Thread: TPP OVERRIDES IMMIGRATION PROTECTIONS FOR U.S. PROFESSIONALS, SKILLED WORKERS, SAYS C

TPP OVERRIDES IMMIGRATION PROTECTIONS FOR U.S. PROFESSIONALS, SKILLED WORKERS, SAYS CRITIC



by NEIL MUNRO
6 Nov 2015

The new Trans-Pacific Partnership trade-deal allows U.S. and foreign companies to hire foreign professionals and technicians to take skilled jobs in the United States, while still only paying them wages typical for their home countries, such as Vietnam and Malaysia, immigration expert Rosemary Jenks told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily radio show.

“We have this massive [TPP] contract that we are apparently about to sign — if they have their way in Washington — that says we are going to open our entire service industry to companies and [their] employees from all of these partner countries,” said Jenks, the director of government relations at NumbersUSA

NumbersUSA is an immigration-reform group that wants to reduce the annual inflow of roughly 1 million immigrants and 700,000 guest-workers. Currently, roughly 4.4 million Americans turn 18 each year.

House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), plus Michael Froman, the chief U.S. trade negotiator, and many other officials, have deceptively claimed that the TPP trade deal makes no changes to the nation’s immigration laws, Jenks said. “It is the sleight-of-hand that is so typical of Washington,” she said.

“It is technically true… [that] TPP would not require us, up front, to change our immigration laws,” she said, if it is approved by the House and Senate next year. But it would create an huge new market for service companies to use existing laws to hire foreign service professionals for jobs in the United States, and it creates a new international committee that can make immigration changes, she said.

TPP’s forced rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws “comes at the back end of the [TPP] process, not the front end,” Jenks said.

The TPP’s opening-up of the U.S. service sector is critical, she said. It means companies will have an incentive to maximize their use of existing rules that allow them to bring an unlimited number of foreign workers — dubbed ‘guest workers’ — into the United States.

The guest-worker visas are L-1 visas and the B-1 business-tourist visas, she said. Service jobs include law, medical and engineering, architecture, equipment and machine maintenance, telecommunications and much else, she told Breitbart News in a later interview.

For example, “if GE can make the argument that a particular [foreign] mechanic serving a particular kind of machine has specialized knowledge, then the person can brought over from Malaysia,” via the L-1 visa, to work in a job in the United States at normal Malaysian wage-rates, she said.

Even if the migrant foreign workers are paid American wage-levels, she said, the huge influx of foreign workers will flood the U.S. market and drive down wages paid to American technicians and professionals. “It is pure supply-and-demand,” she said. For example, “if you increase the supply of legal services, you increase the number of law firms, you reduce the wages of [American] lawyers,” she said.

Top government officials are trying to hide this hugely important part of the TPP deal, she said.

The sheer size and complexity of the TPP deal hides the foreign-labor impact, she told Breitbart News. “There is a chapter in the TPP called ‘Temporary Entry for Business Persons.’ That would be the immigration chapter, right? [But] the United States didn’t take part in a specific subchapter of that part so [it appears] we are not changing our immigration laws up front for TPP,” she said.

Also, the TPP deal does not obviously mandate the inflow of foreign workers, but it creates huge incentives for U.S. companies to hire foreign workers, at foreign-wage rates, she said. The TPP’s chapter on cross-border trade in services “guarantees that the United States will open our economy to the TPP partners countries to send in service-providers… across the service industry,” she said.

Similarly, the treaty does not formally change U.S immigration laws, but it creates an international commission that can and will later change those laws to the advantage of companies and foreign countries, she told Breitbart. Once the treaty is signed, the TPP “the commission is the arbiter” of U.S immigration law, she said.

“It can decide the U.S. is not doing enough to open up its visa process or is not allowing enough service-providers to come… and that puts pressure on Congress to change our immigration laws.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...s-says-critic/

also posted in the other TPP thread of today....

Notice how Obuma announces NO keystone pipeline today to receive positive publicity and to offset the TPP trade deal text released today. Absolutely horrendous trade deal! Important to let your reps know the trade deal is NOT acceptable - @90 days to congressional vote and we want to stop it.

• If the TPP is approved by Congress, this awful deal would offshore good-paying American jobs and drive down wages in the jobs that are left, increasing inequality by forcing Americans into competition with workers abroad paid less than 65 cents an hour. The pact is so poorly written, it would also enable products assembled from parts made in "third party" countries that aren't subject to any TPP obligations to enter the U.S. duty free. It also includes language that effectively bans "Buy American" and "Buy Local" preferences in many types of government purchasing.

• The TPP would hand corporate polluters new tools for attacking future climate policies, also ignoring our environmental laws that help prevent us, our waters and lands from being exposed to more sickening and killer toxins, including controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions that enable them to challenge U.S. laws, regulations and court decisions as "regulatory takings" in international tribunals that circumvent the U.S. and any other country's judicial system. WHOA!

• The TPP would also increase health care prices and reduce access to medicine through language designed to delay the introduction of low-cost generic medications and that enables pharmaceutical companies to challenge Medicare, Medicaid and other public health programs' cost-saving mechanisms. The TPP actually rolls back some of the hard-fought protections for access to medicine in trade agreements that were secured during the George W. Bush administration.

It also gives Obuma a free hand to bring more immigrants here from those countries. It allows other countries to override our immigration laws or what is left of them. Paleeze - this is beyond the pale!

He was put in office to keep our border open, encourage central americans to cross by the thousands, (and obnoxious, dangerous, deniers of American ways, middle east muslims too) distribute them all across the county and we pay for every single one of them their entire life, allow millions of so called anchor babies, grant amnesty, stop deportations, allow criminals & drug dealers to stay in this country, destroy our job market for citizens and endanger our lives. And put in office to deceive and push thru this trade deal. All part of the agenda that is his job description.