Thread: Update on Cornyn's Sneaky, Destructive SKIL Bill

Thanks to all who called Congressional offices! Looks like we're not quite out of the woods yet, but we should know more tomorrow.

Read on....


From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Thursday 7DEC06 5:45 p.m. EST

Your phone calls are making a real difference -- Cornyn/Microsoft currently stymied


DEAR FRIENDS OF AMERICAN PROGRAMMERS, ENGINEERS, NURSES, PHYSICAL THERAPISTS AND SCIENTISTS,

Our citizen network did quite a job again today.

I cannot predict. But as the Senate offices begin to close their phones down for the evening (even as the Senate continues to do business), our friends on the Hill are feeling much more confident that we will wake up tomorrow morning and find that Sen. Cornyn and and the tech industry lobbyists will NOT yet have succeeded.

Some, though, believe Cornyn will make another attempt tonight to get a vote on his bill to almost double H-1B visas and employment-based greencards next year. Once the phone lines are down, however, you just have to take a rest and know you did what you could and hope that your efforts were enough to pull us through this evening.

Your thousands of phone calls made a major impression on all Senate offices and on both Republican and Democratic leadership offices in the House.

Our Capitol Hill Team is hearing from many staffers that this has been one of those "Phone Phenomenon" days in which one issue practically ties every office up in knots.

AND NEARLY 100% OF THE CALLS ARE ON OUR SIDE -- AGAINST HELPING THE TECH COMPANIES, UNIVERSITIES AND HOSPITALS TO USE MORE FOREIGN LABOR TO DEPRESS THE WAGES OF THEIR AMERICAN WORKERS

You may not have any idea how important that has been.

Perhaps most importantly, it has made our best Senator allies exceptionally determined to block Sen. Cornyn (R-TX). Our latest nose count is that nobody is backing off their "holds" that are keeping the Cornyn SKIL Act legislation from reaching the floor of the Senate.

Cornyn and the tech industry lobbyists continue to try to strike deals with the Senators to get them to remove their HOLDS. But backed by what they see as an overwhelming constituency knowledge of the issue and constituency opposition to increased foreign importation, the "holding" Senators are not budging. We are unaware of any of them accepting a deal to change their position.

The reason individual Senators are able to exercise such power with these holds is because Cornyn has to get a lot of normal precedure waived in order to bring up his bill at the last minute like this.

Our understanding is that Majority Leader Frist (R-TN) could go ahead and bring Cornyn's bill to the floor even with the holds if he wants to. But then he would have to get at least 60 of the 100 votes to break the holds of their colleagues -- which is kind of a personal thing.

The more that you make this bill seem totally radioactive the less likely Sen. Frist will want to end his Senate career on such an explosive note, or that 60 Senators would want to vote to break the holds.

A big thank you to all who have helped again today. There are hundreds of thousands of households this evening spread across the country that will have a much happier Christmas if we succeed in blocking the threat to their jobs, wages and standard of living that Cornyn's bill represents.

Our nation's nurses, physical therapists, scientists, engineers and programmers have studied hard and worked hard and invested considerable money to be able to do these jobs. Why should our government import massive numbers of foreign workers (which no independent study has shown are needed) when that action would cause so many middle class American households to suffer?

At NumbersUSA, we spend a lot of our time championing better treatment for the poor. But we also believe in the protection of middle-class Americans. You who have acted today have done a great service to these households.

I expect to have marching orders for you first thing tomorrow morning based on what the situation has become by that time.

THANKS,

ROY

P.S. If you didn't read Prof. Norm Matloff's San Francisco Chronicle op-ed today, please do so now because it explains so well why we consider this fight against major increases in legal foreign workers to be as important as our fight against illegal immigration.

Read the article here:
http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/hightech.html

I will be especially watchful for the morning marching orders. I knew tons of people would call today, but many may be tired or confident tomorrow and if there is a stick or a straw that I can add to our fire I will.

I can remember when hardly anybody knew anything about the H-1b issue. I was on the old HotJobs boards when a nutty guy showed up ranting about something called an 'h-1b' that was responsible for his and many other people's job losses. I studied the matter and will never forget the awful sinking feeling when I ran the numbers and saw where this was going. I was halfway through a master's program - now nearly worthless. I finally understood why I was finding it so hard to find jobs and get interviews, even though I'd had professional, executive-level outplacement assistance and a good track record, and a skillset needed in every business and institution in town.(I was laid off in 2001) And why my grad school classes were increasingly filled with two kinds of people: unemployed Americans, and employed foreigners here on visas (many with tuition assistance). After a while, even my professors lost their industry jobs and had to rely on teaching and their still-employed spouses. That nutty guy was Pete Bennett, and I should look him up and thank him again.

