By Brandon Moseley
Alabama Political Reporter
Friday, September 12 U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R from Alabama) delivered remarks on what his office called, “The Administration’s collaboration with Congressional Democrats and the corporate immigration lobby on executive actions that would reduce workers’ pay.”
Senator Jeff Sessions said, “Earlier this week I spoke about the President’s promise that he would issue an executive amnesty to 5 or 6 million people. The planned amnesty would include work permits, photo ID’s, and Social Security numbers for millions of people who illegally entered the U.S., illegally overstayed their visas, or defrauded U.S. immigration authorities. The Senate Democratic Conference has supported and enabled the President’s unlawful actions and blocked every effort to stop them. Not even one of our Democratic colleagues has backed the House legislation that would stop this planned executive amnesty or demanded that Senator Reid bring it up for a vote. Every Senate Democrat is therefore the President’s partner in his planned lawless acts.”
Sen. Sessions said that this was due to the influence of special interests on our nation’s immigration system. Sen. Sessions said, “Just yesterday Majority Leader Reid wrote in a tweet something that was shocking. He said: ‘Since House Republicans have failed to act on immigration, I know the President will. When he does, I hope he goes real big.’ The Majority Leader of the Senate is bragging that he knows the President will circumvent Congress to issue executive amnesty to millions, and he is encouraging the President to ensure this amnesty includes as many people as possible. And the White House has acknowledged that 5 to 6 million is the number they are looking at.”
Sen. Sessions continued, “Has one Senate Democrat stepped forward to reject Mr. Reid’s statement? Has one Senate Democrat stepped forward to say: I support the legislation passed by the House of Representatives that would secure the border and block this executive amnesty? Have they ever said they support that? Have they ever said: I will do everything in my power to see that the House legislation gets a vote in the Senate so the American people can know what is going on? No. All we hear is silence….The only way Senator Reid can succeed in blocking this Senate from voting to stop the President’s executive actions is for members to stop supporting him.”
Sen. Sessions said, “Every Senator needs to stand up and represent their constituents, not big business, not the ACLU, not activist groups, not political interests but the American interests, the workers’ interests. That is what we need to expect from them, and we don’t have but a few weeks, it looks like, to get it done. In effect, the entire Senate Democratic Congress has surrendered the jobs, wages, and livelihoods of their constituents to a group of special interests meeting in secret at the White House. They are surrendering them to executive actions that will foist on the nation what Congress has refused to pass and the American people have rejected. They are plotting at the White House to move forward with Executive action no matter what the people think and no matter what Congress—through the people’s House—has decided.”
Sen. Sessions said, “White House officials are meeting with the world’s most powerful corporate and immigration lobbyists and activists who think border controls are for the little people. The administration is meeting with the elite, the cosmopolitan set, who scorn and mock the concerns of everyday Americans who are concerned about their schools, jobs, wages, communities, and hospitals. These great and powerful citizens of the world don’t care much about old fashioned things like national boundaries, national sovereignty, and immigration control—let alone the constitutional separation of powers.”
Sessions said that according to one report, corporate open borders interests have spent $1.5 billion since 2007 trying to pass their desired immigration bill. Sen. Sessions said, “—$1.5 billion. They tried and tried and tried to pass the bill through Congress, but the American people said: No, no, no. So they decided to just go to the President. They decide to go to President Obama, and they insist that he implement these measures through executive fiat. And Senate Democrats have apparently said: Well, that is just a wonderful idea. We support that. Just do it. Go big. But, Mr. President, wait a little bit. Wait until after the election. We don’t want the voters to hold us accountable for what you are doing. We want to pretend we in the Senate have nothing to do with it.”
Sen. Sessions said that Facebook CEO and open borders advocate Mark Zuckerberg (30, and worth about $30 billion) spoke in Mexico City, a guest of fellow billionaires, Mr. Carlos Slim, and said that America’s immigration system was a, “Policy unfit for today’s world.”
Sen. Sessions said, “Well, the ‘masters of the universe’ are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and fenced-off estates.” Sessions said that according to a Mercury News Report Zuckerberg just spent more than $30 million to buy four of his neighbor’s houses for privacy. “That is a world the average American doesn’t live in.” Sessions accused Zuckerberg of being, “The top spokesman for expanding the admission of foreign workers.”
Sessions said that the Senate immigration bill would, “Double the supply of low-wage foreign workers brought into the United States for companies such as Facebook.”
