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Gang of Eight Betrays Americans
The Gang of Eight immigration bill, S.744, can be summed up as amnesty now, border closing never. The Department of Homeland Security is not required to build a fence (which was ordered by the Secure Fence Act signed by President George W. Bush). DHS is required only to submit a plan.
If the DHS Secretary decides she has not reached 90% of border security, a “trigger” kicks in: the creation of a Southern Border Security Commission empowered (horrors!) to make recommendations. After six months of pondering its mission, the Commission automatically self-liquidates, so there will never be border security.
The Gang of Eight bill will give legal residence to 11 million illegal aliens, which is the actual goal for which they undertook their journey and broke U.S. law. Their new U.S. legality will be concealed under the pompous bureaucratic title, Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) status.
This amnesty will cost the U.S. taxpayers $6.3 trillion over the lifetimes of the amnestied persons, mostly outside of the 10-year window used for CBO calculations. This horrendous sum, which includes all forms of public benefits less the taxes they pay, was copiously documented by the Heritage Foundation.
The Gang of Eight authorizes the issuance of 33 million lifetime work permits (for 11 million amnesties plus accelerated chain migration) over the next ten years. This enormous influx of job seekers will flood our labor markets and communities, thus continuing the high unemployment of Americans, driving down the wages of those who do have jobs, and eliminating their hope of ever rising to the middle class and achieving the American dream.
Every amnestied person will become eligible for ObamaCare upon receiving a green card, and within five years will be able to cash in on our 79 means-tested welfare benefits. The timetable for these generous benefits will almost certainly be advanced because of Senator Chuck Schumer’s demands, Obama’s executive orders, or lawsuits brought before judges who believe in a “living” Constitution. Remember that the Boston Marathon bomber, Tamarlan, and his family, who were all admitted to the U.S. legally, raked in $100,000 in welfare cash and benefits.
The promises made about E-Verify have a loophole for existing employees and even for those who steal American identities to get a job. Members of the Gang of Eight even included special provisions (earmarks) to import cheap labor to work in their own state’s industries.
The Gang of Eight’s so-called requirement that those amnestied will have to pay back taxes is a sham. They will be asked to pay only any taxes already computed and assessed by Internal Revenue Service and, since the many years the illegals worked off the books were paid in cash and never came to the attention of IRS, there is no paper trail and those years will not be counted.
There are so many loopholes and exemptions to the so-called requirement that amnestied aliens speak English that’s it’s a total farce.
All 11 million amnestied immigrants are supposed to have a background check, but the mere recital of such a requirement sounds like a joke. Our FBI and CIA missed so many obvious clues that the Boston Marathon bomber Tamarlan was a potential terrorist that government background checks on 11 million persons should provoke an “are you kidding?” laugh.
IRS bureaucrats testified in the congressional hearing that the IRS was so overwhelmed by the copious paperwork involved in a few hundred Tea Party applications that IRS had to perform “triage.” So how can IRS cope with 11 million applications for RPI status from people whose paperwork is mostly forged or stolen?
Any government program managed by the liberals always includes a “follow the money” segment. The Gang of Eight’s claim to promote “immigrant integration” is a ruse to give taxpayers’ money to leftwing and Islamist activist groups such as CASA, La Raza, MALDEF, and CAIR.
The Gang of Eight bill defines these groups as “nonprofit organizations including those with legal advocacy experience working with immigrant countries.” They are actually Alinsky-style community organizers that focus on recruiting and politicizing immigrants.
Current U.S. law provides for the yearly admission of more than one million persons, more than any nation in the world, and the Gang of Eight’s bill will double that number. Because of our government’s failure to enforce so many existing laws, such as using a biometric entry-and-exit system to track visitors, we should have a pause in legal immigration until current laws are obeyed.
Another big fraud in the current admission of legal immigrants is illustrated by the entry of the Boston bomber’s family as refugees.
The Gang of Eight bill will reduce Republicans and conservatives to a permanent minority status. For the last century, immigrants who came in big waves voted at least 2-to-1 Democratic, in recent years it was 3-to-1, and there is zero evidence that the amnestied persons believe in Republican principles such as limited government and balanced budgets.
The Gang Can’t Defend Its Bill
The Gang of Eight can’t defend the Gang’s own amnesty bill, S.744, or even explain it to public or TV audiences. The Gang’s premier salesman, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), admits that it isn’t acceptable in its present form and must be amended on the Senate floor.
(YouTube video of Phyllis)
Public opinion surveys show that the American people want the border secured and current laws enforced before we even discuss amnesty. The Gang’s promise that amnestied aliens must pay back taxes is a fraud because neither aliens nor employers have documentation for the years the illegal was paid in cash.
