Kent: Immigration hearings perform great public service
Aug 16, 2006    Georgia Political Digest   Opinion

Phil Kent |Phil Kent.com | Bio

The U.S. House of Representatives is performing a great public service by holding field hearings in Georgia and other states to address border security and especially the impact of immigration-- legal and illegal-- on American workers and their wages. The hearing in Gainesville, where this author testified on behalf of the organization Americans for Immigration Control, particularly focused on S. 2611, the Senate-passed and deeply-flawed Hagel-Martinez immigration bill.

The heart of my testimony before the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, chaired by Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., was this: Importing cheap, low-wage labor does not a prosperous country make. The massive influx of unassimilated foreign laborers pushes our economy ever closer to the Third World economies of the countries they flee. We are importing poverty by allowing uncontrolled immigration. The National Research Council reports that an immigrant to the U.S. without a high school diploma consumes $89,000 more in government services than he pays during his lifetime. And a large body of data indicates that illegals flooding across our borders have less than an eighth grade education.

We already have guest worker programs— a few working, most broken. But any new guest worker or amnesty program is liable to depress wages of the American laborer on a larger scale than that which has already been seen. Consider this example. The Washington Times reported over 30,000 illegal aliens descended upon Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Naturally contractors needed workers to clean up & rebuild. But most contractors were greedy and hired illegals. Employment manger Linda Swope told the Americans who were originally promised jobs that they weren’t needed. “They actually cried, and we cried with them.” This is an outrage.

Illegal aliens are wage thieves. And they are taking jobs from unemployed Americans— especially low-income whites, blacks and teenagers. In fact, teenage unemployment is at its highest level since the end of World War II because greedy employers are paying illegals cash under the table.

Let’s now turn to key provisions of S. 2611 as they relate to American workers and their wages.

Perhaps one of the most outrageous features of S. 2611 – aside from rewarding lawbreakers with services like college tuition breaks and eventual citizenship— is requiring employers to pay foreign workers higher wages at construction jobs. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1939 requires that the local prevailing wage be paid to all workers employed in federally-contracted construction projects. Those wages, which are up to four or five times higher in some construction fields than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour, are set by the Labor Department. The Senate bill incredibly requires that the higher wage must be paid to temporary foreign workers in all construction occupations, even if the project isn’t federally-funded.

This Senate bill would supposedly protect American workers by ensuring that new immigrants would not take away jobs. However, the bill’s definition of ‘United States worker’ includes temporary foreign guest workers, so the protection is meaningless.

Then there’s a provision saying foreign guest workers cannot be ‘terminated from employment by any employer... except for just cause.’ However, American agriculture workers can be fired for any reason.

The Senate bill also creates a totally unnecessary F-4 visa category. It’s essentially an automatic green card for any foreign student who earns a graduate degree in engineering or the physical sciences at a U.S. university. But as Prof. Norm Matloff at the Univ. of California at Davis, researched, there is absolutely no shortage of American Master’s and PhD engineers. Again, foreigners will be poised to steal jobs from Americans.

Progress toward achieving sustainable yearly immigration levels can come only by rejecting the massive and expensive amnesty and guest worker program in S. 2611, and by winning House-Senate conference committee approval of the ‘enforcement only’ House Bill 4437.

Phil Kent is an Atlanta-based author and pundit on WAGA-TV’s Georgia Gang.

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