The Senate isn’t doing anything to
stop Obama’s plans — thank the plutocrats.
(National Review) – Earlier this week I spoke about the
president’s promise that he would issue an executive amnesty to 5 or 6 million
people. The planned amnesty would include work permits, photo IDs, and Social
Security numbers for millions of people who illegally entered the U.S.,
illegally overstayed their visas, or defrauded U.S. immigration authorities.
The Senate Democratic conference has supported and enabled
the president’s unlawful actions and blocked every effort to stop them. Not
even one of our Democratic colleagues has backed the House legislation that
would stop this planned executive amnesty or demanded that Senator Reid bring
it up for a vote. Every Senate Democrat is therefore the president’s partner in
his planned lawless acts.
Tonight I would like to talk about the influence of special
interests on our nation’s immigration system. How did we get to the point where
elected officials, activist groups, the ACLU, and global CEOs are openly
working to deny American workers the immigration protections to which they are
legally entitled? How did we get to the point where the Democratic party is
prepared to nullify and wipe away the immigration laws of the United States of
America?
Just yesterday Majority Leader Reid wrote in a tweet
something that was shocking. He said: “Since House Republicans have failed
to act on immigration, I know the President will. When he does, I hope he goes
Real Big.”
Let this sink in for a moment. The majority leader of the
Senate is bragging that he knows the president will circumvent Congress to
issue executive amnesty to millions, and he is encouraging the president to
ensure this amnesty includes as many people as possible. And the White House
has acknowledged that 5 to 6 million is the number they are looking at.
Has one Senate Democrat stepped forward to reject Mr. Reid’s
statement? Has one Senate Democrat stepped forward to say: I support the
legislation passed by the House of Representatives that would secure the border
and block this executive amnesty? Have they ever said they support that? Have
they ever said: I will do everything in my power to see that the House
legislation gets a vote in the Senate so the American people can know what is
going on? No. All we hear is silence.
This body is not run by one man. We don’t have a dictator in
the great Senate. Every member has a vote. And the only way Senator Reid can
succeed in blocking this Senate from voting to stop the president’s executive
actions is for members to stop supporting him.
Every senator needs to stand up and represent their
constituents — not big business, not the ACLU, not activist groups, not political
interests, but the American interests, the workers’ interests. That is what we
need to expect from them, and we don’t have but a few weeks, it looks like, to
get it done.
In effect, the entire Senate Democratic conference has
surrendered the jobs, wages, and livelihoods of their constituents to a group
of special interests meeting in secret at the White House. They are
surrendering them to executive actions that will foist on the nation what
Congress has refused to pass and the American people have rejected. They are
plotting at the White House to move forward with executive action no matter
what the people think and no matter what Congress — through the people’s House
— has decided.
Politico reports
that “White House officials conducted more than 20 meetings in July and August
with legal experts, immigration advocates and business leaders to gather ideas
on what should be included in the order.”
So who are these so-called expert advocates and business
leaders? They are not the law-enforcement officers; they are not our ICE
officers; they are not our Border Patrol officers; they are not the American
working man and woman; they are not unemployed Americans. They weren’t
in the room. You can be sure of that. Their opinions weren’t sought.
No, White House officials are meeting with the world’s most
powerful corporate and immigration lobbyists and activists who think border
controls are for the little people. The administration is meeting with the
elite, the cosmopolitan set, who scorn and mock the concerns of everyday
Americans who are concerned about their schools, jobs, wages, communities, and
hospitals. These great and powerful citizens of the world don’t care much about
old-fashioned things like national boundaries, national sovereignty, and
immigration control — let alone the constitutional separation of powers.
Well, don’t you get it? They believe they are always
supposed to get whatever it is they want. They are used to that. They spent
hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, one report says they have spent $1.5
billion since 2007 trying to pass their desired immigration bill — $1.5
billion. They tried and tried and tried to pass the bill through Congress, but
the American people said: No, no, no. So they decided to just go to the
president. They decide to go to President Obama, and they insist that he
implement these measures through executive fiat. And Senate Democrats have
apparently said: Well, that is just a wonderful idea. We support that. Just do
it. Go big. But, Mr. President, wait a little bit. Wait until after the
election. We don’t want the voters to hold us accountable for what you are
doing. We want to pretend we in the Senate have nothing to do with it.
One of the groups that have joined the chorus of special
interests demanding executive action on immigration is FWD.us, run by Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He just turned 30, and I understand he is worth about $30
billion.
