Senate amnesty update — May 16

From my email box; This may be a long message, but it is important that you read this.

From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA Date: Friday 16MAY08 12:15 a.m. EDT

Senate amnesty vote postponed ’til next week — time to create grassroots firestorm to stop it

FRIENDS,THE AMNESTY BILL IS FAR WORSE THAN WE TOLD YOU. Because the House of Representatives unexpectedly delayed the Iraq supplemental spending bill late Thursday, the full Senate won’t be allowed today to vote on the amnesty bill that the Senate Appropriations Committee unexpectedly took up and approved Thursday. It now looks like the full Senate won’t be allowed to vote on the amnesty for around 1.3 million illegal alien ag workers (plus their families) until next Wednesday. That gives us some time to beat this atrocity. I don’t need to tell you that we can beat this amnesty ONLY if all of you send the faxes and make the phone calls we’ve posted on your Action Buffet corkboard. Please go there now. And ONLY if you enlist as many of your friends, relatives, neighbors and colleagues as possible by forwarding this Alert to them. Especially important is that you pick up the phone and make the calls to your two Senators that we’ve requested. 202-224-3121 THE INCREDIBLE INGREDIENTS OF THE SENATE’S NOXIOUS AMNESTY STEW Rosemary Jenks (our Vice President, Government Relations) just called me after finishing reading the Iraq supplemental spending bill as it came out of committee. It would: Grant a three-year work visa followed by a permanent greencard to all illegal aliens who have been working as shepherds, goat herders and dairy herders. Grant a five-year work visa to the estimated 1.3 million illegal aliens working in other agricultural jobs — plus all of their families. There is no instruction on what happens after the five years. Grant a tripling of the maximum number of H-2B visas for lower skill, non-agricultural seasonal workers. Grant industries an extra 218,000 additional permanent green cards for skilled foreign workers. Friends, perhaps you are thinking what I’m thinking: Don’t these Senators know that we are in an economic recession, or close to it? Don’t they know that unemployment rates have been going up and that industries across the country are shedding both skilled and unskilled jobs? If ever you doubted that U.S. Senators live lives disconnected from ordinary Americans, you could see it Thursday as 17 of them fell all over themselves to drastically increase the number of foreign workers allowed to hold U.S. jobs! RIDICULOUS CLAIMS ABOUT RUNNING OUT OF FOOD WITHOUT AN AMNESTY Senators Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) led the way to protect our economy from having to figure out ways to hire some of the 14 million-plus American workers who are trying to find a job but can’t. Especially interesting is their claim that we will fail to harvest crops and feed the world this year without an amnesty for illegal aliens. They made the same claim in each of the last four years. Each time that we beat back the amnesty, the harvests still happened! How many times does Feinstein have to cry wolf (or rotting crops) before people stop paying attention? Of course, the outlaw businesses that scream for illegal aliens do have more to fear this year because various enforcement policies (federal, state and local) are beginning to drive more and more illegal aliens home. What we have to constantly remind everybody, though, is that each of these outlaw growers at any time can come clean, go straight and become a legal, patriotic member of the business community by importing any needed foreign ag workers through the H-2A temporary worker program. There is no limit on how many they can import as long as they pay them decently and ensure that they go home. The North Carolina Growers Association has used the H-2A visa program for years and opposes all efforts at amnesty for illegal alien ag workers. If the program works fine for North Carolina farmers, why do farmers in other part of the country insist that only illegal aliens will fit the bill? THE VERY LOW CRITERIA FOR QUALIFYING FOR AN AG AMNESTY Rosemary says you don’t have to have spent much time in the fields to qualify for Feinstein and Craig’s amnesty. You only have to meet ONE of the following three criteria to get the amnesty: Earned $7,000 working in agriculture during the 2004-2007 period. Or worked 863 hours in agriculture during the 2004-2007 period. Or worked at least a little bit in agriculture on 150 different days during the 2004-2007 period. That amounts to an average of $1,750 per year … … or 216 hours per year (the equivalent of 4 hours per week) … … or parts of 37 days per year. DO THEY THINK THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE STUPID AND THAT WE COULD POSSIBLY ACCEPT THAT ILLEGAL ALIENS WORKING THAT LITTLE IN AGRICULTURE ARE ESSENTIAL TO THE SURVIVAL OF AGRI-BUSINESS IN AMERICA!!!!!! The answer is that they really hope we are that stupid or just incredibly unfocused. All the right-wing business lobbyists, leftist organizations, religious groups and news media who tried to force the amnesty last year are cheering this thing on. We beat them last year because the American people FOCUSED for a few weeks and told the U.S. Senators who is their boss. Will you please do everything you can to enlist a small army in your community to fight this? Please keep coming back to our home page several times a day to read the latest news on the Senate amnesty battle. THANKS, P.S. We will be constantly adding new information as we obtain it on our home page at: www.NumbersUSA.com A lot of details are still fuzzy right now. Please keep checking back to our home page. P.S.S. As soon as we get a roll call from the committee that we can count on, we will be notifying all of you with Senators who voted YES to attach the amnesty and give you a chance to express special outrage to them. Watch your emails.

