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.

Roy Beck is executive director and founder of Washington, D.C.-based NumbersUSA, an organization that lobbied against the 2007 version of the DREAM Act and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Beck said he's sympathetic to Rivera's situation, but added that the DREAM Act is not an appropriate path to citizenship for immigrant children who were brought to this country by undocumented parents.

"You can take a lot of these individuals and you can make a compelling case for their story," Beck said. "If it was just this guy, I've got no problem with this guy being given amnesty. But there are apparently about 500,000 of these people in this country."

Beck said the DREAM Act, as written, contains loopholes that would allow people who receive amnesty under the law to apply to have their family members put on a path toward citizenship.

He said that would lead to massive fraud and open the door to thousands of new immigrants who could pour into the country in order to take advantage of the amnesty provisions in the law.

"When you allow people to break the law, and then allow them to harvest what they broke the law to get, you encourage more illegal activity," Beck said.

“I don’t see it as a kick-off,” said Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, which advocates restricting immigration, referring to the president’s meeting with congressional leaders on Thursday. “I think the fact that they’re bringing in a number of members of Congress who will be defiantly against a comprehensive immigration bill suggests that the purpose of this meeting is more to lay out the broad spectrum that’s there in Congress and show how difficult it will be to put together a majority to pass a bill,” he said. In addition to to the conflict over guest workers, he noted that Schumer, for example, supports a national identification card, while civil liberties groups such as the ACLU oppose that. “It seems the president is giving himself some cover to hold back a little from the Hispanic caucus,” said Beck. “They’re the only members of congress keeping this thing alive.”

Beck emphasized that the last time a comprehensive immigration reform bill including “amnesty” was proposed in Congress with the support of President George W. Bush, it didn’t pass. “Why would members who voted against it in 07 when the economy was strong vote for it now?” he asked.

Jewish communal support for immigration reform is organized around several principles, including the need for a path to legalization for illegal immigrants; a mechanism for dealing with future immigration waves; speeding up work on family unification; integrating new immigrants into American society; and finding, as Jewish immigration advocates put it, an “effective and humane” way of enforcing immigration laws and border control...

...While the Jewish organizational world is essentially united on this issue, some have argued that the Jewish rank-and-file is not on entirely the same page as communal leaders.

The supposed divide between religious leaders of various stripes and their rank-and-file was the focus of a recent survey, sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that opposes granting illegal immigrants a path to legalization and instead argues that many will return to their home countries if immigration laws are better enforced. That poll, which was conducted online by Zogby International in December, found that Jews were roughly equally divided between those who prefer a stepped-up enforcement approach and those who prefer granting legal status with a path to citizenship.

As President Obama vows to refocus Democrats' attention on jobs and the economy, advocates for overhauling the nation's immigration laws say they are still gearing up for a battle in the Senate in coming weeks, despite fading hopes for victory.

Washington's drawn-out health-care debate badly damaged prospects for an immigration bill this winter. It ate up weeks of the Senate's time, sapped progressive lawmakers' energy and, most recently, stoked a populist backlash that cost Democrats the seat of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), the chamber's most prominent champion of liberal health-care and immigration policies.

With time running out before lawmakers want to start focusing on the November elections, "immigration is deader than a doornail," one veteran Senate lobbyist put it. Advocates' frustration peaked last week when Obama devoted a single sentence in his 71-minute State of the Union address to a topic he ranked as a top legislative priority last summer, after health care and an energy bill.