The Gang of Eight bill doesn’t make any pretense of securing the border first. S.744 gives us only promises, promises and pie-in-the-sky plans but no reason to believe any of them because all our government’s promises about border security, implementation of an entry-exit system, and workplace verification of employee identity have been repeatedly and flagrantly broken. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on us.
The Gang of Eight bill allows the Obama Administration to decide which laws to enforce. Every S.744 provision allows Obama bureaucrats to issue waivers to avoid enforcement, a wrinkle that fits perfectly with Obama’s governing style, i.e., rule by executive-branch regulations instead of by constitutional legislation.
S.744 weakens the never-enforced electronic entry/exit system that the 1996 law requires to be used at all seaports and airports, and was funded by Congress five times. S.744 guts this law by excluding 106 land border-entry points where most crossings take place.
S.744 will continue to increase our current illegal population. The Gang of Eight bill not only fails to enforce the federal law against giving college-tuition preference to illegal aliens (which Obama unconstitutionally violated by executive order), but guarantees states the right to offer in-state tuition to future illegal aliens.
The Gang of Eight bill will give work permits immediately to 11 million illegal aliens, and then give green cards within 7 years to another 4.3 million foreigners who have applied in chain migration categories. These work permits will flood our labor market with millions of aliens and make unemployment a bigger crisis than it is now.
The Gang of Eight is just as unfair and discriminatory to college-educated American citizens as to entry-level job seekers. S.744 creates four new unlimited green-card preferences for aliens: (1) those with a Ph.D. in any field, (2) foreign physicians, (3) foreign students who graduate from a U.S. college with an advanced degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) subject, and (4) spouses and minor children of the above.
S.744 doubles the current legal immigration level which is already triple the historical average. The bill sets no numerical limits on some types of legal immigrants, despite the billions of people in the world who would like to move to America, the land of freedom and prosperity.
Chamber of Commerce lobbyists are advocating a “let the market decide” policy, i.e., who and how many people can come to work in the United States. This would undermine U.S. sovereignty and the right of our people to make such decisions that will determine our future.
The “let the market decide” argument is extremely hypocritical. In a free market, a labor shortage raises wages, but the lobbyists want to jimmy the system by creating an artificial overabundance of labor in order to enable corporations to pay lower wages to those who come from low-wage countries and are glad to work for low pay without American-style benefits.
S.744 would impose a massive unfunded mandate on U.S. taxpayers that will require us to increase taxes or incur more debt, or both. That’s because those 11 million amnestied aliens will receive $9.4 trillion in government services over their lifetime, but pay only $3.1 trillion in taxes, for a net cost of $6.3 trillion.
The main reason for this enormous cost to U.S. taxpayers is that the big majority of these aliens never finished high school. Wages, and the taxes you pay, are proportional to the job for which you can be hired.
Last year, after widespread public criticism, we thought we abolished the practice of loading a spending bill with earmarks, i.e., special spending that benefits the constituents of favored Members of Congress. Earmarks are back with specific goodies buried in S.744. The Gang of Eight bill exempts ski and snowboard instructors from the visa cap in order to benefit Colorado, exempts meat-packing workers to benefit South Carolina, and exempts workers who repair cruise ships to benefit Florida, all states that have Senators on the Gang of Eight.
And don’t forget the shocking earmarks for immigration lawyers and community organizers for illegal-alien groups. S.744 can never be amended into good legislation; it is thoroughly bad and incredibly costly.
Gang of Eight Increases UNemployment
The bill created in secret by the Gang of Eight is an outrageous betrayal of American workers, both high-skilled and low-skilled. Claiming it is bipartisan, the drafters were Democrats and Schumer Republicans.
Economics 101 teaches that prices of products and wages go up when there is a shortage and go down when there is an ample supply of whatever. But funny thing, a consortium of billionaire oligarchs and high-paid lobbyists have defied those axioms by rejecting U.S. STEM college graduates and then crying about shortages.
Half of American STEM graduates are not currently hired for a STEM job. Many students are so discouraged about the lack of job opportunities for STEM graduates that they have switched to more promising course majors such as accounting.
The lobbyists lied to us by reciting the slogan that the “best and the brightest” are foreigners, rather than Americans, and must be imported so we can benefit from their brains and labor. The notion that the best and the brightest are foreigners is false and contemptible, since most of the world’s great inventions and innovations are American.
In pursuit of the foolish notion about the “best and the brightest,” tens of thousands of foreigners have been imported to take jobs in the tech industries. The corporations welcome this deceit because they pay them less than Americans, bring in foreigners (who are not high-skilled) for entry-level jobs, force experienced Americans to train them, and then lay off the Americans.
The Gang of Eight is so enamored with this racket that their proposed legislation more than doubles the number of guest worker visas. The Gang of Eight bill raises H-1B visas to 115,000 a year and allows up to 180,000.
