16 House Republicans to Obama: Amnesty 'Final Economic Blow' for American Workers
by Matthew Boyle 8 Jan 2014
breitbart.com
Sixteen House Republicans led by Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) are demanding President Barack Obama get unemployed Americans back to work before granting amnesty to illegal aliens or bringing unprecedented levels of new immigrants to take jobs away from American workers.
“We write to you today on behalf of the 21 million Americans who can’t find a full time job,” the GOP members of the House wrote to President Obama Wednesday.
We write to you on behalf of the 6 million young Americans who are neither working nor in school. We write on behalf of the countless American workers whose wages today are lower than they were more than a decade ago. We write on behalf of the 90 million Americans over 16 – including early retirees, college grads living at home, and those living on welfare – who are not part of our nation’s workforce.
Because of massive and perpetual unemployment statistics, the GOP congressmen argued that Obama should stop pushing for a large immigration bill that would contain amnesty – any legal status for any illegal alien – and a massive increase in legal immigration. “That is why we reject your call for the House to get an immigration bill to your desk that would permanently displace American workers,” they wrote.
The Senate immigration bill, which the White House helped craft and you personally endorse, would double the number of guest workers brought into this country at a time of crippling joblessness and falling incomes. On top of that, the Senate immigration bill would also add millions more permanent immigrant workers through green cards – handing out permanent residency to more than 30 million immigrants over the next decade. This represents a tripling of the normal green card rate.
In addition to Brooks, Reps. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI), Lou Barletta (R-PA), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Walter Jones (R-NC), Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), John Fleming (R-LA), Steve King (R-IA), Ted Yoho (R-FL), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Steve Stockman (R-TX), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Jeff Duncan (R-SC), each signed the letter.
Cotton is significant because he is a U.S. Senate candidate against Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), who supported amnesty in the Senate. Smith is a former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and current chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
The letter serves two major and equally important purposes for the conservative movement.
First, this represents a major platoon of House Republicans stepping forward in an organized manner against amnesty efforts right as House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) make organized moves towards amnesty with the backing of the Chamber of Commerce. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue announced Wednesday morning that the Chamber is planning a massive push to try to get immigration legislation passed out of the House, which would result in more cheap labor for its clients.
Second, this offers Republicans an actual and legitimate counter-argument to the Democrats’ and institutional left’s coming poverty, income inequality, and unemployment benefits pushes. The left is gearing up for such a debate to kick off 2014, and Republicans like National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chairman Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) told the Wall Street Journal that Republicans should seize this opportunity. “It’s very beneficial for us to talk about the things we are for, the things we care about, and most importantly how they impact the lives of people around the country,” Moran said.
The House GOP members cite the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as a source in their letter to Obama that confirms the new immigrants would be mostly low-skilled workers and that the increases would spark a decline in American workers’ wages and employment prospects. They also cite research from Harvard professor Dr. George Borjas, who states that from 1980 to 2000, American workers’ wages plummeted by at least eight percent as a direct result of legal low-skilled immigration.
“Rapidly expanding unskilled immigration – at a time when factory work and blue collar jobs are disappearing – would represent the final economic blow for millions of workers who have been struggling to gain an economic foothold,” the members wrote.
Yet, despite this jobs crisis for American workers, the White House continues to advocate that CEOs and business executives seek lower cost labor. The White House has entertained a parade of high-powered business executives to discuss immigration policy, all while shutting out the concerns of everyday wage-earners who overwhelmingly oppose these measures. You even released an economic report saying that the "hospitality and leisure industry" needs "legislation that would legalize workers in the U.S. and facilitate the lawful employment of future foreign-born workers."
The GOP congressmen then posed a question to the president: “Is it the position of the White House that the hotel industry cannot be asked to find employees from among the legions of unemployed residing here today?”
They also cited a recent report from Byron York in the Washington Examiner showing how companies that have been begging for new workers from overseas have laid off thousands of American workers in recent months.
The 16 GOP congressman argued that pushing for a “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” package, whether it be in one bill or in a series of piecemeal or step-by-step bills, is essentially crony capitalism that would disproportionately harm the black and Hispanic communities in America.
"So-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform may be a good deal for big businesses who want to reduce labor costs, and it may be a good deal for progressive labor unions seeking new workers from abroad, but it’s an awful deal for US workers – including African-American and Hispanic communities enduring chronically high unemployment,” they wrote. “Job number one for Congress should be to reduce the unemployment rolls, get families and communities out of poverty and government dependency, rebuild our deteriorating communities and collapsing middle class, and increase wages for American citizens. Your immigration proposals do the exact opposite on every count.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...erican-workers
See the Scathing Letter GOP Lawmakers Sent to Obama on Immigration
Jan. 9, 2014 8:06am Sara Carter
Sixteen GOP lawmakers warned President Obama in a letter delivered Thursday that they “reject” his call for the House to pass an immigration reform bill, which they say will displace tens of millions of American workers who are already struggling to keep a part time job, reduce wages and affect tens of millions more who are unemployed.
Obama White House speech
Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks spearheaded the letter, along with 15 other members, saying the Senate’s immigration overhaul will give permanent residency to over 30 million immigrants in the next decade, adding in the letter that the “so-called comprehensive immigration reform may be a good deal for big businesses who want to reduce labor costs, and it may be a good deal for progressive labor unions seeking new workers from abroad, but it’s an awful deal for U.S. workers – including African-American and Hispanic communities enduring chronically high unemployment.”
