Thread: The 25th Anniversary Of The Immigration Act Of 1990 Is No Cause For Celebration

Posted By Ian Smith On 3:39 PM 12/03/2015

Twenty-five years ago last Sunday President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Immigration Act of 1990. The act would take the revolutionary and needless changes created under the Immigration Act of 1965 and make them dramatically worse. Although the economy was in recession at the time, the 1990 act raised general immigration levels by over 30 percent and increased employment-based entry provisions by three times. In spite of this, it had very little public debate due largely to a serious budget fight between President Bush and the Democrats which shut down the government for a brief time. As former Cornell labor economist Vernon Briggs reflects, this smokescreen together with it being signed on the final day of session, it was “doubtful” any member of Congress actually read the act.

Programs and provisions that would never withstand a citizen referendum on their own abound in the 1990 act. Take the “diversity lottery visa.” The point of the diversity lottery, which applies mainly to people from Africa and South Asia, is simply to bring in immigrants of a particular race. Because of this low standard, over 10 million people apply for the 55,000 slots made available each year. Ironically, because of its emphasis on race and national origin, the program harks back to the pre-1965 national quotas system, which was started in 1921 to keep immigration low and ensure assimilation. It fell victim to the heady days of the civil rights era because it had a built-in preference for descendants of America’s settler-stock and for migrants from countries that made up the first immigration wave of 1860-1890. China, Japan and Israel are just a few nations that have such systems today.

Then there is the act’s creation of so-called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that open-borders pushers point to as precedent for President Obama’s unilateral actions on amnesty. TPS ‘temporarily’ stalls deportation of illegal aliens whose home country is ravaged by war or suffers a natural disaster. It initially only applied to then-war-torn El Salvador; however, TPS has since grown to include no fewer than 11 other countries. And although the relief’s supposed to be “temporary,” the program’s been consistently renewed by DHS even when the problems back home have long since subsided.

Two of the more blatant corporate giveaways in the act deserve mention. Disney, a company facing multiple suits for discriminating against American IT professionals, got its own special program under the act. The Q visa, aka the “Disney provision,” created a special worker category for native performers at amusement parks. Meanwhile, under the “McDonald’s Program,” foreign students were given work permits to work off-campus specifically at the billion-dollar burger chain as well as on certain on-campus research projects. Although that program was found to have “pervasive adverse effects” on the job opportunities in the labor markets surrounding the foreign students’ colleges, it later grew into a far wider program called Optional Practical Training (OPT), a “backdoor H-1B visa” according to Michelle Malkin and John Miano in their new book, Sold Out. When the Homeland Security Department unilaterally expanded OPT for STEM-grads looking to work in IT, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) sued the agency. IRLI found during its ongoing litigation that the original plan for OPT’s expansion was hatched during a private dinner between Microsoft lobbyist, Jack Krumholtz, and then-DHS Secretary, Michael Chertoff.

Perhaps the biggest example of our corporatized immigration system is the H-1B program itself, also created under the act. Among all the “skilled” guest-worker programs, the H-1B is “Grandfather of All American Worker Sellouts” according to Malkin and Miano in their book. Although riddled with problems, the H-1B’s most serious is perhaps that H-1B employers needn’t try to hire Americans first. This puts the U.S. within a special class among developed nations. Luckily, this loophole and others is currently being challenged by a bipartisan bill sponsored by Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin in the Senate.

Crucially, the ’90 act also did nothing to cut the ’65 act’s visa-preferences-for-relatives system, which has had the unintended effect of favoring Hispanic immigration and has needlessly disrupted the nation’s cultural continuity — The ’65 act’s lead sponsor, Senator Ted Kennedy, would later lament over “the inadvertent restriction on immigration from the old seed sources of our heritage.” (Emphasis mine.)

A major effect of giving relatives visa-preferences is that most new immigrants settle in just a few selected metropolitan areas where earlier immigrants of similar ethnicity were already established. This creates what Elizabeth Bogen’s called “ethnic hiring networks” which she estimated in 1988 actually cut out the native-born in New York from “tens of thousands” of jobs. In a similar study from the Wall Street Journal in 1995, immigrant shopkeepers also in the New York area stated they wouldn’t hire American blacks specifically due to their greater propensity to complain about “low wages or lousy working conditions” and were “less intelligent,” “less honest,” and “more prone to criminal acts.” As the piece concluded, “it’s like an unwritten law” that immigrant employers won’t hire blacks.