P.S. We can triple our membership quickly if our members email their friends about us and they in turn email theirs. Polls show that most Americans agree with NumbersUSA’s positions but, despite our recent rapid growth, most American voters still have never heard of us. You can help change that by forwarding this email widely. (Note: depending on your email provider, you may need to send this as an “attachment.”)

To go back a bit here is the email I received yesterday;

From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA Date: Thursday 15MAY08 4:30 p.m. EDT

Senate committee adds amnesty for 1.2 million illegal ag workers to Iraq spending bill — PHONE NOW

DEAR FRIENDS, On a 17-12 vote this afternoon, the Senate Appropriations Committee added Sen. Feinstein‘s ag amnesty to the Iraq supplemental spending bill. This bill could come up for a vote before the full Senate tomorrow. Every phone of every Senator should be ringing off the hook as soon as I click SEND on this alert. Please pick up your phone the minute you read this and call: 202-224-3121 Call the offices of both of your state’s U.S. Senators and tell them: The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday afternoon committed an outrageous act of disrespect for our men and women in uniform and to the citizens of this country by attaching an illegal-alien amnesty to the Iraq spending bill. Urge the Senator to vote and work to strip the amnesty from the Iraq spending bill on the floor. You – or the Senator – may already oppose this spending bill. But if the Senator is inclined to vote YES on the Iraq bill, ask the Senator to definitely vote NO and send it back to committee if the amnesty is NOT stripped. There is no need for an amnesty to provide growers with workers. There already is an H-2A foreign ag worker program that provides growers with an unlimited number of temporary workers if the growers agree to pay a decent wage and ensure that they go home at the end of the season. Feinstein is just trying to protect the abysmally low wages and bad working conditions that farmworkers labor under. Here are additional talking points (and the names of your two Senators, plus additional phone numbers): http://www.numbersusa.com/phones?ID=10121 Expect that many staffers will either have no idea what is going on or will be lying to you. Some of you were reporting to us that Sen. Feinstein‘s staffers were telling you that she had no intention of attaching an amnesty this afternoon at the precise time that the committee was voting on her proposal to attach!!!!! Unless Senators see an outpouring of disgust and outrage similar to what you waged a year ago, they will interpret it to be safe to vote an amnesty this year. Besides an estimated 1.2 million illegal alien ag workers, all the millions of illegal aliens in their families would apparently get an amnesty, also. Good luck. You are the only force that stands between some semblance of the rule of law and massive rewards for illegal immigration. THANKS, P.S. We will be constantly adding new information as we obtain it on our home page at: www.NumbersUSA.com A lot of details are still fuzzy right now. Please keep checking back to our home page. P.S.S. Just as I was starting to click the SEND button, this report arrived from The Hill news service: The so-called Ag-Jobs amendment, sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho), would create a process that allows undocumented workers to continue to work on farms. Without the amendment, Feinstein warned that the U.S. would lose $5-9 billion to foreign competition, tens of thousands of farms would shut down and 80,000 workers would be transferred to Mexico. The bill would sunset in five years. NOTE FROM ROY: Open-borders supporters believe that if they can just help illegal aliens sink roots for a few more years that it will be impossible for the government later to try to make them leave. My staff is just now reading through Feinstein’s language and tell me that it looks like she will give all illegals the chance to adjust to permanent status and path to citizenship at the end of the five years. “Agriculture needs a consistent workforce,” Feinstein said. “Without it, they can’t plant, they can’t prune, they can’t pick and they can’t pack. “This is an emergency situation,” she added. The amendment was approved by a 17-12 vote with defections from both parties. Critics say the amendment amounts to amnesty for people who entered the country illegally. A broader comprehensive immigration overhaul, with a path for citizenship for the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, failed in a divisive Senate vote last year. “No matter how one characterizes it, this enormous amendment still amounts to amnesty,” said Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). “I oppose amnesty. All these immigration issues should be addressed through the regular order.”