Jeb scrubbed work-visa proposals from 2016 immigration plan?
Bush called for huge increases in foreign workers in recent book
Published: 2 hours ago
Aaron Klein
On his presidential campaign website, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush recently unveiled a six-point plan to “secure the border and enforce our immigration laws.”
The blueprint is largely extracted from Bush’s book “Immigration Wars,” in which he and a co-author “presented a number of proposals to strengthen America’s immigration policy,” the campaign website reads.
However, WND has found that entirely missing from Bush’s 2016 campaign website’s immigration reform plan is one of the central themes of his 2013 book – a proposal to vastly expand the number of the nation’s work-based visas.
In the book, Bush and co-author Clint Bollick recommended the government offer nearly limitless work visas to students who obtain advanced degrees in the STEM fields— science, technology, engineering and mathematics – and who intend to work in the U.S. in those fields.
He also called for the granting of green cards to those in the country for at least five years on the guest-worker program. Current law requires guest workers to declare their intention to not immigrate to the U.S.
Writing in “Immigration Wars,” Bush advocated that students who obtain advanced degrees in the STEM fields “should automatically be entitled to work visas if they obtain jobs in those fields following graduation.”
“That employment should not solely be tied to large companies, but should include small companies and start-ups that are such dynamic forces in our economy,” he added.
Bush continued: “Student visas should be plentiful and readily accessible, not only for the talent that many foreign students bring as possible future Americans, but for the goodwill toward America they engender if they return to their native countries.”
None of that rhetoric made it into Bush’s six-point plan as presented on his campaign website.
‘Vastly expanded’
In his book, one of Bush’s primary criticisms of the country’s current immigration system is that “we are not bringing in highly skilled immigrants in sufficient numbers to meet our needs and to maximize future American prosperity.”
He used the book to call on work-based visas to be “vastly expanded beyond current numbers.”
Besides students, Bush proposed “workers in especially important occupations requiring specialized skills should be given green cards after a specified time, and they should know that up front.”
Bush opined that U.S. immigration agencies should set priorities for workers who possess skills that are in particular demand at the time, pending an assessment of the current unemployment rates in those areas.
“In that way, our immigration system will enable us to meet our most urgent needs while not exacerbating unemployment,” he wrote.
Bush proposed that along with increasing the number of high-skilled workers on H1-B visas, the U.S. should also vastly up the number of low-skilled workers who come in through guest-worker programs pending market demand.
“If jobs disappear, the number of guest-worker visas will decline as well,” he posited in the 2013 book.
Bush blasted the current system, which requires temporary workers to declare their intent not to immigrate to the United States.
“That makes no sense given that the guest-worker program provides a chance for visitors to demonstrate the qualities we desire for American citizenship,” he wrote.
Bush proposed that after five years of working pursuant to renewable temporary work visas, “guest workers should be entitled to green cards if they have obeyed the law and paid taxes.”
What happened to the plan?
Despite the centrality in his 2013 book of the work and student visa proposals, not a single one of those policies made it to Bush’s six-point immigration-reform plan as posted on the presidential candidate’s website.
The only part of his 2016 campaign plan that discusses immigrant employment is an enforcement section calling for a “strong E-Verify system to ensure that American businesses are not hiring illegal immigrants.”
That six-point campaign plan, filed under the banner of “Border Security,” reads as follows:
1. A forward-leaning Border Patrol with the flexibility to deploy resources to meet threats.
2. Use new technologies to achieve continuous surveillance of the border.
3. Bolster border infrastructure and improve access to federal lands.
4. Require electronic verification of employment eligibility.
5. Identify and send home the people who are entering the United States and overstaying their visas or otherwise violating the terms of their admission.
6. Crack down on sanctuary cities that undermine efforts to enforce immigration laws.
Bush’s book proposals stand in stark contrast to the immigration reform plan posted on Donald Trump’s campaign website.
Unlike Bush, who complains not enough visas are granted to students with STEM degrees, Trump lamented that “we graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs.”
“Yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program,” Trump’s campaign website states.
Trump called for a raise in the prevailing wages paid to H-1B visa workers to “force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas.”
Trump is further demanding “requirement to hire American workers first.”
“Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement,” the presidential candidate’s plan states.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/jeb-scrub...igration-plan/