Mr. Zuckerberg has been very busy recently. One of his
fellow billionaires, Mr. Carlos Slim — maybe the world’s richest man — invited
Mr. Zuckerberg down to Mexico City to give a speech. What did Mr. Zuckerberg
promote in his speech? Well, this is a report of it.
I guess I will first note that young Mr. Zuckerberg maybe
doesn’t know there is a deep American tradition — a tradition in most developed
nations — that you don’t go to a foreign capital to criticize your own
government. I suppose he doesn’t know about that. They probably didn’t teach
him about that when he was at one of the elite schools he attended.
This is what he said in Mexico City: “We have a strange
immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for
today’s world.”
Well, the “masters of the universe” are very fond of open
borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and
fenced-off estates.
I have another article from late last fall that
was printed in Business Insider about Mr. Zuckerberg’s
actions. The headline is “Mark Zuckerberg Just Spent More than $30 Million
Buying 4 Neighboring Houses for Privacy.” The article says:
Mark
Zuckerberg just made an unusual purchase. Well, four purchases. Facebook’s
billionaire founder bought four homes surrounding his current home near Palo
Alto, Mercury News Reports. The houses cost him more than $30
million, including one 2,600 square-foot home that cost $14 million. (His own
home is twice as large at 5,000 square-feet and cost half as much.) Larry Page
made a similar move a few years ago so he could build a 6,000-square-foot
mansion. But Zuckerberg’s reason is different. He doesn’t want to live in
excess, he just wants a little privacy.
That is a world the average American doesn’t live in.
So Mr. Zuckerberg — who has become the top spokesman for
expanding the admission of foreign workers — championed the Senate immigration
bill for which all of our Democratic colleagues voted. One of the things the
bill did was double the supply of low-wage foreign workers brought into the
United States for companies such as Facebook.
Many of us have heard for a long time the claim that there
is a shortage of STEM and IT workers. This has been the central sales pitch
used by those making demands for massive increases in foreign-worker programs
across the board — programs that bring in workers for every sector in the U.S.
economy. But we know otherwise from the nation’s leading academics, people who
studied this issue and are professionals in it. I have a recent op-ed here
from USA Today which reports that there is actually not a
shortage but a surplus of Americans who have been trained in
the STEM and IT fields and that this is why wages for these fields have not
increased since 1999.
If you have a shortage of workers in a field such as
information technology or science and mathematics, wages go up, do they not? If
wages are not up, we don’t have a shortage.
So rich high-tech companies are using the H-1B visa program
to keep wages down and to hire less expensive workers from abroad. Indeed, the
same companies demanding more guest workers are laying off American workers in
droves.
I would like to read some excerpts from that
op-ed published in USA Today. The article was co-authored by
five of the nation’s experts on labor markets and the guest-worker program. I
think it tells a story that has not been refuted. We have partisans and advocates
who have been claiming there is a shortage in these fields, but the experts say
no. And since they have been speaking out on this issue, we have seen no real
data that would dispute what they say in this article dated July 27, 2014.
Headline: “Bill Gates’ tech worker fantasy.” Sub-headline:
“Silicon Valley has created an imaginary staffing shortage.”
Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that
there is a “shortage” of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more
high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology,
engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and
Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Yet
within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one
in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to
downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs.
The five writers of this article — referring to themselves —
go on to say:
None
of us have been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s
assertions of labor shortages.
The article was written by Ron Hira, Paula Stephan, Hal
Salzman, Michael Teitelbaum, who has recently written a book on this subject,
and Norm Matloff. These are labor-economics experts who have studied these
issues for years. Many of them have testified before Congress. They say:
None
of us have been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s
assertions of labor shortages.
What a statement that is.
They go on to write — they all signed this article together
— that:
If
a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies try to attract scarce
workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the
1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers
have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields.
The “predominant source of new hires” in
information-technology fields is guest-worker programs from abroad.
They go on to say:
Those
supporting even greater expansion seem to have forgotten about the hundreds and
thousands of American high-tech workers who are being shortchanged — by wages
stuck at 1998 levels, by diminished career prospects and by repeated rounds of
layoffs.
They go on to say:
There
is an ample supply of American workers who are willing and qualified to fill
high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether the
supply is two or three times larger than the demand.
There is no doubt we have a surplus of IT workers. The question
is whether the supply is two or three times as big as the number of job
openings.
