So I would pose
a question to Mr. Zuckerberg. I read in the news that Facebook is now worth
more than $200 billion. Is that not enough money to hire American workers for a
change? Your company now employs roughly 7,000 people. Let's say you want to
expand your workforce 10 percent, or hire another 700 workers. Are you claiming
you can't find 700 Americans who would take these jobs if you paid a good wage
and decent benefits?”
“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.
Tonight I
would like to talk about the influence of special interests on our nation's
immigration system. How did we get to the point where elected officials,
activist groups, the ACLU, and global CEOs are openly working to deny American
workers the immigration protections to which they are legally entitled? How did
we get to the point where the Democratic Party is prepared to nullify and wipe
away the immigration laws of the United States of America?
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.’
Let this sink
in for a moment. 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.
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.
This body is
not run by one man. We don't have a dictator in the great Senate. Every Member
has a vote. And 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.
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.
Politico reports that
‘White House officials conducted more than 20 meetings in July and August with
legal experts, immigration advocates and business leaders to gather ideas on
what should be included in the order.’ So who are these so-called expert
advocates and business leaders? They are not the law enforcement officers; they
are not our ICE officers; they are not our Border Patrol officers; they are not
the American working man and woman; they are not unemployed Americans.
They weren't in the room. You can be sure of that. Their opinions weren't
sought.
No, 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.
Well, don't
you get it? They believe they are always supposed to get whatever it is they
want. They are used to that. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars. In
fact, one report says they have spent $1.5 billion since 2007 trying to pass
their desired immigration bill—$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.
One of the
groups that has joined the chorus of special interests demanding executive
action on immigration is FWD.us, run by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He just
turned 30, and I understand he is worth about $30 billion.
Mr. Zuckerberg
has been very busy recently. One of his fellow billionaires, Mr. Carlos
Slim—maybe the world's richest man—invited Mr. Zuckerberg down to Mexico City to
give a speech. What did Mr. Zuckerberg promote in his speech? Well, this is a
report of it.
I guess I will
first note that young Mr. Zuckerberg maybe doesn't know there is a deep American
tradition—a tradition in most developed nations—that you don't go to a foreign
capital to criticize your own government. I suppose he doesn't know about that.
They probably didn't teach him about that when he was at one of the elite
schools he attended.
This is what
he said in Mexico City: ‘We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of
immigrants. And it's a policy unfit for today's world.’
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.
I have another
article from late last fall that was printed in Business Insider about
Mr. Zuckerberg's actions. The headline is ‘Mark Zuckerberg Just Spent More Than
$30 Million Buying 4 Neighboring Houses For Privacy.’ The article says: ‘Mark
Zuckerberg just made an unusual purchase. Well, four purchases. Facebook's
billionaire founder bought four homes surrounding his current home near Palo
Alto, Mercury News Reports. The houses cost him more than $30 million,
including one 2,600 square-foot home that cost $14 million. (His own home is
twice as large at 5,000 square-feet and cost half as much.) Larry Page made a
similar move a few years ago so he could build a 6,000-square-foot mansion. But
Zuckerberg's reason is different. He doesn't want to live in excess, he just
wants a little privacy.’
That is a
world the average American doesn't live in.
So Mr.
Zuckerberg—who has become the top spokesman for expanding the admission of
foreign workers—championed the Senate immigration bill for which all of our
Democratic colleagues voted. One of the things the bill did was double the
supply of low-wage foreign workers brought into the United States for companies
such as Facebook.
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.
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.
I would like
to read some excerpts from that op-ed published in USA Today. The article
was co-authored by five of the nation's experts on labor markets and the guest
worker program. I think it tells a story that has not been refuted. We have
partisans and advocates who have been claiming there is a shortage in these
fields, but the experts say no. And since they have been speaking out on this
issue, we have seen no real data that would dispute what they say in this
article dated July 27, 2014.
Headline:
‘Bill Gates' tech worker fantasy.’ Sub-headline: ‘Silicon Valley has created an
imaginary staffing shortage.’
‘Business
executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a “shortage” of
qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers
to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This
claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark
Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Yet within the
past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported 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 five
writers of this article—referring to themselves—go on to say:
‘None of us
have been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry's
assertions of labor shortages.’
The article
was written by Ron Hira, Paula Stephan, Hal Salzman, Michael Teitelbaum, who has
recently written a book on this subject, and Norm Matloff. These are labor
economic experts who have studied these issues for years. Many of them 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.’
What a
statement that is.
They go on to
write—they all signed this article together—that:
‘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.’
The
‘predominate source of new hires’ in information technology fields is coming
through guest worker programs from abroad.
They go on to
say:
‘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.’
They go on to
say:
‘There is an
ample supply of American workers who are willing and qualified to fill
high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether the
supply is two or three times larger than the demand.’
There is no
doubt we have a surplus of IT workers. The question is whether the supply is two
or three times as big as the number of job openings.
They go on to
say:
‘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.’
That is
exactly what the bill before this Senate—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.
The article
goes on:
‘Another
major, yet often overlooked, provision in the pending legislation’—that is the
bill President Obama is pushing for, the Gang of Eight bill—‘would grant
automatic green cards to any foreign student who earns a graduate degree in a
STEM field, based on assertions that foreign graduates of U.S. universities are
routinely being forced to leave. Such claims are incompatible with the evidence
that such graduates have many paths to stay and work, and indeed the “stay
rates” for visiting international students are very high and have shown no sign
of decline. The most recent study finds that 92 percent of Chinese Ph.D.
students stay in America to work after graduation.’
