Italians, not Texans, building signature Dallas bridge

DALLAS — Seventy million dollars worth of federal, state and city funds are pouring into the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

Supporters hope the span will be a signature for the city. But it may be remembered for something else, because the key jobs in its construction -- tens of thousands of man hours of work — are going to Italians.

On the construction site in the Trinity River bottoms, an American inspector told News 8: "If you don't speak Italian, it's going to be tough to communicate."

In broken English, a man who appeared to be a foreman, told me all the welders and helpers on the project — eleven in all — are from Italy.

The Texas Department of Transportation is buying the bridge. The steel comes from Italian company Cimolai. Cimolai imported the workers to build the span without giving Texans a chance at the jobs, which would have been required under H-2B visas, the kind specified for construction jobs.

When asked what kind of visas he and his colleagues had, the foreman in charge of the project said they had "visa for work (sic)."

Documents show the eleven men came in not as construction workers but "business visitors" on B-1 visas.

State Department rules do allow commercial or industrial workers to enter the U.S. under B-1 visas. They are permitted to enter the U.S. to "install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery."

TxDOT spokeswoman Cynthia Northrup White said her agency inquired about the legality of the visas "months ago" and found no problem.

The document Northrup White uses to defend the agency's position is an October 5 letter from Houston immigration attorney Beatriz Trillos Ballerini. The letter is not addressed to TxDOT, but rather to the Italian firm Cimolai, which presumably paid for her opinion.

Ballerini said the B-1 visas are "in full accordance with the federal regulations and the Foreign Affairs Manual." Ballerini cites section 9FAM 41.31N10.1 of the Foreign Affairs Manual, which lets workers use B-1 visas to "install equipment purchased from a company outside the United States."

She does not mention the part of the regulations that say the visas are not to be used for construction.

Ballerini did not return News 8's phone calls seeking clarification of her analysis.

Immigration lawyers commonly find parts of the law that fit their clients' needs to justify importing workers, while excluding parts of the law that do not.

An exhaustive News 8 investigation of aircraft mechanics found repair firms importing foreign mechanics as "scientific technicians" and "aircraft repair engineers" to fit certain sections of immigration law, when what the workers were really doing was fixing airplanes.

Immigration lawyer Ballerini writes that "only highly-trained individuals screened for this project possess the specialized knowledge of Cimolai S.p.A distinctive on-site installation technique, including preparation, unique welding procedures, assembly and appropriate lifting."

This is news to Williams Brothers Construction Company, the general contractor for the bridge.

We asked company spokesman Bill Miller if Italian welders are any different than American welders. "Presumably no," he chuckled. "Nothing that I can name."

TxDOT officials admit that the Italian workers actually welded the wrong ends of two sections of the bridge together.

"They turned one of the boxes [a massive piece of support steel on the bottom of the structure] around the wrong way," TxDOT inspector Stan Ybarra told News 8. "That happens. They’re only human."

All of this, however, is no joke for unemployed welders in North Texas, who might have been working on Dallas' signature bridge.

"We feel like we have American citizens being cheated out of work -- not only from the bridge, but all over by these visas," said Steve Anthony of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers. He says he could put 50 welders to work today.

Although the bridge is a signature project for Dallas, Mayor Tom Leppert said the lost jobs are not the city's problem. "That one's being run by TxDOT, so TxDOT's going to have to be the one to do the fact check, the analysis, all of those sorts of things; they're going to have to be approached."

TxDOT — citing Ballerini's letter to someone else — says it is the responsibility of the general contractor to make sure the law is followed.

And the jobless Texas welders trying to find a way to put dinner on the table tonight don't have anyone to plead their case.

Article was sent out by Mike Cutler today. Following are some of his comments by email.

According to the article, eleven Italian welders are assembling the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas. But the article notes that "tens of thousands of man hours of labor" is being done by foreign workers that should be done by Americans.

You may not think that 11 workers are a big deal when you consider that there are millions of illegal aliens in our country. The point is that I believe that this is the tip of a huge iceberg. As I have noted when I have testified before Congress and when I have testified before legislative hearings conducted on the state level, and at other venues, I have made the point that our nation's entire immigration system is utterly dysfunctional.

I have made the point that immigration has an impact on so many areas of concern for our nation and certainly the impact that failures to secure our borders against the unlawful entry of the millions of illegal aliens who are currently living and working in our country is an area of great concern. The Italian workers who are doing the work Americans want to do, did not run our nation's borders but were, in fact, granted business visas in order to enter our country and supplant American welders.