They go on to say:
Unfortunately,
companies are exploiting the large existing flow of guest workers to deny
American workers access to STEM careers and middle-class security that should
come with them. Imagine, then, how many more Americans would be frozen out of
the middle class if politicians and tech moguls succeeded in doubling or
tripling the flow of guest workers into STEM occupations.
That is exactly what the bill before this Senate — the bill
the House of Representatives rejected — would have done. It would have doubled
the number of guest workers coming into America just to take jobs — coming in
for the very purpose of taking a job that we need Americans to be taking.
The article goes on: “Another major, yet often overlooked,
provision in the pending legislation” — that is the bill President Obama is
pushing for, the Gang of Eight bill — “would grant automatic green cards to any
foreign student who earns a graduate degree in a STEM field, based on
assertions that foreign graduates of U.S. universities are routinely being
forced to leave. Such claims are incompatible with the evidence that such
graduates have many paths to stay and work, and indeed the ‘stay rates’ for
visiting international students are very high and have shown no sign of
decline. The most recent study finds that 92 percent of Chinese Ph.D. students
stay in America to work after graduation.”
So there is this myth that we have thousands and thousands
of students graduating from schools and being sent home. That is not accurate,
according to the experts who study the data.
The article continues:
The
tech industry’s promotion of expanded temporary visas (such as the H-1B) and
green cards is driven by a desire for cheap, young and immobile labor. It is
well documented that loopholes enable firms to legally pay H-1Bs below their
market value and to continue the widespread age discrimination acknowledged by
many in the tech industry.
I talked to a gentleman whom I knew a little bit who worked
at a computer company. He is well into his 40s, maybe close to 50. I asked him
what kind of security there is. He said, well, in the tech industry these
companies go and fall. I said, what happens if you were to lose your job? He
said, at my age, it would be very difficult.
The USA Today op-ed concludes by saying:
IT
industry leaders have spent lavishly on lobbying to promote their STEM shortage
claims among legislators. The only problem is that the evidence contradicts
their self-interested claims.
So I would pose a question to Mr. Zuckerberg. I read in the
news that Facebook is now worth more than $200 billion. Is that not enough
money to hire American workers for a change? Your company now employs roughly
7,000 people. Let’s say you want to expand your workforce 10 percent, or hire
another 700 workers. Are you claiming you can’t find 700 Americans who would
take these jobs if you paid a good wage and decent benefits?
Let me just say one more thing: Facebook has 7,000 workers.
Microsoft just laid off 18,000. Why doesn’t Mr. Zuckerberg call his friend Mr.
Gates and say: Look, I have to hire a few hundred people; do you have any
résumés you can send over here? Maybe I will not have to take somebody from a
foreign country for a job an unemployed U.S. citizen might take.
There is this myth that we have surging employment in the
high-tech industry.
As Byron York reported, Hewlett-Packard, a high-tech
company, “laid off 29,000 employees in 2012” — 29,000. “In August of 2013, Cisco
announced plans to lay off 4,000 workers in addition to the 8,000 cut in the
last 2 years,” and Cisco was right in the White House this summer with a group
of other companies demanding more workers from abroad. Cisco was signing a
letter with a bunch of other companies: “United Technologies has announced
3,000 layoffs this year”; “American Express cut 5,400 jobs”; “Procter and
Gamble announced 5,700 jobs cut in 2012”; “T-Mobile announced plans to lay off
2,250 employees in 2012.”
“According to a recent Reuters report,” York writes, overall
“U.S. employers announced 50,000 layoffs in August of 2013, up 34 percent from
the previous month, then up 57 percent through August 2012.”
There is no shortage of workers.
But FWD.us and other immigration lobbyists are working with
the White House to extract executive orders from the president that provide
them with the same financial benefits that were included in the Senate bill
that was rejected by the House of Representatives. One proposal would increase
by as much as 800,000 the number of foreign workers admitted for the explicit
purpose of taking jobs in the United States.
A recent Associated Press article, entitled
“Obama Weighs Broader Move on Legal Immigration” reports that “President Barack
Obama is considering key changes in the nation’s immigration system requested
by tech, industry and powerful interest groups.” Not by the American people was
he being requested to do this, not by the national interest, but by “powerful
interest groups” that are referred to here.
It goes on to say:
After
recent White House meetings, top officials have compiled specific
recommendations from business groups and other advocates.
“Other advocates.” Who are they? We know the ACLU has been
there. We know La Raza has been meeting there on a regular basis. It goes on.