Interestingly, the 1990 act also contained a commission to study the implementation and impact of this legislation on the U.S. economy. The committee, made up of community and industry leaders, then went on to rebut the very act itself by voting 8-1 that immigration levels should be reduced to 550,000 with the complete elimination of both the diversity visa and the unskilled immigrant visa (unsurprisingly, the dissenting vote was from the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the nation’s largest immigration attorneys’ lobby).

The 1990 act was a disaster, but it can be fixed. Trumping well-worn clichés is a start, for instance, “that immigration ‘enriches’ the American people,” including those who must directly compete with new immigrants. Or, “that immigration brings the world’s strivers and its best and brightest,” including those who’ve simply arrived via a lottery system or who are merely following their relatives. Briggs was right when he said the 1990 act “cemented into existence the phenomenon of mass immigration as an ongoing feature of American life for as long as it remains in effect.” But as he implies, such phenomenon does not have to remain in effect forever.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/03/th...r-celebration/

The primary solution to this horrible problem is to return the federal government to its constitutional role with regards to immigration which is solely to prohibit it, not generate it, not cause it, not encourage it, and not license or permit it, or admit immigrants. The only authority the federal government has with regards to immigration under Article 1, Section 9 is after the year 1808 is to prohibit migration and the importation of such persons.

For Congress to sit around twiddling its thumbs passing laws that permit immigration of all kinds at all types of numbers against the will of the people and the states in violation of the US Constitution is criminal. When our country has tens of millions in poverty, 73 million on Medicaid, tens of millions of unemployed, millions of college graduates that can't find jobs, STEM graduates who can't find jobs, tens of millions of experienced, qualified workers in their 40's, 50's and 60's who lost their jobs to free trade treason and can't find a job to replace it, and Congress is diddling with itself pulling numbers out of their butts to ADMIT IMMIGRANTS when Congress has no constitutional power to admit any immigrant into the United States for any reason at all. It can admit tourists, business visitors, diplomats, but it can not admit immigrants, and that means green card residents, that means visa workers, that means guest workers, that means refugees, asylum-seekers, and any other alien who plans to "migrate" to the United States, only States can do that under the US Constitution, subject to and balanced by prohibitions set by the federal government.

What has happened instead is the stupid treasonous idiotic low-life back-stabbing pond scum federal government has done the opposite. Instead of prohibiting immigration, it admits immigrants and dumps them in the states without any request, approval or consent from the states, and in most cases, in direct opposition to the will of the states.

What's happened to this country because of immigration is a great tragedy, one that has changed the dynamics, domestic tranquility, economics, spirit, culture, kinship and weave of our nation to such a degree that Americans are no longer safe, no longer secure, no longer employed, no longer self-sustaining, no longer free, and no longer happy.

The US Congress, the US Supreme Court, and every President since and including Jimmy Carter has violated its oath to uphold the US Constitution. Every branch has failed our country, every branch has sold out our people, every branch has betrayed the United States, and did so willfully and knowingly, because no one in those positions can be that stupid and claim they didn't know. It's their job to know. It's their job to say "whoa, we've already got a lot of poor people of our own, we don't need any more." It's their job to say "whoa, immigrants come in and take jobs from Americans and deflate wages and benefits." It's their job to say "whoa, immigrants are signing up for welfare, flooding our schools with more kids than we have money to support." It's their job to say "whoa, what is all this foreign student visa stuff when kids in my district who are more than qualified to attend college can't get a seat." It's their job to say "WHOA". Whoa means prevent, stop, "prohibit". That is the role of the US Congress, the US Supreme Court, and the President of the United States, collectively known and referred to as the federal government, under the US Constitution with regards to immigration ... to say "WHOA" and STOP THIS DISASTER.

Our country is so bloated, our pot so boiling over, it is truly the most perilous time in our history. Just wait until your turn comes with a family member in a hospital and there is no American doctor to be found, because the whole staff is J-1 Visa doctors from places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jamaica, Mexico and the Dominican Republican, because our medical schools won't expand and allow more American Kids into medical school so with this bloated population of immigrants, legal and illegal, hospitals are forced to hire foreign doctors who can't even speak English, whose attitudes are not only different but dead wrong, and whose egos and arrogance are bigger than their medical knowledge.

Every institution of our country has been adversely impacted by this immigration problem. Every single one. Law, law enforcement, health care, education, religion, charity, government, business, work force. All of it is so infected with the virus of immigration, there is no cure except an immediate 10 to 20 Year Moratorium on All Immigration.