Thread: Ted Cruz Exposes Amnesty Bill: $5000 Penalty For Hiring Citizens Over Legalized Alien

Freedom Outpost
9 hours ago by Dean Garrison

We can’t possibly expect our Senators to read a 1200 page bill before voting on it. Can we? Well Thank God Ted Cruz read it. Not only did Cruz read it but he schooled anyone who would listen from the Senate floor on Tuesday. Cruz found a loophole that actually penalizes an employer $5000 for hiring a citizen over a legalized alien. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up. Senator Cruz was quoted as saying:

“I filed an amendment that would have corrected one of the most egregious aspects of the gang of eight bill as it intersects with Obamacare legislation, namely a penalty imposed on U.S. employers for hiring U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents. This bill says if an employer hires a citizen or a legal immigrant, the IRS can impose a $5,000 penalty on that employer. But if the employer instead hires someone with RPI status, that penalty will go away. That is utterly and completely indefensible.”
“Nobody in this body wants to see African-American unemployment go up. Nobody wants to see Hispanic unemployment go up, youth unemployment go up, union household unemployment go up, legal immigrant unemployment go up. Yet every one of those will happen if this Gang of Eight bill passes without fixing this problem. If that happens, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate will be accountable to our constituents for explaining why we voted to put a federal penalty on hiring U.S. citizens and hiring legal immigrants. I hope this body will choose to pass my amendment and fix this grave defect in the Gang of Eight legislation.”

It would be very interesting to know whose hand was responsible for slipping this into the bill but it surely won’t be the only surprise that comes from a 1200 page bill that has not been scrutinized by the majority of those who voted to pass it.

John Hayward reports:

Cruz already weathered a few hilariously botched attempts to “fact-check” his claim into oblivion, which ended with the “fact checkers” admitting he was right about the problem, but questioning whether employers would respond to this incentive on the scale he envisions. (That, of course, is a difference of opinion, not a fact check.)
For added fun, the Weekly Standard collared five of the Democrat senators who voted to cut off debate on the immigration bill, and asked for their take on the problem Cruz describes. None of them knew if the loophole had been addressed yet. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) babbled something incoherent that had nothing to do with the question; Tom Carper (D-DE) snarled that he was too busy to answer the question; and Max “Train Wreck” Baucus, the author of ObamaCare, mumbled: “We’re trying to solve that right now… I don’t know if that’s been solved.”

America, what in the hell are these Senators trying to sell us? I don’t even know where to begin with this story so I believe I will stop while I am ahead. Senator Cruz sums up the problem really well in the video. I will defer to the expert. As my friend Jessica Smith told me yesterday when she passed this on, “Are you ready for your head to explode?” I think it already has Jessica.

This is unreal, unbelievable and unforgivable.

Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/06/te...#ixzz2XUXtZ7R6

Added to the HP
http://www.alipac.us/content.php?r=2...egalized-Alien

68 Senators Vote to Create Incentive for Employers to Hire Amnestied Immigrants Over U.S. Citizens

9:49 AM, JUN 28, 2013 • BY JOHN MCCORMACK

The immigration bill passed by the Senate Thursday afternoon would give some employers a financial incentive to employ "registered provisional immigrants" (illegal immigrants granted legal status) instead U.S. citizens.

As the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein recently reported: "Under Obamacare, businesses with over 50 workers that employ American citizens without offering them qualifying health insurance could be subject to fines of up to $3,000 per worker. But because newly legalized immigrants wouldn’t be eligible for subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges until after they become citizens – at least 13 years under the Senate bill – businesses could avoid such fines by hiring the new immigrants instead."

On Tuesday, THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked five U.S. senators about this problem, and none of them knew if it was a problem. "We're trying to solve that right now. I don't know if that's been solved," Senator Max Baucus of Montana (chief author of Obamacare) told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

"I don't know. I'd have to look at it closely," said Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania. "I just haven't read it that closely to know."