The article says:
One
of the more popular requests is a change in the way green cards are counted
that would essentially free up some 800,000 additional visas the first year,
advocates say. . . . Other requests would extend work
permits to the spouses of all temporary H-1B skilled workers who have not been
able to work.
But how about the fact that a single mom might like that
job? An unemployed single mom or a single mom who has a job prospect that would
pay $3 more than the job she is now working while trying to raise a family? Or
an unemployed father? Maybe they would like those jobs first.
So these actions fall on the heels of previous executive
action in which the president already acted unilaterally earlier this year to
grant companies an additional 100,000 guest workers. He has already done that.
In just the first year of this order, it adds 100,000 guest workers by
providing work authorizations to the foreign spouses of temporary guest
workers. It would increase the supply of guest workers by approximately 30,000
each year thereafter — this at a time when we have 58 million working-age
Americans who are not working. Since 2009 the number of adults has increased by
13 million, while the number of people actually working has decreased by 7
million.
Median household income has dropped $2,300 since 2009.
According to the National Employment Law Project, wages are down across all
occupations.
A CBS report titled “Why American workers feel increasingly
poor” writes of the NELP’s study:
Real
median hourly wages have declined across low, middle and high income levels
from 2009 to 2013, the study found. No matter if workers were in the lowest
bracket ($8.84 to $10.85 an hour) or the highest ($31.40 to $86.34) median
hourly wages declined when you take into account the impact of inflation.
It goes on: “Across all occupations, real median hourly
wages slipped 3.4 percent since 2009. While even better-paid workers saw median
hourly earnings erode, the worst hit segments were at the bottom” — the people
who got hurt the most were at the bottom — “with declines in their wages of
more than 4 percent.”
We have business CEOs, lobbyists, activists, immigration
groups, and clever politicians who demand that we have to have even more
workers brought into America even when we have a decline in wages and a decline
in jobs. But what does the president do? His administration issues an executive
order to provide foreign spouses — the citizens of other countries, not
American citizens — with 100,000 jobs in the United States, precious jobs that
many Americans would love to have. How many American spouses struggling to
support their families would benefit from one of those jobs? How many single
moms would benefit from a chance to earn a better paycheck?
Our Senate Democratic friends talk about paycheck fairness
repeatedly. Yet they are supporting policies that take jobs and wages directly
from American women by the millions.
Immigration policy is supposed to serve the national
interest and the people of the United States, not the interests of a few
activist CEOs and the politicians who are catering to them. We have had 40
years of mass immigration combined with falling wages, a shrinking workplace,
and exploding welfare rolls. We know that, don’t we, friends and colleagues? It
is time for a shift in emphasis. It is time to get our own people back to work,
and our communities out of poverty, and our schools back on their feet.
Harvard professor Dr. George Borjas — who is probably the
leading academic in this entire area and has been for many years — estimates
that our current immigration rate results in an annual loss of more than $400
billion in wages for Americans competing with immigrant labor. Between 2000 and
today the government issued nearly 30 million visas to temporary foreign
workers and permanent immigrants, largely lower-skilled and lower-wage.
A recent Reuters poll showed that Americans wish to see the
record rate of immigrant admissions reduced, not increased (as the Gang of
Eight bill would have done), by a huge 3-to-1 margin.
Another poll from pollster Kellyanne Conway recently showed
that 80 percent of Americans think companies should hire from among the
existing unemployed rather than bringing in new workers from abroad to fill
these jobs. Yet Senate Democrats have unanimously supported legislation to
double the annual supply of labor brought into the United States. These workers
would be brought in to take jobs in every field, occupation, and industry in
America.
So what about the good, decent, and patriotic citizens of
our country who fight our wars, who obey our laws, who follow our rules, and
want a better future for their children? Should their needs not come first?
As National Review explained, we are “a nation
with an economy, not an economy with a nation.” We cannot put the parochial
demands of a few powerful CEOs ahead of an entire nation’s hopes, dreams, and
aspirations.
The basic social contract is that citizens agree to follow
the law, pay their taxes, and devote their love and loyalty to their country,
and in exchange the nation commits to preserve and protect and serve their
interests, safeguard their freedom, and return to them in kind their first
allegiance and loyalty.
The job of elected officials is to answer to the people who
sent them to Washington — not to scorn them, not to demean them, not to mock
them, and not to sell their jobs and dreams to the highest bidder.
I yield the floor.
Source: http://www.teaparty.org/sessions-dont-give-masters-universe-amnesty-54961/ September 11, 2014
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/387726/print
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