS. The program allows people from a country that suffers a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other extraordinary event to remain in the United States and work legally, but the Trump administration has signaled that renewals, once routine, will be much harder to get. So far, DHS has moved to phase out protections for Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Sudanese covered by the program. El Salvador was granted TPS in 2001 after a series of powerful earthquakes killed more than 1,000 people. Newsday’s Víctor Manuel Ramos captured the reactions of some Salvadoran TPS recipients here.

H-1B CRACKDOWN: The Trump administration laid out plans last month to reform aspects of the H-1B visa program, which allows employers to hire specialized foreign workers. The administration’s unified agenda featured proposals to tighten the standards that govern the program; to eliminate a regulation that allows spouses of H-1B visa holder to work; and possibly to alter a lottery to distribute visas. McClatchy’s Franco Ordoñez reports that DHS has considered another big change: halting H-1B visa extensions.

The administration has explored whether it can reinterpret the language of a 2000 immigration law that says the federal government “may grant” the extensions, writes Ordoñez. “The act currently allows the administration to extend the H-1B visas for thousands of immigrants, predominantly Indian immigrants, beyond the allowed two three-year terms if a green card is pending.” Temporary workers from India need to wait as long as 12 years for green cards because of the current backlog of applicants, so ending the extension could leave the H-1B visa holders without a means to remain in the U.S.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials told McClatchy they couldn’t discuss “any part of the pre-decisional processes.” More from McClatchy here.

INFRASTRUCTURE PUSH?: The White House aides and advisors are still divided over what the administration should tackle in 2018, POLITICO’s Eliana Johnson, Annie Karni and Andrew Restuccia report. “At issue: whether to appeal to traditional conservative voters by tackling welfare reform or instead push forward on the president’s long-promised infrastructure plan, which could attract Democratic support and win over a broader slice of the electorate,” the trio write. Regardless, the White House plans to roll out a $1 trillion infrastructure plan this month, a package that could potentially garner support from building trades unions.

But the Trump administration on Friday took off the table what Will Bredderman of Crain’s New York Business calls “perhaps the nation's most crucial infrastructure project”: a multi-billion-dollar Amtrak tunnel between New Jersey and New York’s Pennsylvania Station, the busiest transit hub in the U.S. “The lone existing tunnel is rapidly deteriorating,” Bredderman writes, “threatening to sever Amtrak's popular Northeast Corridor and to divert tens of thousands of New Jerseyans from their daily Manhattan commutes.” The Obama Transportation Department had agreed to provide half the funding for the project, but in a Dec. 29 letter K. Jane Williams, deputy administrator of DOT’s Federal Transit Administration, informed the New York state budget director that “There is no such agreement.” That turnaround may put Democratic support for any infrastructure plan in jeopardy, Bredderman notes, given that the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, is a New Yorker and a party to the earlier 50-50 agreement. More from POLITICO here and from Crain’s New York here. Click here to read Williams’ letter.

MINIMUM WAGE INCREASES: The minimum wage rose in 18 states on Jan. 1. Wage hikes in 10 of those states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, and Vermont) are being phased in over several years. The other eight states (Alaska, Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio and South Dakota) will make automatic adjustments to match a higher cost of living. Read more about the increases in the Wall Street Journal here.

TRAVEL BAN SPARKED ‘CRISIS ACTION TEAM’: “When protests and widespread confusion broke out at airports across the U.S. after [Trump] issued his first travel ban executive order last January, White House officials scoffed at the scenes of turmoil and insisted the president’s plan was smoothly moving into place,” writes POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein. White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, for instance, told CBS the roll-out was “efficient, orderly [and] enormously successful,” brushing aside the idea that it had caused chaos.

“However, [DHS] records obtained by POLITICO reflect confusion on the frontlines about how to implement the order and show that DHS officials deemed the situation a ‘crisis’ requiring a high-level response.” An email sent to senior DHS officials on Jan. 29 said that DHS deployed a “crisis action team” in response to the executive order, which barred the entry of travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations and suspended the refugee resettlement program.

The deployment is just the latest evidence of the rocky rollout. In late November, then-DHS Inspector General John Roth sent a letter to members of Congress that claimed the department was bottling up a report on the confusion that followed the order’s implementation. Read more from Gerstein here.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT UPDATE:

Martins out at NYC Ballet: “After a sexual harassment accusation, followed by allegations of physical and verbal abuse, Peter Martins, the powerful leader of New York City Ballet who shaped the company for more than three decades, has decided to retire, he told the ballet’s board in a letter Monday night,” Robin Pogrebin writes in the New York Times. Martins denied any misconduct in a letter to the board. “I cooperated fully in the investigation and understand it will be completed shortly,” he wrote, according to the Times. “I believe its findings would have vindicated me.” More here.

President Donald Trump and Congress, “not long before a deluge of sexual harassment claims engulfed Capitol Hill,” writes POLITICO’s Ian Kullgren, “quietly repealed safeguards to protect hundreds of thousands of American workers from such harassment. Their target was an Aug. 2016 regulation issued by the Obama Labor Department that required businesses to disclose certain labor violations— including sexual harassment — whenever they bid on large federal contracts.” What businesses denounced as the “blacklist rule” also “forbade businesses with federal contracts in excess of $1 million from requiring that workers, as a condition of employment, forfeit their right to sue the company over claims of sexual harassment or sexual assault.” More here.