As The New Republic, Investors' Business Daily, and the Washington Examiner have all reported, this problem certainly does exist, and the bill was never amended to fix the problem before it was passed by the Senate on a 68-32 vote Thursday afternoon. "[Registered provisional immigrants] are not subject to mandate and the do not count towards an employer's penalty," Sean Neary, communications director for the Senate Finance Committee, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email late Thursday night.


http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...ns_738015.html

Many people still naively believe they can remain unscathed by this bill's passage

This makes me cry for our nation...

From the ALIPAC archives, posted by Motivated on April 17,2013.

This is not a "glitch" in the bill it was intentional and all of the Gang of Eight knew what the impact would be to US citizens when they pushed this and voted for it.

Senator Cruz offered an amendment to fix this and it was voted down.

It just gets worse! Immigration Bill Gives New Legals $3,000 Hiring Edge

investors.com
April 17, 2013

Immigration Bill Gives New Legals $3,000 Hiring Edge

By JED GRAHAM, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 02:29 PM ET


Under the Senate "Gang of Eight" immigration reform bill, some employers would have an incentive of up to $3,000 per year to hire a newly legalized immigrant over an American citizen.


In avoiding one controversy — the hefty cost of providing millions of newly legalized immigrants with ObamaCare subsidies — the Senate "Gang of Eight" may have risked walking into another.
The bipartisan immigration reform bill released Wednesday dictates that those granted provisional legal immigrant status would be treated the same as those "not lawfully present" are treated under the 2010 health law.

That means they would neither be eligible for ObamaCare tax credits nor required to pay an individual tax penalty for failing to obtain qualifying health coverage. It also means some employers would face no penalty for failing to provide such workers affordable health coverage.

In the case of employers who don't offer insurance, fines are based on full-time equivalent staffing levels, so distinctions between citizens and visa holders don't matter.

But employers who do offer insurance also can be subject to fines. If the coverage costs a worker more than 9.5% of pay, it is deemed unaffordable and the worker becomes eligible for ObamaCare's exchange subsidies.

These employers would have to pay the government up to $3,000per full-time worker who receives ObamaCare subsidies.Some employers have said they would seek to limit fines under ObamaCare by shifting some workers to part-time, which the law defines as fewer than 30 hours.

The immigration bill, as currently written, would provide another path for avoiding fines through the hiring of legalized immigrants as full-time employees, since they wouldn't be eligible for ObamaCare for a decade or more.

Millions of immigrants given provisional legal status would be eligible for permanent residence after 10 years under thebill.

A playing field tilted toward legalized immigrants is surely not what the bipartisan group of Senators intended, and it may be possible to craft a legislative fix. But it may not be simple, either politically or administratively.

To level the playing field between Americans and those granted legal status would either require weakening ObamaCare's employer mandate, which might not please Democrats, or making it even more punitive, a tough pill to swallow for Republicans who would like to see the employer mandate go away.

One possibility, for example, would be to further penalize companies based on the number of full-time provisional immigrants on their payroll without qualifying coverage.

ObamaCare's design has been unusual among means-tested programs in that benefits — and penalties — apply to all legal residents who earn up to 400% of the poverty level and don't have employer coverage. Other programs aren't accessible for five years after gaining legal status.

ObamaCare's exception for the undocumented only made sense because their status was in flux, politically, and it has been illegal for employers to knowingly hire them. But with no legal barrier to employment, favored status under ObamaCare's employer mandate looks problematic.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily:http://news.investors.com/041713-652...#ixzz2QkgW4vqV

All those businesses that have cut employee's hours below 30 hours a week will be able to hire "full time" employees at their own discretion. Walmart comes to mind.....

