Suggested Talking Points

March 19 Meetings with Local Congressional Representatives

• Why is the United States continuing to issue 160,000 work permits to foreign workers each month while 25 million Americans are unable to find a full-time job?
  • [The latest federal data show that 75,000 permits go to working-age immigrants and 85,000 go to temporary foreign workers each month]
• Will the Representative introduce legislation to temporarily halt all non-essential, non- nuclear-family immigration so that these 25 million Americans have a decent chance of finding a job? This would protect far more American workers than the hundreds of billions of dollars taxpayers have spent creating/protecting jobs.
• Does the Representative realize that 7 million illegal aliens hold non-agricultural jobs? Does he/she understand that more than 7 million Americans are looking for those same jobs? Does the Representative support any amnesty “or a pathway to citizenship” for these illegal aliens. If so, why does he/she believe that lawbreakers should be at the front of the jobs line while 25 million Americans are behind them?
• Does the Representative support mandating the E-Verify employment verification system? If not, why? Is the Representative in favor of employers being able to hire illegal aliens over U.S. workers or is he/she unaware that E-Verify has a 99.7% success rate (only .3% of new hires run through E-Verify are erroneously rejected, and no employees can be fired for being erroneously rejected).
• Does the Representative believe that employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens should be punished to the fullest extent of the law? If not, are there any other laws the Representative believes should be ignored? Does the Representative fully support the bipartisan SAVE Act (H.R. 3308)? The SAVE Act would mandate the use of E-Verify, fully secure our nation’s borders, and increase interior enforcement. Does the Representative not support any of those goals?
• If the Representative is not a sponsor of the SAVE Act, will he/she consider cosponsoring it?

Leah Durant, the Executive Director of Progressives for Immigration Reform, will appear on Lou Dobbs on CNN on Tuesday night to explain new poll numbers showing that liberals are concerned about rising population numbers due to increased immigration. The poll was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC in April.

The poll revealed:

• Sixty seven percent of liberals and progressives felt the level of population growth caused by immigration negatively impacts the quality of life in the United States.
• Fifty eight percent felt that the current levels of immigration are harmful to the environment.
• Sixty three percent said that current levels of immigration hurts job prospects for American workers.
• With regard to undocumented workers already here, the poll revealed that self-identified liberals are split over whether illegal immigrants should be offered an amnesty. Fifty three percent were in support of a pathway to citizenship and forty five percent were opposed.

A third group of conservatives sides with the second against the first, but goes further than either in wanting to see legal immigration reduced and changed as well. They fear that we are taking in more newcomers than we can absorb, especially given that so many of those newcomers are from the same place and that place is right next door. From their perspective our immigration policies import social problems — and Democratic voters. This group has few elected champions, but it does have some advocacy groups and think tanks on its side, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and NumbersUSA.

It also has potentially broad popular support. Gallup’s most recent poll on the question found 50 percent of the public favoring decreased levels of immigration, compared with 32 percent who wanted to keep current levels and 14 percent who wanted more. According to Gallup, the decreasers have been the largest bloc of opinion for almost the entirety of the last 35 years, and only a small minority of Americans has ever wanted higher immigration levels.

Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, a group opposing illegal immigration, since February had been working with local tea party leaders across the country to disseminate a detailed fact sheet chronicling the congressional votes behind Armey’s low rating from NumbersUSA on immigration issues.

Beck told POLITICO he decided to take his anti-Armey campaign public after Armey in last week’s press club appearance blasted the GOP for ostracizing Hispanic voters by calling for an immigration crackdown and declared “there is room” for immigrants in America, which he called “a nation of immigrants.”

In a blog post entitled “Dick Armey stuns tea partiers with open-borders advocacy,” Beck charged that Armey “wants immigration to be treated as a social issue with no place in the tea parties,” and suggested he and FreedomWorks may be trying “to intimidate local tea parties” to shy away from the issue at the behest of “corporate benefactors (who) want the foreign labor to keep pouring in.”

Beck offered no proof of any link between FreedomWorks’ donors and Armey's stance but said, “We’re seeing lots of traffic that shows a lot of anger at (Armey). I would think that he’s endangering his entire standing among the patriots.”

For most of their history, labor unions opposed attempts at loosening immigration laws and often threw their weight behind restrictionist measures. During the most recent overhaul effort in 2007, a schism among unions cracked an otherwise willing liberal coalition and helped defeat the reform bill. But now, in the wake of Arizona’s strict and highly controversial new immigration law, labor has united to support immigration reform with unprecedented vigor.

Richard Trumka, president of the 11.5-million-member AFL-CIO, gave a pivotal speech on June 18 at the City Club of Cleveland that crystallized labor’s shift in outlook. Trumka, the nation’s most powerful labor voice, made a moral and economic case for reform and pledged to “face head-on our own contradictions, hypocrisy and history on immigration.” AFL-CIO has joined forces with the 2.2-million-strong Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union to pour resources into the fight, and the three have written a joint letter to Congress detailing labor’s “unified position and unfailing commitment” to sweeping reform.