By Joel Gehrke • 2/25/16 5:21 PM

Sen. Chuck Schumer laughed about Florida Republican Marco Rubio's collaboration on the Gang of Eight immigration bill on Thursday, as he debated the merits of the legislation with Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

The New York Democrat argued that Sessions' hearings on immigration demonstrate the need for the Gang of Eight legislation that stalled in the last Congress. He listed the Republican senators who helped draft the bill, saving Rubio for last and putting special emphasis on his name. Then Schumer said the lawmakers worked "on the Democratic — on the Republican side" to pass the bill.

"I had fun doing that," Schumer laughed.

Schumer's jokes about Rubio, one the three remaining major contenders for the GOP nomination, seemed aimed at reminding people how the Gang of Eight bill damaged the presidential primary prospects of a candidate once regarded as the golden boy of Republican politics. It was just one example of how Schumer needled his Republican counterparts during the Senate hearing.

Sessions called the hearing to investigate whether U.S. tech companies are replacing American employees with cheaper, high-skilled foreign-born workers, and invited a former Disney employee to testify about being laid off and required to train his replacement, who was working in the United States on an H-1B visa.

"I started to think what kind of American was I becoming?" Leo Perrero, a former IT engineer at Disney, told the panel in his prepared testimony. "Was I going to become part of ruining our country by taking severance pay in exchange for training my foreign replacement? How many other American families would be affected by the same foreign worker that I trained? Sadly, I choose the money over America."

Sessions argued that Congress needed to change the H-1B visa program in order to help American workers retain jobs in an era of increasing automation.

"How many should we bring in [from] abroad to take routine work that our people need to be doing? Else they're going to be on welfare, they're going to be depressed. What are they going to do with their lives?" Sessions said. "We have a declining job [market]. Robotics, computers, technology is making us more productive, which, in the long run, should be good and I don't intend to try to stop, but this is the reality that we're dealing with."

Schumer maintained that Republican opponents of the Gang of Eight bill couldn't offer any help to such workers and argued that his legislation would have increased penalties for companies that replaced Americans with foreign workers.

"Today's hearing is not an indictment of immigration reform, it's an indictment of doing nothing," Schumer said. "They are for the status quo. Until we see a comprehensive bill on the other side of the aisle, we'll be able to say that."

At that point, Sessions interjected. "We have three bipartisan bills pending," he said.

"Yeah, but they're not comprehensive, they're little tiny pieces," Schumer replied.

"Well, if you mean comprehensive, we double the lawful flow of immigration across the board," the Judiciary subcommittee chairman replied, before realizing the interruption of Schumer's statement was a minor breach of decorum. "Excuse me," he apologized.

Schumer didn't mind. "It's okay, we see each other in the gym on bicycles every morning so we can talk to each other like this," the incoming leader of Senate Democrats said. "I'm making him a little more Brooklyn; I don't know if he's making me a little more Alabama."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sc...rticle/2584250