Immigration and Obamacare’s employer mandate

BY PHILIP KLEIN | JUNE 11, 2013 AT 1:05 PM

TOPICS: OBAMACARE BELTWAY CONFIDENTIAL

Lawmakers still have not resolved a problem under which the bill would effectively encourage...With the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill set for a procedural vote later Tuesday, lawmakers still have not resolved a thorny problem under which the bill would effectively encourage employers to hire newly legalized immigrants over American citizens as a way of avoiding Obamacare’s taxes.

Under the existing Senate immigration bill, immigrants who have been in the United States illegally can obtain a provisional legal status after paying fines and meeting certain preconditions. But this population would have to wait at least 13 years to be able to obtain full citizenship, and it isn’t until then that they could qualify for government benefits such as Obamacare.

The problem arises when this rule interacts with another provision of Obamacare – the employer mandate. Starting in January, businesses with 50 or more employees who don’t offer workers health insurance that the federal government deems acceptable must pay a penalty if at least one of their workers obtains insurance on a new government-run exchange. The penalty is up to $3,000 per worker.

This means if the immigration bill becomes law, some employers could effectively face incentives of hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire newly legalized immigrants over American citizens, because the immigrant workers would not qualify for Obamacare benefits.

As the implementation of Obamacare approaches, there have been many news reports about companies considering cutting back full-time workers to part-time, or taking other actions to get around the mandate penalties. The immigration bill would offer employers another way out –hiring fewer American citizens and more immigrants with provisional legal status.

It’s not surprising that this unintended consequence hasn’t yet been resolved, because there’s no easy fix. One way of eliminating the problem would be to get rid of the employer mandate in Obamacare altogether – which would be a non-starter for Democrats. The other way would be to give noncitizen immigrants with provisional status access to Obamacare’s benefits – which would destroy any hopes of garnering Republican votes.

Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily first reported this complication in April. When I followed up back then, Sen. Marco Rubio’s spokesman Alex Conant told me it was exactly the type of issue that could be addressed during the legislative process. “[T]he scenario you raise illustrates both the absurdity of Obamacare, and why we have insisted on a lengthy process to review this legislation before any votes are taken,” Conant emailed at the time. “We always expected there might be a need for amendments to fix technical problems, and we’ll be interested in seeing what sort of amendments might be offered to improve this part of the legislation without giving Obamacare to illegals – something Sen. Rubio has always said he will not support.”

However, the issue was never addressed in any of the more than 200 amendments proposed when the immigration legislation made its way through the Senate Judiciary Committee. Another flood of amendments are expected to be filed later Tuesday afternoon, assuming the immigration bill clears the necessary procedural vote thresholds. My contact with multiple Senate offices offered no indication that this specific issue would be addressed. Conant did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/immigration-and-obamacares-employer-mandate/article/2531604

IMMIGRATION REFORM: THE ESCAPE HATCH FROM OBAMACARE


By: John Hayward
6/12/2013 10:19 AM

One of the bluntly practical issues raised by “comprehensive immigration reform” skeptics is that amnesty for illegal aliens will drop millions of new workers into a system that is already groaning under endless high unemployment. If Obama’s economy can’t produce enough jobs for the existing citizens, suddenly introducing a new population of job seekers isn’t going to help matters, particularly for unemployed people in the regions and demographics that will find themselves in direct competition with all those “New Americans.”

Of course, those workers are already physically present in the United States, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but they’re current segregated into industries that can get away with hiring them under the table, for those fabled (and largely mythical) “jobs Americans just won’t do.” This is a matter of understandable concern for illegal aliens and their advocates, because their shadow sector of the workforce is not known for providing decent wages and pleasant work environments. Legalization will move them into direct competition with the rest of the unemployed, a concern that prompted Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) – the true master of “Marco Rubio’s immigration reform” – to absurdly promise that “a foreign worker will never be hired to undercut an American worker’s wage.”

