US Civil Rights Commissioner: Is Obama Admin Preparing to Grant 34 Million Immigrants Green Cards?
U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow asked on Monday whether the Obama administration is preparing to allow 34 million new immigrants into the United States over the next five years.
In a letter to Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus, Kirsanow warned President Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus that Obama’s planned executive amnesty would “devastate” America’s black workers the most. He said his concerns “center around the effect such grant of legal status will have on two subsets of American workers: low-skilled workers, particularly low-skilled black workers, and high-skilled STEM workers.”
He noted that a recent USCIS solicitation, which Breitbart News first reported, provides that “the estimated maximum for the entire contract is 34 million cards.”
“Given that the base ordering period is 02/01/15 to 01/30/16, with optional ordering periods that last only until 01/30/20, this solicitation contemplates that USCIS will grant an estimated 34 million Permanent Resident Cards (PRC) and Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) in only five years,” he added. “Such an increase in lawful workers would have a deleterious effect on low-skilled American workers, particularly black workers.”
Kirsanow noted that “some members of your administration have attempted to dismiss questions about why DHS would issue a draft solicitation for such a large number of identity documents.” But he added that “given that the solicitation itself states that it contemplates immigration reform, and you have publicly discussed issuing work authorizations via executive action (and have indeed done so in the past under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), it seems prudent to take DHS at its word.”
Obama said he intends to enact an executive amnesty “by the end of the year” after he delayed it to give Senate Democrats a better chance at retaining control of the Senate. He has also pressed Congress to pass comprehensive amnesty legislation that would give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and allow for massive increases in foreign guest workers and immigrants. Last year, pro-amnesty advocates had a fit when Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said that the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill would allow nearly 30 million more new immigrants into the United States. As Breitbart News has reported, a “Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report found that all of the net gain in employment during that period (the last 13 years) went to illegal and legal immigrants. And the Congressional Budget Office determined that comprehensive amnesty legislation would lower the wages of American workers.”
As he has written on numerous occasions to Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been supportive of Obama’s amnesty agenda, Kirsanow emphasized that “illegal immigration has a disparate impact on African-American men because these men are disproportionately represented in the low-skilled labor force.” He said Obama’s proposed “executive order will also have a negative effect on young African-Americans at the outset of their working lives” during a time in which “young, low-skilled workers are facing enormous difficulties in this economy.” He cited the grim labor force participation rate for September, which was only 44.3 percent for those over 25 with less than a high school diploma. Kirsanow said “surely some of the 55 percent who aren’t in the labor force would like to work,” and “this problem too will be exacerbated by legalizing illegal immigrants.”
“Granting legal status to millions of people who are in the United States illegally will continue to depress the wages and employment opportunities of African-American men and teenagers,” he wrote.
Kirsanow also addressed the “the supposed need for an increased number of high-tech visas” by saying “there is little evidence, other than the protestations of tech titans and politicians, that there is a shortage of STEM workers in the United States.” As Howard University Public Policy Professor Ron Hira has said, tech jobs have been a traditional way for Americans to move up the economic ladder. And massive grants of foreign guest-worker visas would only undermine those opportunities for Americans during a time in which numerous scholars and studies from across the ideological spectrum have determined that America has a surplus, not a shortage, of high-tech workers.
“The problem is not that there are insufficient STEM graduates; the problem is that tech companies do not want to pay the wages American workers would demand absent a continual influx of high-tech visa holders,” Kirsanow said, citing Silicon Valley’s “desire for young, cheap, and immobile labor.” Last week, a billion-dollar Silicon Valley company was caught paying foreign workers from India $1.21 an hour.
Kirsanow also noted that granting “legal status to illegal immigrants, or even mere rumors that legal status will be granted, increases illegal immigration,” and pointed out that “the evidence indicates that the flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border is mostly attributable to your directive granting temporary legal status to people allegedly brought to the United States as children.”
“This is unsurprising,” Kirsanow said. “When you incentivize bad behavior, you get more of it.”
Harold
ACGR's "News with Attitude" 