States Stop Illegal Work Permits

Numbers USA Worked with the States, THOSE 5 MILLION ILLEGAL-ALIEN WORK PERMITS THAT DIDN'T GET DISTRIBUTED

Just a few blocks from our offices near the Reagan Airport in Arlington, Virginia, is a building that is a monument to the Obama Administration's insistence a year ago that nobody would be capable of challenging its just-declared Executive amnesty. Not Congress, not the courts, not unions and especially not the American people.

The Department of Homeland Security immediately leased a huge part of our neighboring building to house the thousand new employees that officials said they were hiring to process work permits for the estimated five million illegal aliens who qualify for the Executive Amnesty of 2014.

But those thousand new amnesty employees never arrived. And the 5 million work permits weren't given out for illegal aliens to compete legally for every job in America.

Why?

The short answer is that 26 states sued to block the work permits, and three court rulings thus far have backed an injunction stopping the 2014 amnesty.

But the longer and more complete answer starts with this:  Those states probably would not have successfully acted to block the 2014 Executive Amnesty without the work of our professional staff, the pressure from the NumbersUSA Activist Network, and our financial supporters like you.

Here's why:  Before Texas put together the coalition behind the states' lawsuit, our team met with top officials there. We introduced them to the results of a lawsuit by immigration enforcement agents that NumbersUSA has been funding since its inception after the first Executive Amnesty in 2012.

The attorney for the immigration agents -- Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas -- was one of our team who met with Texas officials a year ago.  He told me again last week that federal judges during the last three years of the immigration agents' case have signaled what it would take to get an injunction against the 2014 amnesty if states were the plaintiffs instead of the ICE agents.

We armed the states with all knowledge gained from the last three years in court and provided the grassroots support to give officials the confidence that bringing suit would be politically popular.

Incredibly powerful victories such as those achieved in federal courts this year usually depend on years of prior work.  This points to the necessity of building and maintaining an institution that can systematically create and exploit opportunities when they arise.

Those 5 million unused illegal-alien work permits are a testament to that -- and to all who have faithfully provided the financial backing for our NumbersUSA operation.

PBS ASKS WHAT MAKES NUMBERSUSA SO EFFECTIVE

In assessing our humanitarian results, let's not forget the continuing success of beating the bulk of the most powerful institutions in America by once again completing a year without any congressional increases in immigration.

PBS this fall ran a major documentary about the failed efforts of the last two years in passing comprehensive immigration reform in Congress. Comprehensive Immigration Reform not only would have granted a near-blanket amnesty but would have increased lifetime work permits to around 20 million legal immigrants over the next decade.

Can you imagine how much more economically depressed the holiday season would be for millions of American households if they had been forced to compete for jobs and wages with that increased tidal wave of foreign labor?

On its website, PBS ran an accompanying article asking how our side could be so effective and featured NumbersUSA. It noted:

"In American political debates, money often has the loudest voice. But that has not always been the case with immigration reform.

"In the lead-up to the 2013-14 debate in Congress over comprehensive reform, conservative estimates put the amount spent pushing for a bill in the hundreds of millions. Reform had the support of the preponderance of politically powerful institutions in the United States, including Silicon Valley, big agriculture, the hospitality industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, unions, educators, human rights advocates and many churches."

But they all lost.

Source: numbersusa.com