If Schumer was actually serious about somehow detecting and prevent that, it would mean a surveillance state that makes Obama’s current Orwellian patchwork look like child’s play. In fact, it would require more regulatory effort than actually doing the government’s damn job and securing the border. Does Schumer think he’d be able to set up tribunals that review complaints from native-born Americans and legal immigrants who feel they lost jobs to the “New Americans?” Is he planning to set up affirmative-action-style “disparate impact” boards that would force employers to hire no more than, say, six percent legalized aliens if the general population of their community is six percent legalized aliens?

Phillip Klein at the Washington Examiner makes a solid, devastatingly simple case that employers have a huge incentive to hire freshly-legalized aliens over full-boat American citizens: ObamaCare. The worst legislation in modern history provides a very direct, almost irresistible reason to prefer workers who are only partway down the “pathway to citizenship.”

Under the existing Senate immigration bill, immigrants who have been in the United States illegally can obtain a provisional legal status after paying fines and meeting certain preconditions. But this population would have to wait at least 13 years to be able to obtain full citizenship, and it isn’t until then that they could qualify for government benefits such as Obamacare.

The problem arises when this rule interacts with another provision of Obamacare – the employer mandate. Starting in January, businesses with 50 or more employees who don’t offer workers health insurance that the federal government deems acceptable must pay a penalty if at least one of their workers obtains insurance on a new government-run exchange. The penalty is up to $3,000 per worker.

This means if the immigration bill becomes law, some employers could effectively face incentives of hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire newly legalized immigrants over American citizens, because the immigrant workers would not qualify for Obamacare benefits.

Klein notes that this incentive will be provided in the teeth of the great Obama unemployment story the media absolutely refuses to tell, even though the evidence is clear and plentiful: the transition of the American workforce to part-time status, driven by the heavy mandates ObamaCare drops on full-time positions. Under George Bush, a deeply concerned media called them “burger-flipper jobs”; James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute describes the phenomenon as the birth of “Waiter and Waitress Nation.”

Even the relatively decent jobs reports of the Obama era have featured “job creation” that actually consists of replacing solid full-time career positions with part-time work. Full-time jobs are lost; part-time jobs are created; the media portrays this as “job growth.” It’s not really accurate to call the Obama jobs market “stagnant.” It’s getting worse even when it looks like it might be getting slightly better.

What happens when we suddenly add millions of job seekers who are, according to recent versions of “comprehensive immigration reform,” 10 to 13 years away from falling under those ObamaCare mandates? Business owners would be fools not to prefer them over full citizens.

Klein notes there is “no easy fix” for the problem, since legislators would have to either strip the employer mandates out of ObamaCare (which would make the President’s boondoggle even more absurd than it already is) or stuff legalized aliens into ObamaCare immediately (a deal-breaker for Republicans that would also detonate a deficit-spending H-bomb.) Klein asked Rubio’s staff about it several months ago, but got no answer beyond the reasonable but irrelevant observation that ObamaCare sucks. None of the 200+ amendments to immigration reform proposed thus far has addressed the problem. It’s difficult to see how an amendment to the immigration bill possibly could.

This issue highlights the fundamental incompatibility of open borders and socialism. Socialism is a complex series of inputs and outputs, which illegal immigration disrupts. Group A pays this much, so that Group B can be given these benefits… what happens when Group X is abruptly introduced to the equation? Intellectually serious advocates of amnesty and open borders should be calling for the welfare state to be dismantled, not designing flimsy barriers that will supposedly keep legalized aliens out of it. Socialism requires walls, to keep people both in and out, but free markets can have turnstiles.

Of course, as long as power accumulates to the State, socialists don’t really care about the practical failure of their programs, so this is a concern only to outside skeptics who enjoy needling liberals by taking their ideas more seriously than they do. Problems with State power are merely opportunities to propose “solutions” that will grant the State even more power. If that wasn’t painfully obvious during the passage of ObamaCare, it should be abundantly clear to anyone following the immigration debate.


http://www.humanevents.com/2013/06/1...rom-obamacare/

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