The Eight Gangster's Mission Impossible: Making the Immigration System Work for America and Americans

The “Eight Gangsters” cobbled together the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, S.744, purportedly to fix America's broken immigration system. A review of their legislative handiwork makes it clear that what they think is broken does not coincide with what most Americans think needs fixed.

Shortly before the Senate voted on S.744 Senator Jeff Sessions made an incredibly courageous and candid statement in which he stated, in part:

     "This flawed bill did not come about because of inadvertence, chance, error, ignorance, or mistake. It came about as a direct result of the fact that the forces that shaped it all had goals that were important to them, but these goals are not coterminous with the interests of the nation as a whole."

Presently, what is most broken is the lack of resources to enforce the immigration laws within the United States interior to create meaningful deterrence to would be lawbreakers. 

Current immigration laws have their roots in nearly a century of  regulations that had been originally enacted to protect American lives and jobs from aliens whose presence would be problematic. These are the laws that the administration has not only mocked but refused to enforce.

Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182 provides a list of categories of aliens who are to be prevented from entering the United States. It includes aliens who suffer dangerous communicable diseases, suffer serious mental illness, have been convicted of committing serious crimes, are war criminals, spies, human rights violators or terrorists. Additionally, aliens who are likely to remain in the United States illegally to take jobs that would create unfair competition for American workers, thereby lowering wages and working conditions for American workers are excludible as are aliens who would become public charges.

The goal of preventing the entry of the excludible aliens are commonsense and vital for the United States security and the well being of all Americans. Only the tiny group of the super-wealthy, whose goal is to further increase their wealth, want  to hire virtually unlimited numbers of foreign workers who will accept the lowest possible wages. This is not simply about hiring workers on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder that they falsely claim do the work Americans won't do, but also includes high tech workers such as computer programmers, scientists, technicians and engineers- the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) professionals.

This is not speculation. Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan laid out the goal of greatly increasing the number of foreign highly skilled workers when, on April 30, 2009, he testified before a hearing conducted by the Senate Immigration Subcommittee chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, S. 744's original sponsor. The topic for the hearing was titled "Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do It and How?”

Greenspan's testimony was clear. In his testimony, he extolled the need to greatly increase the quotas for foreign workers to achieve the perceived benefits he was adamant about creating like boosting the values of homes to benefit the banking industry and driving down the wages of American workers:

     "They (foreign workers) will, of necessity, move into vacant housing units, the current glut of which is depressing prices of American homes. And, of course, house price declines are a major factor in mortgage foreclosures and the plunge in value of the vast quantity of U.S. mortgage-backed securities that has contributed substantially to the disabling of our banking system.

     "The second bonus would address the increasing concentration of income in this country. Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition."

S.744 would enable huge numbers of foreign high-tech workers to legally enter the United States but would do nothing to increase resources for enforcing the immigrations laws  within the interior. The House of Representatives is all that stands in the way of this legislative betrayal. We must make certain that The “Peoples' House” lives up to its sobriquet and stands up for the well being of the citizens of the United States.