The globalists who want to give us a foreign workforce invented a cutesy slogan: “staple a green card” to every master’s degree or Ph.D. that a foreign student receives from a U.S. college in STEM subjects. The Gang of Eight bill puts no cap on the number of green cards to be issued, no quality standards for the colleges that grant the degrees, and no effective requirement that tech companies must seek U.S. workers before offering jobs to foreigners.
Colleges can also make this a profitable racket. A master’s program usually takes only one year, so foreign students can buy the right to U.S. residency and a tech job by the price of one year’s tuition at any U.S. college.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who has been the people’s friend throughout the negotiations, said, “One of the things that most upsets the American people about Washington is drafting a bill with special interests in secret and jamming it across the finish line in a way that minimizes public involvement and input.” S.744 was drafted in secret and the Gang allowed only one day of hearings.
The lobbyists are still objecting to language in the bill that requires employers to ensure that an “equally qualified” American is not available for a job opening before hiring a foreign temporary worker. The Senate Judiciary Committee defeated a Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) amendment to require that employers assure the government they have made “good faith” efforts to hire American workers. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a usually voluble big-government liberal, claimed this would give the government “too much power” to interpret!
The Gang of Eight beat back several other GOP amendments on border security, such as a Sessions proposal to require 700 miles of double-layer fencing along our southern border. The Gang also defeated Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) amendment that would triple border patrol agents.
Bad as the Gang of Eight bill is for high-skilled workers, it is disaster for low-skilled U.S. workers because the big majority of new immigrants will be low-skilled. The bill will swallow up opportunities for our own citizens to join the ranks of the employed and it will depress the wages of both U.S. citizens and immigrants.
Granting amnesty to 11 million illegal aliens will, of course, act as a magnet for future illegals coming across our border, as well as substantially increase the legal immigrants coming in through the family unification process. Estimates are that the Gang’s bill will bring in 33 million immigrants over the next 10 years.
The biggest victims demographically will be African-Americans because most of the 33 million immigrants will be low-skilled. Legal and illegal immigration over the last several decades accounts for 40% of the 18 point percentage decline in African-American employment rates, according to evidence produced by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The Gang of Eight bill will punish black Americans to benefit foreigners and tech company profits. Where are the civil rights advocates when we need them?
Sessions Speaks Against Amnesty
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has issued important reports on the dangers of the amnesty legislation drafted in secret by the eight Senators known as the Gang of Eight. Here are his own words:
“When the Gang of Eight was first formed, a publicly stated principle was that enforcement would come first — before legalization. On the Sunday TV shows, Gang of Eight members admitted that they abandoned this principle and that, in fact, legalization — or amnesty — would come first. This plan is contrary to the commitment they made to the American people and raises the same core problem as the 2007 proposal that was rejected by the American people. . . . The [Gang’s] proposal will not stand up to scrutiny.
“Another area of great concern in this proposal is the impact it will have on low-income Americans and those individuals and communities suffering from chronic underemployment. The guest worker program in this proposal represents only a fraction of the increase in legal foreign workers that will be rapidly introduced. Including those illegal immigrants that are legalized, this bill, over ten years, will result in at least 30 million new foreign workers — more than the entire population of Texas.
“While this may mean lower wages for the business lobby, and more political power for AFL-CIO leadership, it will be bad for American workers — union and non-union. And it will expose taxpayers to enormous long-term costs, including trillions in unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security from which low-wage foreign workers will draw more benefits than they pay in.” . . .
“Despite promised protections for U.S. workers, the bill would double the number of guest workers admitted annually. Such a large influx would be disastrous for the wages and job prospects of U.S. workers.
“On every major front, this legislation fails to deliver on its core promises. It delivers only for the special-interest groups who helped write it. Should it pass, it would represent the ultimate triumph of the Washington elite over the everyday citizen to whom Congress properly owes its loyalty.”
Warning by Four Senators
Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Mike Lee (R-UT) wrote a joint letter to all Senators about the Gang of Eight bill, identifying the following key flaws. S.744 —
provides immediate legalization without securing the border.
rewards criminal aliens, absconders, and deportees and undermines the law.
contains extremely dangerous national security loopholes.
facilitates fraud in our immigration system.
creates no real penalties for illegal immigration and rewards illegals with entitlements.
delays for years the implementation of E-Verify.
does not fix our legal immigration system.
rewards those who have broken our laws with a path to citizenship.
These four Senators concluded: “We need immigration reform, but the American people deserve better than a 1,000-page bill that makes our immigration system more complex and less accountable without truly ensuring border security. Americans expect their government to end the lawlessness, not surrender to it. S.744 fails to deliver anything more than the same empty promises Washington has been making for 30 years.”