The B-1 visas that they were granted are supposed to be used by business people who come to the United States to attend conferences, make purchases of equipment and conduct other functions relating to their businesses. Foreign workers can used Bi1 visas to repair equipment but B-1 visas were never intended to be used by foreign workers coming to our country to replace American workers on construction jobs.

Workers who possess skills that are unavailable to an employer in the United States in a particular city are supposed to apply for visas such as H-1B and H-2B visas. As it now stands, the H1-B Visa Program for skilled workers is loaded with fraud and there are nearly no investigations being routinely conducted about these egregious examples of crimes that harm American workers. H-2B visas are supposed to be used for construction workers but this time an employer has apparently found a way to circumvent the H-2B process altogether by getting the United States Department of State to issue the welders discussed in this article, with B-1 visas and somehow the inspectors at a port of entry simple admitted them into the United States and on to the payroll of a company that, by all right, should have hired American workers!

As I read the article I was compelled to recall how when the administration and the "bobble heads" in the Congress passed the "Economic Stimulus Package" and touted the many "Shovel Ready" jobs that were set to get underway if only the money was made available. I guess I was mistaken as to who was supposed to be doing those jobs!

The biggest thing that is wrong with the immigration system is not that the immigration laws are bad, it is that those laws are not being enforced!

A job freed up by removing an illegal foreign worker creates a job for an American worker. This is the principle behind worksite enforcement. It is entirely appropriate to penalize employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens but ICE needs to address the other side of the equation- alien workers found to be working illegally need to be arrested, detained and removed from the United States. The stated policy of the current administration of only going after the employers and not the illegal alien employees does not deter illegal immigration.

Furthermore, statements made by the President, members of his administration and members of Congress who speak about their intentions to legalize all of the millions of illegal aliens who are in our country creates a huge incentive for many more aliens to seek to enter our country in violation of law in the hope that they will be able to participate in Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

In 1986, when the first amnesty was enacted, its proponents claimed that no more than 1.5 million illegal aliens would participate in that program that was supposed to be a "one time" program to finally get all of the illegal aliens "out of the shadows." By the time the bureaucratic dust settled, between 3.5 and 4 million illegal aliens availed themselves of that opportunity to be granted lawful status.

Fraud was rampant in that program because the INS lacked the resources to conduct field investigations and we were dealing with aliens who had no way of proving their true identities. There was no way of substantiating their identities or when, where or how they entered the United States.

If the INS was overwhelmed by "only" 3.5 million illegal aliens in 1986 to effectively administer the amnesty of 1986, what will the beleaguered and inept USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) do when 20 million or 30 million applications land on its adjudicators' desks?

I fear that any massive Comprehensive Immigration Reform program would entice many millions of additional illegal aliens to run our nation's borders and claim that they were present in our country for whatever the requisite period of time would be required in order to participate in this duplicitous program.

Here is something else to consider: an issue that further exacerbated the issue of fraud was a provision that prohibited INS agents from sharing information contained in the amnesty files with other law enforcement agencies regardless of what crimes these aliens might have been suspected of committing! Even if an alien who had acquired lawful status through that amnesty program was wanted for drug trafficking, murder, rape, child molestation, etc., etc, INS agents were ordered to not provide that information to any other law enforcement agency! The purported rationale was that our "leaders" did not want illegal aliens who violated our borders, violated our laws and violated their victims to be intimidated and not come forward to get their green cards and, ultimately, United States citizenship!

Two years ago, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation contained the same provision!

Our nation's leaders have mortgaged our children's and our grandchildren's futures by siphoning an incredible sum of money out of our economy to supposedly create new jobs to jump start our economy.

The unemployment rate continues to climb and yet there are those "leaders" who still want more foreign workers to come to our country and undercut Americans whose only goal is to pay their bills and support and feed their families!

Those who are pushing for Comprehensive Immigration Reform know that the law, the facts, commonsense and morality are all against their position so they play the only card they have left. They engage in lying and engaging in name-calling. They claim that anyone who wants to secure our nation's borders are "nativists." They use the term "racist" to describe anyone who calls for securing our borders against unlawful entry of illegal aliens and the creation of an immigration system that has real integrity.

Hear is the reality they don't want to hear (and that they don't want you to hear): America is not a "white" country. Our nation is arguably the most ethnically diverse nation on the face of this planet. As a New Yorker, I can tell you that my home town is home to people of all races, religions, ethnicities and cultures.

Enforcing our nation's borders against illegal entry is not about racism but it is about security and commonsense.

Mike Cutler

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