By Brandon Moseley
Alabama Political Reporter
U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R from Alabama) said on the floor of the Congress that America is not an oligarchy. President Obama and a handful of global elites shouldn’t be able to meet in secret to change American immigration laws without the consent of the Congress.
Senator Sessions said, “I have a message today to all the special interests, the global elites, the activists, and the cynical vote-counting political plotters that are meeting in secret at the White House. And the message is this: you don’t get to sit in a room and rewrite the laws of this country… America is not an oligarchy. ‘The Masters of the Universe’ don’t get to meet at the White House and decide how to run this country…If we leave town without having passed a bill to block this executive amnesty, then it will be permanent stain on this Senate, on the constitutional order, and on the tenure of this entire Senate Democrat caucus.”
Sen. Sessions said, “In a few moments, Senators in this chamber will cast one of the most important votes they will ever cast in their Senate careers. With this vote, Senators will make a simple but vital decision. It is a decision that will steer the future course of this nation. With this vote, Senators will decide whether their allegiance is to President Obama, Majority Leader Reid, and the open borders lobby, or whether their allegiance is to the American worker, the constitutional order, and our sovereign nation’s immigration laws. The choice could not be more clear. Do we, as a nation, have the right to control our own borders? That is the question every Senator will be answering today.”
Sen. Sessions said, “President Obama has announced to the entire world that he will implement a sweeping, unilateral, executive amnesty after the midterm elections. This amnesty by executive order will give, contrary to law, work permits and Social Security numbers to 5–6 million people who illegally entered the U.S., illegally overstayed their visas, or defrauded U.S. immigration authorities. With the casual stroke of a pen, the President is preparing to nullify the immigration laws of the United States. He is preparing to wipe away the lawful protections to which every American worker is entitled. He is preparing to assume for himself, and himself alone, the absolute power to decide who can enter our country, who can work in our country, and who can live in our country—by the millions—regardless of what the law says, what the citizenry says, and what the Constitution says.”
Sen. Sessions called our immigration rules, “The bedrock of any nation’s immigration laws, and indeed its very sovereignty. The President has already erased much of these rules—and his planned executive action would remove much of what remains of them. It would establish for people all over the world the principle that if you can get into America, you can stay in America and even be given the right to work in America.”
Sen. Sessions said that under President Obama’s leadership immigration officers have been barred from fulfilling their oaths to uphold the law. “The policies of this Administration represent an open invitation to the millions who enter the U.S. on visas each year to illegally overstay those visas.” “More than 99% of the immigrants apprehended with their families have so far been allowed to stay. This is in addition to the tens of thousands of migrants who have entered without their families who have been promptly released into the U.S., and many adults from Central America who have been released as well. As the President’s former ICE Director, John Sandgweg, explained, “if you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero. And who picks up the tab? Local school districts, local police departments, and local taxpayers.”
Sen. Sessions warned, “No nation can have a policy where people can simply show up at the border and demand to be released into the country—especially since the policy is to never seek to apprehend and deport them. But that’s what this Administration is doing right now. These policies represent a collapse of our immigration system.”
Sessions said that under Obama, asylum approval rates overall have increased dramatically even though an internal Department of Homeland Security report shows that at least 70% of asylum cases contain proven or possible fraud.”
Sen. Sessions said that the President of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, Kenneth Palinkas, said that ‘USCIS adjudications officers are pressured to rubber stamp applications instead of conducting diligent case review and investigation. The culture at USCIS encourages all applications to be approved, discouraging proper investigation into red flags and discouraging the denial of any applications. USCIS has been turned into an ‘approval machine,’” and that ”‘Large swaths of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) are not effectively enforced for legal immigrants and visa holders.’”
Sen. Sessions warned, “Consider what will happen to our system if the President goes through with his plan to provide unilateral executive amnesty to illegal workers and visa violators. What immigration law will be left?” “And when millions more enter illegally asking for their amnesty, will the President print work permits for them too?”
Sen. Sessions said, “When the American people learned what was in the Senate amnesty and guest worker bill—for which every single Senate Democrat voted—the people said: no, no, no. And the House stopped the plan. But now the same groups who wrote this bill are working with the White House to extract these benefits through executive fiat. They had at least 20 secret meetings in July and August alone to plan and execute their scheme. These measures, we are informed, would include a massive expansion in the admission of new foreign workers—including more workers for IT giants who are laying off Americans. We learned from Rutgers Professor Hal Salzman that 2/3 of all new IT jobs are now already being filled by foreign guest workers. Wages are falling. Americans wish to see record legal immigration levels reduced, not increased, by a 3-1 margin, and yet Senate Democrats are colluding with the White House to dramatically surge the supply of low-paid labor to fill open jobs.”
Sen. Sessions said, “I also have a message for the American people: you have been right from the beginning. You have justly demanded that our borders be controlled, our laws enforced, and that, at long last, immigration policy serve the needs of our own people first. For this virtuous demand, you have been demeaned, even scorned by the governing class. They know so much, this cosmopolitan elite. They want you to believe your concerns are somehow illegitimate. That you are wrong for being worried about your jobs, or your schools, or your hospitals, or your communities, or your national security. These elite citizens of the world speak often of their concern for people living in poverty overseas, yet turn a blind eye to the poverty and suffering in their own country. They don’t want you to speak up. They don’t want you to be heard. They don’t want you to feel you have a voice.”
Senate Democrats eventually blocked by a vote of 50–50 the effort to prevent President Obama from moving forward with his plan to implement a unilateral executive amnesty. President Obama is expected to implement his unilateral changes to American immigration policy after the November elections no matter which party is victorious in the November elections.
U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions is a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and serves on the Senate’s Armed Services, Environment and Public Works, and as the Ranking Member of the Budget Committee.