“The letter focuses on the concern that the president’s preferred immigration policies would have a harmful impact on American workers,” a Senate aide, who is familiar with the immigration reform proposals, told TheBlaze. “I think it’s particularly timely given the president’s and Senate Democrats’ current focus on unemployment, wages, and inequality.”
To that end, the letter’s conclusion doesn’t hold back [emphasis added]:
"Job number one of Congress should be to reduce the unemployment rolls, get families and communities out of poverty and government dependency, rebuild our deteriorating communities and collapsing middle class, and increase wages for American citizens. Your immigration proposals do the exact opposite on every count.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014...n-immigration/
Republicans shift immigration debate from amnesty to Americans’ jobs
12:16 AM 01/10/2014
Neil Munro
The Daily Caller
http://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-cont...tty-Images.jpg
A group of House Republicans is trying to shift the media’s focus in the immigration debate away from the proposed amnesty for 12 million illegal immigrants and toward the 140 million Americans now trying to earn a decent living amid high unemployment and declining wages.
“Amnesty is a component part of the overall issue and I tried to focus on the overall economic issue,” Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who issued a statement for the group, told The Daily Caller. “For me, the issue has always been about the damage that the president’s immigration policy will do to the American economy and to American workers.”
But only 16 House conservatives signed the letter, including Rep. Tom Cotton, who is running for a Senate seat in Arkansas.
“I can’t say for a certainty why some Representatives have not cosigned a letter to protect American workers, but I do note that it is an election year and there is some fear associated with very wealthy people who are contributors [and] who make profits by hiring illegal aliens and foreign workers over American citizens,” Brooks said.
The letter slams the Senate-passed bill, which President Barack Obama has repeatedly endorsed.
“So-called comprehensive immigration reform may be a good deal for big businesses who want to reduce labor costs, and it may be a good deal for progressive labor unions seeking new workers from abroad, but it’s an awful deal for U.S. workers — including African-American and Hispanic communities enduring chronically high unemployment,” said the letter, which doesn’t mention amnesty.
The Senate-passed immigration bill “would double the number of guest workers brought into this country at a time of crippling joblessness and falling income … [and it] would add millions more permanent immigrant workers through green cards,” said the letter.
The Congressional Budget Office’s June report “confirms that these immigrants will be mostly lower-skilled, and that wages for American citizens would fall while American unemployment would rise,” said the letter.
Roughly 21 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Wages have been flat for decades, and economic inequality has spiked, amid record levels of low-skill immigration, now about one million per year.
The letter’s focus on American workers is unusual, mostly because advocates for an immigration rewrite focus the media’s attention on the demand for amnesty of illegal immigrants who face deportation.
Illegal immigrants win a good deal of sympathy from reporters, especially if they have gotten into university or have lived in the U.S. as children. Partly because of the sympathetic coverage, advocates’ polls show that many Americans would back a conditional and staged amnesty for the illegals, but only if government would actually enforce immigration laws. Few Americans, however, think amnesty is a priority.
But very few voters support the paired demand by business for more immigrant workers. In fact, one 2013 poll showed that only two percent of Americans strongly back a law allowing companies to hire foreigners while Americans are unemployed.
Brooks’ letter highlights the public’s deep opposition to immigrant workers. Obama is “increasing the labor supply by roughly a third … [which is] going to suppress the wages of almost all Americans, especially blue-collar workers. The upper class tends to gain because it means they can hire people for less, and that’s why the Chamber of Commerce is stridently for wage suppression,” said Brooks, who is regarded by progressives as a right-winger.
Obama and White House officials do not recognize a link between Americans’ economic problems and low-skill immigration. Instead, they’re simultaneously calling for measures to reduce economic inequality and to increase immigration. ”What the Senate passed in a bipartisan way adheres to [Obama's] principles,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Jan. 7.
The law will “bring great benefit to our economy and our businesses, which is, again, the focus of the president and of so many members of both parties here in Washington,” he admitted.
But a CBO report, which Obama frequently cites, also showed that the Senate bill would steer an even greater share of the nation’s income to investors, away from workers.
One day before Brooks released the letter, the chamber declared it would redouble its push for additional cheap labor.
The chamber “will pull out all the stops — through grassroots lobbying, communications, politics, and partnerships with unions, faith organizations, law enforcement and others — to get it done,” Tom Donohue, the president of the chamber, told reporters Jan. 7.
The chamber will also use its clout and funding to displace political candidates who won’t back its preferences, he said. “If you can’t make them see the light, then at least make them feel some heat,” Donohue said.
The GOP’s House leaders have been vague about their views on immigration, and have zig-zagged between their business donors and their voters. ”The House leadership has been all over the map on the immigration issue and so I don’t know what they’re going to do,” Brooks told TheDC.
In the Senate, Sen. Jeff Sessions has frequently highlighted the impact of the Senate bill on American workers.
The Senate bill would triple legal immigration for a decade, and double the inflow of temporary guest workers. The resulting inflow of 33 million immigrants and roughly 13 million guest workers would provide one immigrant or guest worker to compete against every American for a job.
The increased competition is hitting university graduates and professionals, not just blue-collar workers. California’s top court, for example, recently allow an illegal immigrant to begin working as a lawyer in the state. At least 700,000 university trained guest workers are already working in the nation’s labs, hospitals, universities and stock-picking companies.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/10/re...mericans-jobs/