Until Pete showed up, we'd have to fend off apparent do-gooders who reprimanded us for complaining and being negative. Every time we beat something back by lobbying like we did today, we show the value of well-researched and well-founded complaining!

Then the foreign critics started showing up on the boards, and I learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of prejudice. I was repeatedly assured that I was uneducated, stupid, lazy, and didn't know English, by people who I'd never been in the same room with. One even assured me I didn't bathe. How he could know that from the Internet still eludes me. The sense of entitlement to American jobs I encountered was creepy. I am 53 and THIRD generation IT, yet I ran into foreigners who genuinely believed that America owed its technological greatness to letting them in. I saw people assert that our nation had nobody who could run the computers and technology - that we had invented. I saw the poison of the put-down and the re-writing of history. The IBM of today is some toxic changeling, not the company my grandfather worked for (engineer, inventor, trainer, quarter-century club). It was shocking to learn that one reason why we get so little sympathy is that many foreign workers have been told by what they consider authoritative sources, that they are mererly taking over jobs from incompetent Americans who never deserved them in the first place. I'd love to track that line of thought down to its source, but I think I might have to learn Hindi or Tamil.

Sleep well, everyone. Even if Cornyn somehow pulls this out of a hat, laws can be overturned down the road. I'm up for it.

The H-1C visa has been approved by the Senate. It didn't take long either.
The H-1C is a visa that allows hospitals to import foreign nurses for
places like slums.

Hopefully this sorry saga won't be how it goes on the Skil bill or an H-1B
increase.

This is how it happened.

On December 5, 2006 Sen. Cornyn (yes, the same Senator who is pushing the
Skil bill) went on the record supporting House Bill HR 1285. The very next
day the Judiciary committee "discharged" it and WHAM!

Nurses might want to know just which one of their representatives voted to
bring in more foreign nurses. Unfortunately that won't be possible because
both the House and Senate bills were approved by unrecorded voice votes.

Our Democracy in action!

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-1285

Jun 20, 2006: This bill passed in the House of Representatives by voice
vote. A record of each representative's position was not kept.

Dec 6, 2006: This bill passed in the Senate by Unanimous Consent. A record
of each representative's position was not kept.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD

http://thomas.loc.gov/

Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Routine Proceedings, pages S11239-S11373
Daily Digest
Nursing Relief for Disadvantaged Areas Reauthorization Act: Committee on
the Judiciary was discharged from further consideration of H.R. 1285 , to
extend for 3 years changes to requirements for admission of non-immigrant
nurses in health professional shortage areas made by the Nursing Relief for
Disadvantage Areas Act of 1999, and the bill was then passed, clearing the
measure for the President.


NURSING RELIEF FOR DISADVANTAGED AREAS REAUTHORIZATION ACT -- (Senate -
December 05, 2006)


[Page: S11175] GPO's PDF
--- Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I would like to go on the record regarding
H.R. 1285, the Nursing Relief for Disadvantaged Areas Reauthorization Act
of 2005, a bill that I support as it moves through the Senate today.

This legislation extends for 3 years the Nursing Relief for
Disadvantaged Areas Act of 1999 which provides nonimmigrant visas for
nurses in areas where there is a shortage of health professionals.

Many hospitals across the Nation and, particularly in my home State of
Texas, have been experiencing great difficulties over the last several
years in attracting nurses. This shortage has been especially severe in
both inner-city neighborhoods and in rural isolated areas.

It was for this reason that in 1999 Congress passed the Nursing Relief
for Disadvantaged Areas Act. This legislation created a new H-1C temporary
worker program with 500 visas available per year for registered nurses. In
order to be eligible to petition for an alien nurse, a hospital must be
located in a health professional shortage area as designated by the
Secretary of Health and Human Services, the hospital must have at least 190
acute care beds, and it must have a certain percentage of Medicare and
Medicaid patients.

The legislation also included strong protections for American nurses by
requiring that any H-1C nurses be paid the prevailing wage and mandating
that hospitals take steps to recruit American nurses. Furthermore H-1C
nurses may not comprise more than 33 percent of a hospital's registered
nurses, and these hospitals may not contract out any H-1C nurses to other
hospitals.

The legislation before us, H.R. 1285, will reauthorize the H-1C nurse
program for 3 more years. The H-1C visa category is vital to Texas
hospitals like McAllen Medical Center and Mercy Health System, located in
Laredo, TX. The United States is facing a critical nursing shortage in the
coming years, and this small but significant program is essential to our
efforts to recruit more nurses to the United States. I believe this
legislation strikes a balance between the critical need for nurses in
certain shortage areas while protecting the wages and working conditions of
U.S. citizen nurses.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.


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That is ironic because in the wake of the dot.com bust and the massive layoffs of 2001-2002, I often heard IT people considering or being advised to pursue some type of medical career.