From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Monday 19DEC05 4 p.m. EST


All of Specter's massive immigration increases stripped from just-passed Budget Bill

CONGRATULATIONS AGAIN.

House passed Budget Reconciliation bill with NONE of Sen. Specter's 350,000-a-year immigration increase!

You will recall that all during November and early December, we were coming to you regularly to ask you to fight Sen. Specter (R-PA) and his at-first sneak effort to add this massive increase in foreign workers in the budget bill.

You all sent thousands of faxes and made hundreds of phone calls to try to stop Specter's assault in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

We lost. We told you to keep fighting.

We then influenced Sen. Byrd (D-WV) to introduce an amendment on the floor of the Senate to strip out the outlandish Specter increases. You sent thousands of faxes and made hundreds of phone calls.

We lost overwhelmingly. We told you to keep fighting.

You sent TENS OF THOUSANDS FAXES and made thousands of phone calls to influence the Conference Committee process of resolving the terrible Senate bill with the benign House bill. And then we alerted you that our inside sources had tipped us off that House leaders were thinking seriously about letting ALL of the Specter increases to stay in the final bill in exchange for other matters entirely. You made even more phone calls.

WE WON!

The 350,000 permanent green cards for foreign workers and their families have been erased.

The 30,000 extra H-1B temporary visas for high-tech workers have been erased.

You created a climate on Capitol Hill that told people reading the political tea leaves that this was just not the time to pick a fight with the American people.

Thanks to all of you who never gave up .... who took defeat after defeat and kept trying.

As we told you earlier, Specter's efforts were facilitated by one of his staffers who has a close relationship with a Microsoft lobbyist. The massive increases were the work of Microsoft and its nearly endless supply of money to undermine American workers.

But I told you repeatedly that collectively you all truly can and do have more power than Microsoft and more power than all of Bill Gates' dreams of a global workforce in which all Americans have to bid for American jobs in competition with all the rest of the world's workers.

THIS IS WHAT I WROTE YOU IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE

"U.S. House on verge of biggest immigration disaster for American communities and workers since 1990 Act.

"The only thing that can possibly avert this disaster is if all 124,000 NumbersUSA members take some kind of action today and Tuesday.

"We think many of these leaders may not even know what is happening because the Budget bill is gigantic and the immigration provisions look like small stuff and are easily overlooked.

"Please do not sit on the sidelines on this one!"

Well, you did not sit on the sidelines.

People power prevailed.

I thank you on behalf of millions of American workers and American students whose lives would have been made so much economically worse if Microsoft and Specter had gotten their way.

I and Dan Stein of FAIR went to Pennsylvania to do a media assault on their Sen. Specter's efforts. Along with about 20 other organizations, we ran saturation TV ads against the concept that America needed more foreign workers.

And your NumbersUSA Capitol Hill Team worked tirelessly making sure that staffers in all key offices truly understood the danger of what Specter was proposing.

Thanks to all of you,

-- ROY




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