[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 129 (Wednesday, September 10, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5519-S5522]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Presiding Officer and appreciate the 
opportunity to share some thoughts on an important subject tonight.
  Earlier this week I spoke about the President's promise that he would 
issue an Executive amnesty, a grant of amnesty to 5 or 6 million people 
by some form of Executive order with his own pen. 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 actions and blocked--so far--every effort to stop it. Not 
even one of our Democratic colleagues has backed the House legislation 
that would stop this Executive amnesty or demanded that Senator Reid 
bring it up for a vote at least. Every Senate Democrat is therefore the 
President's partner in his planned lawless acts. Plainly the President 
must execute the law that was passed by Congress, and the law does not 
allow for unlawful immigrants to work in the U.S. It doesn't allow for 
many other things they are suggesting the President may plan to do by 
Executive order.
  Tonight I would like to talk about the influence of special interests 
on our nation's immigration laws and how it is creating unwise and 
unlawful policies. 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? And we are at that point, colleagues.
  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.

  That is the majority leader of the Senate. He intends to do nothing 
in the Senate to stop the President's actions. But colleagues, we 
know better. 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 could do such a thing to block this Senate from voting in a way 
that would stop the President's Executive actions is to not support him 
in his plan.

  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.
  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.
  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--what Congress 
has refused to pass and the American people have rejected. They are 
plotting at the White House--maybe even more so today--to move forward 
with Executive action anyway, no matter what the people think, no 
matter what Congress, the people's House, votes on.
  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.'' Now that is a quote from Politico. Twenty meetings with legal 
experts, immigration advocates, and business leaders to gather ideas on 
what should be included in the President's 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 immigration lobbyists and activists who think Border Patrol 
is for the little people. We know better. 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, we know, don't care much about old fashioned things like 
national boundaries, national sovereignty, immigration control, let 
alone the constitutional separation of powers or even the consistent 
and even-handed enforcement of plain law, passed by the elected 
representatives of the American people in due fashion.
  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 spend 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 think whatever they want is good for America. 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 we will 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 $28 billion.
  Mr. Zuckerberg has been very busy recently. One of his fellow 
billionaires,

[[Page S5520]]

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.
  We have been told for a long time--and most of us have heard this 
repeatedly--that there is a shortage of STEM and IT workers. STEM 
stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This has 
been the central selling point of these massive demands for 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 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 and are basically down since 1999, I think the case 
for our free-market friends is pretty clear--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 recently 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.''
  Subheadline: ``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 efforts 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 8 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 that just meant 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.
  That was a poignant moment for me. This man, with a family, raising 
children, doing the right thing, is worried at his age whether he can 
get a job, when the majority of people being hired in these fields are 
H-1B guest workers.
  The USA Today op-ed concludes by saying:


[[Page S5521]]


       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.

  I think this is a dramatic article. It is an article by undisputed 
experts in their field. To my knowledge no one has disputed it. The 
false, tech world fantasy claims, the USA Today op-ed referred to, is 
an imaginary shortage, not a real shortage.
  So I would pose a question to Mr. Zuckerberg, who is a brilliant man 
with so many fabulous qualities, and I respect that. But I read in the 
news that Facebook, his company, 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.
  It is a serious matter. I want to continue to talk about this. 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.
  The shortage is not there. The experts tell us and the plain facts, 
if we look around, indicate that.
  But instead 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.
  This is an article that talks about that. It is a matter of 
importance. The Associated Press article, the title of it: ``Obama 
Weighs Broader Move on Legal Immigration.''

       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 interests but by powerful special 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, we added 100,000 guest 
workers by providing work authorizations to the foreign spouses of 
temporary guest workers. So he 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. According to a CBS report titled ``Why American workers 
feel increasingly poor":

       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 are able to demand that we have to have more 
workers in 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, by a huge 3-to-1 margin, as the 
Gang of 8 bill would have done.
  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.
  Some people think this is agricultural work. Not so. The increase in 
immigration under that bill would be more than 90 percent 
nonagricultural work. These jobs are going to be taken by anyone. 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?

[[Page S5522]]

  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 of 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, 
not to sell their jobs and dreams to the highest bidder.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________