So there is
this myth that we have thousands and thousands of students graduating from
schools and being sent home. That is not accurate, according to the experts who
study the data.
The article
continues:
‘The tech
industry's promotion of expanded temporary visas (such as the H-1B) and green
cards is driven by a desire for cheap, young and immobile labor. It is well
documented that loopholes enable firms to legally pay H-1Bs below their market
value and to continue the widespread age discrimination acknowledged by many in
the tech industry.’
I talked to a
gentleman whom I knew a little bit who worked at a computer company. He is well
into his forties, maybe close to 50. I asked him what kind of security there is.
He said, well, in the tech industry these companies go and fall. I said, what
happens if you were to lose your job? He said, at my age, it would be very
difficult.
The USA
Today op-ed concludes by saying:
‘IT industry
leaders have spent lavishly on lobbying to promote their STEM shortage claims
among legislators. The only problem is that the evidence contradicts their
self-interested claims.’
So I would
pose a question to Mr. Zuckerberg. I read in the news that Facebook is now worth more than $200 billion. Is that not
enough money to hire American workers for a change? Your company now employs
roughly 7,000 people. Let's say you want to expand your workforce 10 percent, or
hire another 700 workers. Are you claiming you can't find 700 Americans who
would take these jobs if you paid a good wage and decent benefits?
Let me just
say one more thing: 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.
But FWD.us and
other immigration lobbyists are working with the White House to extract
executive orders from the President that provide them with the same financial
benefits that were included in the Senate bill that was rejected by the House of
Representatives. One proposal would increase by as much as 800,000 the number of
foreign workers admitted for the explicit purpose of taking jobs in the United
States.
A recent
Associated Press article, entitled ‘Obama Weighs Broader Move on Legal
Immigration’ reports that ‘President Barack Obama is considering key changes in
the nation's immigration system requested by tech, industry and powerful
interest groups’—not by the American people was he being requested to do this,
not by the national interest, but by ‘powerful interest groups’ that are
referred to here.
It goes on to
say:
‘After recent
White House meetings, top officials have compiled specific recommendations from
business groups and other advocates.’
‘Other
advocates.’ Who are they? We know the ACLU has been there. We know La Raza has
been meeting there on a regular basis. It goes on. The article says:
‘One of the
more popular requests is a change in the way green cards are counted that would
essentially free up some 800,000 additional visas the first year, advocates
say…Other requests would extend work permits to the spouses of all temporary
H-1B skilled workers who have not been able to work.’
But how about
the fact that a single mom might like that job? An unemployed single mom or a
single mom who has a job prospect that would pay $3 more than the job she is now
working while trying to raise a family? Or an unemployed father? Maybe they
would like those jobs first.
So these
actions fall on the heels of previous executive action in which the President
already acted unilaterally earlier this year to grant companies an additional
100,000 guest workers. He has already done that. In just the first year of this
order, it adds 100,000 guest workers by providing work authorizations to the
foreign spouses of temporary guest workers. It would increase the supply of
guest workers by approximately 30,000 each year thereafter—this at a time when
we have 58 million working-age Americans who are not working. Since 2009 the
number of adults has increased by 13 million, while the number of people
actually working has decreased by 7 million.
Median
household income has dropped $2,300 since 2009. According to the National
Employment Law Project, wages are down across all occupations.
A CBS
report titled ‘Why American workers feel increasingly poor’ writes of their
study:
‘Real median
hourly wages have declined across low, middle and high income levels from 2009
to 2013, the study found. No matter if workers were in the lowest bracket ($8.84
to $10.85 an hour) or the highest ($31.40 to $86.34) median hourly wages
declined when you take into account the impact of
inflation.’
It goes on:
‘Across all
occupations, real median hourly wages slipped 3.4 percent since 2009. While even
better-paid workers saw median hourly earnings erode, the worst hit segments
were at the bottom’—the people who got hurt the most were at the bottom—‘with
declines in their wages of more than 4 percent.’
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.
Harvard
professor Dr. George Borjas—probably the leading academic in this entire area
and has been for many years—estimates that our current immigration rate results
in an annual loss of more than $400 billion in wages for Americans competing
with immigrant labor. Between 2000 and today the government issued nearly 30
million visas to temporary foreign workers and permanent immigrants, largely
lower-skilled and lower-wage.
A recent
Reuters poll showed that Americans wish to see record immigration
reduced, not increased (as the Gang of Eight bill would have done), by a huge
3-to-1 margin.
Another poll
from pollster Kellyanne Conway recently showed that 80 percent of Americans
think companies should hire from among the existing unemployed rather than
bringing in new workers from abroad to fill these jobs. Yet Senate Democrats
have unanimously supported legislation to double the annual supply of labor
brought into the United States. These workers would be brought in to take jobs
in ever field, occupation and industry in America.
So what about
the good, decent and patriotic citizens of our country who fight our wars, who
obey our laws, who follow our rules, and want a better future for their
children? Should their needs not come first?
As the
National Review explained, ‘we are a nation with an economy—not an
economy with a nation.’ We cannot put the parochial demands of a few powerful
CEOs ahead of an entire nation's hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
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.