Weaponizing #MeToo: “As the #MeToo movement to expose sexual harassment roils the nation’s capital, political partisans are exploiting the moment, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support accusers who come forward with charges against President Trump and members of Congress, even amid questions about their motivation,” writes Kenneth Vogel in the New York Times. More here.

Roberts targets harassment in courts: “Chief Justice John Roberts, in his annual State of the Judiciary report, said Sunday his branch of government will examine the issue of sexual harassment within the judicial system,” POLITICO’s David Cohen reports. Roberts wrote that the judiciary will undertake “a careful evaluation of whether its standards of conduct and its procedures for investigating and correcting inappropriate behavior are adequate to ensure an exemplary workplace for every judge and every court employee." Read more from POLITICO here and the report here.

Hollywood women join forces: “Driven by outrage and a resolve to correct a power imbalance that seemed intractable just months ago, 300 prominent actresses and female agents, writers, directors, producers and entertainment executives have formed an ambitious, sprawling initiative to fight systemic sexual harassment in Hollywood and in blue-collar workplaces nationwide,” Cara Buckley reports in the New York Times. The coalition plans to launch a legal defense fund to protect women with limited financial means against misconduct, among other measures. More here.

BuzzFeed fires Carrasquillo: BuzzFeed fired White House correspondent Adrian Carrasquillo following an internal investigation, Business Insider reported last week. "In responding to a complaint filed last week by an employee, we learned that Adrian violated our Code of Conduct by sending an inappropriate message to a colleague," a BuzzFeed spokesperson told Business Insider. Carrasquillo tweeted about the firing on Dec. 29. “I deeply regret the crass & sexist attempt at a joke that led to my firing from BuzzFeed,” he wrote. “I privately apologized to my colleagues & also want to apologize publicly to friends & colleagues this incident affected. I loved my time at BuzzFeed & wish everyone there continued success.” More here.

WAGES GROW IN SOME CITIES: “In U.S. cities with the tightest labor markets, workers are finding something that’s long been missing from the broader economic expansion: faster-growing paychecks,” write Shayndi Raice and Eric Morath in the Wall Street Journal. “The labor market in places like Minneapolis, Denver and Fort Myers, Fla., where unemployment rates stand near or even below 3 percent, has now tightened to a point where businesses are raising pay to attract employees, often from competitors.”

“It’s an outcome entirely expected in economic theory, but one that’s been largely absent until now in the upturn that began more than eight years ago,” the pair write. “Nationally, wage growth has been stuck in neutral for the past two years, even as the unemployment rate has declined to the lowest level in 17 years.” More here.

TAX LAW COULD FUEL ‘GIG’ TREND: “The new tax law is likely to accelerate a hotly disputed trend in the American economy by rewarding workers who sever formal relationships with their employers and become contractors,” Noam Scheiber reports in the New York Times. “That’s because a provision in the tax law allows sole proprietors — along with owners of partnerships or other so-called pass-through entities — to deduct 20 percent of their revenue from their taxable income.” More here.

BLS WORKER KILLED: A Bureau of Labor Statistics employee was shot and killed with his wife in their Virginia home days before the Christmas holiday, the Washington Post reported. The suspect in the case is the 17-year-old boyfriend of the couple’s daughter. The BLS employee, Scott Fricker, was a senior research psychologist in bureau’s office of survey methods research. He and his wife, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker, had been concerned about the boyfriend’s alleged neo-Nazi ideology, according to family members and friends interviewed by the Post. More here.

BORDER BUCKS: ProPublica and the Texas Tribune told the story last week of Godfrey Garza Jr., a drainage district bureaucrat in the Rio Grande Valley’s Hidalgo County who made millions when the federal government tried to build a border fence there. “A shrewd county insider, Garza ran an obscure agency that had plans to repair 22 miles of crumbling dirt levees running along the Rio Grande, the riverine border between Texas and Mexico,” the outlets reported. ‘Garza helped negotiate a deal: If Homeland Security would pay to fix the levees, the feds could build their fence on top of them.”

“What the federal government didn’t know was that Garza negotiated an unusual contract with county commissioners that earned him 1.5 percent of every dollar the drainage district spent on the levee project — in addition to his six-figure salary,” the outlets write. “In the end, Garza’s personal yield totaled at least $3.5 million, according to county records.” More here.

COFFEE BREAK:

—“Does the white working class really vote against its own interests?” from POLITICO

—“Donald Trump’s jobs promise just about holding up but trouble may lie ahead,” from the Guardian

—“‘I hope I can quit working in a few years’: A preview of the U.S. without pensions,” from the Washington Post

— “Why the new tax bill may drive retailers to hire less, automate more,” from CNBC

— “She imports Trump’s foreign labor. Now she’s running for Congress,” from the Daily Beast

—“Class-action lawsuit alleges immigrants are forced to labor in detention,” from the Los Angeles Times

—“First, this town lost its Macy’s. Then Sears. Now, all eyes were on J.C. Penney,” from the Washington Post

—“Asylum-seekers locked in limbo at backed-up U.S.-Mexico border,” from NPR

—“When picking apples on a farm with 5,000 rules, watch out for the ladders,” from the New York Times

—“We asked 615 men about how they conduct themselves at work,” from the New York Times

THAT’S ALL FOR MORNING SHIFT.