Gang of Eight Can’t Defend Their Own Bill

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by Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum: The Gang of Eight can’t defend the Gang’s own amnesty bill, S.744, or even explain it to public or TV audiences. The Gang’s premier salesman, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), admits that it isn’t acceptable in its present form and must be amended on the Senate floor.

Public opinion surveys show that the American people want the border secured and current laws enforced before we even discuss amnesty. The Gang’s promise that amnestied aliens must pay back taxes is a fraud because neither aliens nor employers have documentation for the years the illegal was paid in cash.

The Gang of Eight bill doesn’t make any pretense of securing the border first. S.744 gives us only promises, promises and pie-in-the-sky plans but no reason to believe any of them because all our government’s promises about border security, implementation of an entry-exit system, and workplace verification of employee identity have been repeatedly and flagrantly broken. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on us.

The Gang of Eight bill allows the Obama Administration to decide which laws to enforce. Every S.744 provision allows Obama bureaucrats to issue waivers to avoid enforcement, a wrinkle that fits perfectly with Obama’s governing style, i.e., rule by executive-branch regulations instead of by constitutional legislation.

S.744 weakens the never-enforced electronic entry/exit system that the 1996 law requires to be used at all seaports and airports, and was funded by Congress five times. S.744 guts this law by excluding 106 land border-entry points where most crossings take place.

S.744 will continue to increase our current illegal population. The Gang of Eight bill not only fails to enforce the federal law against giving college-tuition preference to illegal aliens (which Obama unconstitutionally violated by executive order), but guarantees states the right to offer in-state tuition to future illegal aliens. The Gang of Eight bill will give work permits immediately to 11 million illegal aliens, and then give green cards within 7 years to another 4.3 million foreigners who have applied in chain migration categories. These work permits will flood our labor market with millions of aliens and make unemployment a bigger crisis than it is now.

The Gang of Eight is just as unfair and discriminatory to college-educated American citizens as to entry-level job seekers. S.744 creates four new unlimited green-card preferences for aliens: (1) those with a Ph.D. in any field, (2) foreign physicians, (3) foreign students who graduate from a U.S. college with an advanced degree in a STEM subject, and (4) spouses and minor children of the above.

S.744 doubles the current legal immigration level which is already triple the historical average. The bill sets no numerical limits on some types of legal immigrants, despite the billions of people in the world who would like to move to America, the land of freedom and prosperity.

Chamber of Commerce lobbyists are advocating a “let the market decide” policy, i.e., who and how many people can come to work in the United States. This actually undermines U.S. sovereignty and the right of our people to make such decisions that will determine our future.

The “let the market decide” argument is extremely hypocritical. In a free market, a labor shortage raises wages, but the lobbyists want to jimmy the system by creating an artificial overabundance of labor in order to enable corporations to pay lower wages to those who come from low-wage countries and are glad to work for low pay without American-style benefits.

S.744 would impose a massive unfunded mandate on U.S. taxpayers that will require us to increase taxes or incur more debt, or both. That’s because those 11 million amnestied aliens will receive $9.4 trillion in government services over their lifetime, but pay only $3.1 trillion in taxes, for a net cost of $6.3 trillion.

The main reason for this enormous cost to U.S. taxpayers is that the big majority of these aliens never even finished high school. Wages, and the taxes you pay, are proportional to the job for which you can be hired.

Last year, after widespread public criticism, we thought we abolished the practice of loading a spending bill with earmarks, i.e., special spending that benefits the constituents of favored Members of Congress. Earmarks are back with specific goodies buried in S.744.

The Gang of Eight bill exempts ski and snowboard instructors from the visa cap in order to benefit Colorado, exempts meat-packing workers to benefit South Carolina, and exempts workers who repair cruise ships to benefit Florida, all states that have Senators on the Gang of Eight.

And don’t forget the shocking earmarks for immigration lawyers and community organizers for illegal-alien groups. S.744 can never be amended into good legislation; it is thoroughly bad and incredibly costly.

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