Paul Ryan’s Christmas Warning: American Companies Will Shut Down
without More Foreign Workers
(Breitbart) – In a
Tuesday morning interview with radio host Bill Bennett,Rep. Paul Ryan
(R-WI) defended his omnibus bill’s controversial expansion in the H-2B
visa program, which would allow foreign workers to fill blue-collar American
jobs, by arguing that if the provision were not included, American
companies would be forced to shut their doors.
Bennett pressed Ryan
on the details of the H-2B visa expansion, slipped 700-pages into Ryan’s
2,009-page omnibus spending bill—asking Ryan directly, “Do you believe
there are not enough Americans to fill these jobs?” In response, Ryan
described the H-2B visa expansion as “a very small, discrete provision.”
Despite the
nation’s high levels of unemployment and stagnating wages, Ryan continued
on to assert, without offering evidence in support of his claim,
that corporations are facing a shortage of labor, which rendered the
provision necessary. Ryan said:
The reason that this
was passed is because there was some seasonal surge jobs that they can’t find
local workers to fill, like the seafood packaging industry in Chesapeake Bay.
You have seafood season, you need people to package those things, to can
them. In the North, we have the summer tourism industry. What it is is
there’s seasonal industries where they can’t find local people to do the jobs:
kids are already in college or things like that where you have a surge in
workers.
Ryan explained
that the provision was passed specifically “to help small business who
cannot find labor when there’s a surge in demand for their labor like seafood
processing, or tourism.”
Ryan warned, “The
point is these businesses would have shut down without this and that’s what we
didn’t want to see happen. We didn’t want to see businesses, who are seasonal,
shut down because they couldn’t get the labor. That’s why this provision was
passed in July.”
The data, however,
demonstrates Ryan’s claim to be unsubstantiated. As Sen. Jeff
Sessions (R-AL) has highlighted, the Economic Policy Institute has
documented how, “wages were stagnant or declining for workers in all of the top
15 H-2B occupations between 2004 and 2014.”
Unemployment rates
increased in all but one of the top 15 H-2B occupations between 2004 and 2014,
and all 15 occupations averaged very high unemployment rates… Flat and
declining wages coupled with such high unemployment rates over such a long
period of time suggest a loose labor market—an over-supply of workers rather
than an under-supply.
Cries of so-called
“labor shortages” are frequently invoked by corporations and
immigration expansionist who want to see large increases in low-wage labor.
As immigration attorney Ian Smith has explained, Ryan’s resurrection and
expansion of the controversial provision in Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)’s Gang
of Eight bill to increase guest-worker programs will disproportionately
“hurt America’s most vulnerable workers” such as black workers, single women,
the elderly, and first-generation immigrants.
While
Ryan argues that more low-wage immigrant labor is needed to fill
labor shortages, National Review’s Rich Lowry has
previously declared, “The next time I hear a Republican strategist or a
Republican politician say that there are jobs that Americans won’t do, that
person should be shot, he should be hanged, he should be wrapped in a carpet
and thrown in the Potomac River.”
Ryan’s push to expand
immigration comes on top of the nation’s existing federal policy
of autopilot visa dispensations. Under current policy, every day the U.S.
brings in enough new immigrants to fill an overcrowded, metropolitan high
school. Every week, the United States brings in enough new immigrants to fill
the Staples Center, where the Los Angeles Lakers play. Every year, we add
an immigrant population the size of Dallas. And every three
years, the U.S. adds another entire city of Los Angeles, made up of
foreign-born immigrants.
Ryan, however, seems
to believe these numbers should be even bigger, even as the U.S.
foreign-born population is already at an all-time high of 42.4 million.
Perhaps the most
unusual aspect of Ryan’s using conservative talk radio platforms to make
arguments for expanded immigration is that the Republican Party is now in the
position of having an electorate that is almost universally opposed (92 percent
according to Pew) to immigration increases, but it is led by a House Speaker
who has a two-decade long history of pushing for higher rates of
immigration. This means that one segment of the electorate, perhaps most
in favor of immigration reductions, now has as its leader one of the
politicians most associated with pushing for expanded immigration.
This seems to pose the
same kind of stress as if the Democratic Party had nominated as its leader
someone who wanted to eliminate social security.
As Breitbart
News reported prior to Ryan’s election as House Speaker: The fact that
the political class, and punditry class, are fairly unified in pushing Ryan for
Speaker demonstrates the double standard for how Republicans and Democrats are
expected to choose leaders.
No one has ever
suggested that the Democrat conference elect leaders who oppose core
progressive values—such as the ability to have abortions or protecting the benefit
programs established by President Johnson’s Great Society… If the roles
were reversed, and an anti-amnesty Democrat was working with Rep. Steve
King (R-IA) to stop immigration [as Ryan has worked with Rep. Luis
Gutierrez (D-IL) to expand immigration], there is no chance anyone in the
media, the Democrat establishment, or the punditry would tell progressive
activists to embrace an anti-amnesty Democrat Speaker.
In a Tuesday
column, Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz highlighted the
tension between the steadfast representation Democratic leaders give their
progressive base as opposed to how Republican leaders seem to actively
undermine the interests of their conservative base. Horowitz wrote, “Don’t you
just wish the Democrats had their version of Paul Ryan leading them in the
House and Senate?”
http://www.teaparty.org/paul-ryans-christmas-warning-american-companies-will-shut-without-foreign-workers-136186/?promocode=tpo-2237438&utm_source=news email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tpo-2237438
Comments
Paul Ryan
is a Liberal Republican. He supports
Obama’s agenda as if he were a Democrat.
He is completely out of sync with 90% of American voters. He claims to be a Conservative at election
time, but he is actually a Democrat, running as a Republican. He doesn’t get it.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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