TRUMP & 2 GOP SENATORS OFFER EXPECTED D.O.A. BILL AGAINST LEGAL IMMIGRATION

…Crazy Arkansas  Senator, Tom Cotton

 

More info from an inside track on Washington politics.

 

President Trump on Wednesday endorsed a bogus new bill in the Senate aimed at cutting legal immigration levels in half over a decade.  It’s a bill that will most likely be D.O.A. as it’s a potentially profound change to working policies that have been in place for more than 50 years.  It is also a bill that will be limiting an already major issue of not enough unskilled workers for helping America’s farmers, restaurants and hotels. ( And that includes the president’s hotels and golf courses that have said they are in constant demand for more unskilled workers.)

 

It’s basically just a bogus bill for satisfying Trump’s political base of white working Americans.

 

Trump appeared this week with conservative Republican Senators Tom Cotton (Ark.) and David Perdue (Ga.) at the White House to unveil their modified version of a bill that had first been introduced in February to create a “merit-based” immigration system such as that in the UK, Australia, Canada and other European countries.  A system that would put a greater emphasis on the job skills of foreigners over their ties to family in the United States.  Yes, just another bill that could potentially separate foreign workers from their American born children.  And yes, good workers for jobs that most Americans won’t take such as jobs in hotels, fast-foods restaurants, agricultural fields, car washes and as America’s weekly visiting gardeners.

 

The legislation seeks to reduce the annual number of green cards awarding permanent legal residence to just over 500,000 from more than 1 million. Trump had promised on the campaign trail to take a harder line on immigration, arguing that the growth in new arrivals had harmed job opportunities for American workers, which is pure B.S..

 

President Trump’s additional false claim is that illegal immigration went up under past administrations, it actually declined.  One more Trump lie.

 

“Among those who have been hit hardest in recent years are immigrants and minority workers competing for jobs against brand-new arrivals,” said Trump, flanked by the immigration-ignorant senators in the Roosevelt Room. “It has not been fair to our people, our citizens and our workers.”  (When will more Americans and the media start calling Trump out on all of his miss-statements?)

 

The bill faces more than just dim prospects in the Senate, where Republicans hold a narrow majority and would have difficulty reaching 60 votes to fend off a filibuster. But the president’s latest event came as the White House sought to move past a major political defeat on repealing the Affordable Care Act by pivoting to issues that resonate with Trump’s core supporters.  (But it’s just more attempts at changing the subject in the media's short attention span.)

 

Meanwhile, the Session’s Justice Department has begun fulfilling the dream of laying the groundwork to potentially bring legal challenges against universities over admissions policies that could eventually be deemed to discriminate against white students.

 

Trump’s critics accused the administration of pursuing policies that would harm immigrants and racial minority groups.  (So true.)

 

“This offensive plan . . . is nothing but a series of nativist talking points and regurgitated campaign rhetoric that completely fails to move our nation forward toward real reform,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) properly said in his response statement to the bill.

 

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, appropriately also predicted that the bill would be D.O.A. and would not go far in Congress and just called it “red meat for Donald Trump’s base.”

 

Trump had met twice previously at the White House with Senator’s Cotton and Perdue to discuss the details of their legislation, which is improperly titled the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act. Their proposal calls for reductions­ to family-based immigration programs, cutting off avenues for the siblings and adult children of US citizens and legal permanent residents to apply for green cards. Minor children and spouses would still be able to apply, for what it’s worth.

 

The bill would create a point system based on factors such as “English ability, education levels and job skills” to rank applicants for the 140,000 employment-based green cards distributed annually.  But that's not what the US farmers, restaurants, car washes, gardeners and hotels need.

 

In addition, the senators propose to cap annual refugee admissions at 50,000 and to end a visa lottery that has awarded 50,000 green cards a year, mostly to applicants from African nations.

 

Senator Cotton said that while some might view the current immigration system as a “symbol of America’s virtue and generosity,” he instead sees it “as a symbol we’re not committed to working-class Americans and we need to change that.”  More B.S..

 

The number of legal immigrants has grown rapidly since 1965, when lawmakers eased restrictionist laws that had been in place for four decades that largely shut down immigration from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.  Trump and his base wants to go back to those days.

 

I’m sorry, but the world has changed and that’s just like closing the gate after all the horses have left the corral.

 

Trump’s chief “not-so-bright” policy aide, Stephen Miller, has argued that the system has grown unwieldy, and has been flooding the country with low-skilled workers who drive down wages for Americans of all racial backgrounds, including other immigrants who are already here.  That just isn’t supported by the data.  Another example of the Trump administration lying to the American public.

 

Miller sparred with a reporter Wednesday at the daily White House briefing over the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty. He argued that the famous poem by Emma Lazarus was “added later” and thus did not define the US immigration system as offering protection to the “poor” and “huddled masses.”  This administration just doesn't get it!

 

“If you look at the history of immigration, it actually ebbed and flowed,” Miller said. “There were periods of large waves followed by periods of less immigration.”

 

But the legislation was quickly denounced by congressional Democrats, including the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and immigrant rights groups. It is also likely to face resistance from business leaders and moderate Republicans in states with large immigrant populations.

Opponents of the bill rightly said that immigrants help boost the economy and that studies have shown they commit crimes at lower levels than do native-born Americans.

 

“This is just a fundamental restructuring of our immigration system which has huge implications for the future,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy for the Center for Migration Studies. “This is part of a broader strategy by this administration to rid the country of low-skilled immigrants they don’t favor.....”

 

Perdue and Cotton said their proposal is modeled after “merit-based” immigration systems in Canada and Australia that also use point systems. But those countries also admit more than twice the number of immigrants to their countries as the United States does now when judged as a percentage of overall population levels.

 

“Just because you have a PhD doesn’t mean you’re necessarily more valuable to the US economy,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy. “The best indication of whether a person is employable is if someone wants to hire them.”

 

Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, wrote that the bill “would do nothing to boost skilled immigration and it will only increase the proportion of employment-based green cards by cutting other green cards. Saying otherwise is grossly deceptive.”

 

Cuts to legal immigration levels, including some of the same groups targeted in the ­Cotton-Perdue bill, were included in a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013 that was backed by President Barack Obama and approved on a bipartisan basis in the Senate.

 

But that bill, which died in the GOP-controlled House, would have offered a path to citizenship to an estimated 8 million immigrants living in the country illegally and cleared a green-card waiting list of 4 million foreigners.

Groups that favor stricter immigration policies hailed the ­legislation as a step in the right direction. Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, said the Raise Act “will do more than any other action to fulfill President Trump’s promises as a candidate to create an immigration system that puts the interests of American workers first.”  Again, not true.

 

The US un-employment rate is as low as it has ever been and there aren’t enough American workers to fill out the overwhelming current demand for workers.  You have probably noticed how many stores, restaurants or hotels have an almost permanent “We’re hiring” sign in their windows.

 

Once again, this is just another example of us having an illegitimate US president.

Copyright G.Ater  2017