Sen. Sessions said, “Many of us have heard for a long time the claim that there is a shortage of STEM and IT workers. This has been the central sales pitch used by those making demands for massive increases in foreign worker programs across-the-board—programs that bring in workers for every sector in the U.S. economy. But we know otherwise from the nation’s leading academics, people who studied this issue and are professionals in it. I have a recent op-ed here from USA Today which reports that there is actually not a shortage but a surplus of Americans who have been trained in the STEM and IT fields and that this is why wages for these fields have not increased since 1999.”
Sen. Sessions said, “If you have a shortage of workers in a field such as information technology or science and mathematics, wages go up, do they not? If wages are not up, we don’t have a shortage. So rich high-tech companies are using the H-1B visa program to keep wages down and to hire less expensive workers from abroad. Indeed, the same companies demanding more guest workers are laying off American workers in droves.”
Sen. Sessions referred to an op-ed published in USA Today. The article was co-authored by: Ron Hira, Paula Stephan, Hal Salzman, Michael Teitelbaum, and Norm Matloff. Sessions said the four are labor economic experts who have testified before Congress. “They say:
‘None of us have been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages.’”
Sessions said the four say that “Silicon Valley has created an imaginary staffing shortage.” As evidence they cite Census reports that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs. The four writers said, “If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies try to attract scarce workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields…Those supporting even greater expansion seem to have forgotten about the hundreds and thousands of American high-tech workers who are being shortchanged—by wages stuck at 1998 levels, by diminished career prospects and by repeated rounds of layoffs….Unfortunately, companies are exploiting the large existing flow of guest workers to deny American workers access to STEM careers and middle-class security that should come with them. Imagine, then, how many more Americans would be frozen out of the middle class if politicians and tech moguls succeeded in doubling or tripling the flow of guest workers into STEM occupations.”
Sen. Sessions said that the Senate immigration bill, “The bill the House of Representatives rejected—would have done. It would have doubled the number of guest workers coming into America just to take jobs—coming in for the very purpose of taking a job that we need Americans to be taking.”
Sen. Sessions said, “Facebook has 7,000 workers. Microsoft just laid off 18,000. Why doesn’t Mr. Zuckerberg call his friend Mr. Gates and say: Look, I have to hire a few hundred people; do you have any resumes you can send over here? Maybe I will not have to take somebody from a foreign country for a job an unemployed U.S. citizen might take. There is this myth that we have surging employment in the high-tech industry. According to a recent Reuters report, ‘U.S. employers announced 50,000 layoffs in August of 2013, up 34 percent from the previous month, then up 57 percent through August 2012.’ As Byron York reported, Hewlett-Packard, a high-tech company, ‘laid off 29,000 employees in 2012’—29,000. ‘In August of 2013, Cisco announced plans to lay off 4,000 workers in addition to the 8,000 cut in the last 2 years’, and Cisco was right in the White House this summer with a group of other companies demanding more workers from abroad. Cisco was signing a letter with a bunch of other companies; ‘United Technologies has announced 3,000 layoffs this year’; ‘American Express cut 5,400 jobs’; ‘Procter and Gamble announced 5,700 jobs cut in 2012’; ‘T-Mobile announced plans to lay off 2,250 employees in 2012.’ There is no shortage of workers.”
Sen. Sessions said, “We have business CEOs, lobbyists, activists, immigration groups, and clever politicians who demand that we have to have even more workers brought into America even when we have a decline in wages and a decline in jobs. But what does the President do? His administration issues an executive order to provide foreign spouses—the citizens of other countries, not American citizens—with 100,000 jobs in the United States, precious jobs that many Americans would love to have. How many American spouses struggling to support their families would benefit from one of those jobs? How many single moms would benefit from a chance to earn a better paycheck? Our Senate Democratic friends talk about paycheck fairness repeatedly. Yet they are supporting policies that take jobs and wages directly from American women by the millions. Immigration policy is supposed to serve the national interest and the people of the United States, not the interests of a few activist CEOs and the politicians who are catering to them. We have had 40 years of mass immigration combined with falling wages, a shrinking workplace, and exploding welfare rolls. We know that, don’t we, friends and colleagues? It is time for a shift in emphasis. It is time to get our own people back to work, and our communities out of poverty, and our schools back on their feet.”
Sen. Sessions concluded, “The basic social contract is that citizens agree to follow the law, pay their taxes, devote their love and loyalty to their country, and in exchange the nation commits to preserve and protect and serve their interests, safeguard their freedom, and return to them in kind their first allegiance and loyalty. The job of elected officials is to answer to the people who sent them to Washington—not to scorn them, not to demean them, not to mock them, and not to sell their jobs and dreams to the highest bidder.”
Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III serves on four Senate committees: Armed Services, Judiciary, Environment and Public Works, and is the Ranking Member on the Budget Committee.
