Democratic Leadership Requires Stimulus Job Access for Illegal Aliens -- Secret Negotiations

House Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Reid and the Obama White House were absolutely certain about one thing for the House/Senate negotiating committee on the Stimulus Bill: There was to be no special restriction to keep illegal aliens from getting new jobs created by the bill at a cost of $250,000 to $500,000 each.

The Democratic leadership of our federal government made it clear that there has been no change from eight years of a Republican White House that let the Chamber of Commerce call the shots on immigration.

Pelosi, Reid and Obama gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce exactly what it wanted -- freedom for unscruplous businesses to continue to hire illegal aliens at the same rate as in the past, and to use the hundreds of billions of Stimulus dollars to do it.

(Rep. Calvert (R-Calif.) was the one who (inserted E-Verify) language into the Stimulus Bill in the House Appropriations Committee. Tonight, he stated the sad betrayal of the American workers. His words take on a partisan tone. As a studiously non-partisan organization, NumbersUSA is uncomfortable when issues are stated in partisan ways. But in this case, there is no question but that the national Democratic leadership sold out the interests of the American working man and woman.

"Tonight, behind closed doors with no input from House Republicans, Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid crafted the so-called compromise on the stimulus bill. What we now know is that while billions of American taxpayer dollars are going to be spent, there is no assurance that the jobs created will go to American workers. The two amendments that had been accepted by the House Appropriations Committee were stripped without discussion or debate."

The House of Representatives had included two provisions in its Stimulus bill to make sure that the huge sums of money would create jobs only for legally authorized workers. One provision reauthorized the current voluntary E-Verify program which expires March 6. The other (required local government or business receiving stimulus funds) to run their new hires through the electronic 99.5%-accurate E-Verify system. There were no publicly stated objections to this.

But the U.S. Senate repeatedly brushed aside Alabama ( Sen. Sessions') efforts to introduce the same protections into its Stimulus bill.

When the House and Senate negotiators sat down, the leader of the House (Nancy Pelosi) tossed aside the will of the Members of the House of Representatives and did the bidding of the most unscrupulous businesses of America.

The American people have repeatedly voiced their support for employment verification and yet we find that once again special interests win out. The one candle in the darkness of this disastrous bill was the reauthorization and requirements to use E-Verify. Now all we are left is a bill that places illegal immigrant interests above those of hard working American families and leaves the bill at the foot of future generations.

"Friends, this is an injustice that will come to plague the perpetrators as time moves on.

But the extent to which the ( U.S. Chamber of Commerce can continue to call the shots") on using illegal foreign workers and importing additional authorized foreign workers will depend on how hard each of you reading this will work to spread this story in every newspaper, talk show and website.

These closed-door affronts to fair-play and compassion were executed because the leaders believed they will get by with it.

.... because they believe the American people are too tired, too dispirited and too baffled by the complexity of the trillions of dollars of bail-outs to hold their leaders accountable.

The negotiated Stimulus Bill is expected to come to a vote in the House and Senate this week and then go to Pres. Obama for his signature by next Monday.

It’s Official — U.S. Chamber Would Lobby for Foreign Workers During a Depression

By Roy Beck, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 10:44 AM

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s reaction to a limited set of stricter rules for banks hiring foreign workers answers a bar debate that long has raged. The question has always been whether if we had another Great Depression would the Chamber still continue to lobby for more foreign workers on the basis of worker shortages. This week, the debate is settled. YES, THEY WOULD!

The Chamber and immigration lawyers are in an uproar over a provision placed in the Stimulus Bill by socialist Sen. Sanders of Vermont and Republican Sen. Grassley of Iowa. Any bank receiving Stimulus money should not be hiring foreign workers while laying off American workers, Sanders and Grassley said.

This concept has enraged the Chamber and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

(The provision) will hurt immigrant workers, the businesses they work for, and the economy. U.S. businesses who are trying desperately to recover financially MUST have access to specialty skills inside our country, so they can keep their businesses in the U.S.

— From a letter sent by R. Bruce Josten, the Chamber’s vice president for government affairs, and Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the lawyers association.

The news service Congress Daily noted that the provision in the Senate Stimulus doesn’t even prohibit the hiring of foreign workers while laying off Americans.

Companies would still be able to hire workers through the H-1B program.But under the Grassley-Sanders language, they must actively recruit U.S. workers, ensure they do not displace American workers and ensure that
American workers are not laid off in favor of foreign workers. Grassley and other advocates say the intention is to ensure that U.S. workers are given priority in hiring.

— Chris Strohm, Congress Daily

Shouldn’t this be the standard even during good times? But it isn’t. Except for a small percentage of companies in very special circumstances, current law allows corporations to ignore the applications from American students and choose only foreign students for jobs. It allows corporations to fire American workers and replace them with foreign workers. It even allows them to force American workers to train their foreign replacements in order to get severance pay.

But the Chamber of Commerce says it will do a major lobbying blitz on Congress this next week to make sure that those mistreatments of American workers can continue by removing the Sanders/Grassley language.

And don’t think the Chamber’s incredible greed and callousness toward American workers is all that special.

Editorial writers from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Indianapolis Star to probably the newspaper in your region have argued over the last week that our nation is experiencing a labor shortage.

That’s right! While the government announces that another 598,000 U.S. jobs were eliminated in January, the elite scribblers of our nation’s ivory towers are telling us that we don’t need a mandatory E-Verify system to keep illegal aliens out of jobs because the nation is suffering from a labor shortage. They say that the answer to illegal immigration is to greatly increase the number of foreign workers allowed to take jobs here.

This kind of thinking helped the majority of Senators on Monday decide that companies and local governments should be able to hire illegal aliens and use Stimulus money to avoid hiring American workers. Although the Senators put some limits on banks, they answered the Chamber’s call to make sure Stimulus recipients don’t have to use E-Verify to screen out illegal foreign workers.

With 12 million officially unemployed Americans, the Chamber and its friends still see worker shortages. Is there a point when our elected officials will stop listening to them?

http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/beckr/february-10-2009/its-official-us-chamber-would-lobby-foreign-workers-during-depressio

Pushing what may have been true in the past but is an outright lie now (labor shortage), the Democrats have truly surpassed themselves. Alas, they’ve probably judged their constituency correctly. They got a socialist con artist elected President! Only in L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” stories did that ever happen.

While it’s already been pointed out what corporate whores Pelosi and Co. are on this (what valiant champions of the downtrodden they are), the stripping of E-Verify after it’s improvement after years of criticism PROVES the Democrats and their RINO allies are scalawags of the worst sort. Seriously.

When the taxation with little to see for it finds too many of the guilty floating on Golden Parachutes the citizens will find it much too late to object. Ahh, but it’s a double-edged knife the Democrats are wielding here. The other side of the blade is their push for mass amnesty at the worst time our nation can afford it.

They wager that calling all opponents of that “racists” under a not-entirely-white President will seal the deal. Obama is waking up to a lot of realities he didn’t fathom: the Middle East, the trade gaps and national security to name a few. If he has any cognitive ability remaining he’ll realize amnesty for the illegals is actually twisting the knife in those who elected him...along with the rest of us who’ve been fighting it all along.

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