SOUP KITCHEN: Can Senators See the Face of Unemployed Americans Whose Jobs They Give To Illegal Aliens?

My wife and I recently spent an evening assisting more than 600 people in families racked by unemployment and poverty.

They were given a hot meal, bags of groceries, bus tokens, coupons and advice/counseling if requested. They needed a band-aid, and we gave them one. But most of all, these households need a job.

The majority of U.S. Senators have decided that illegal foreign workers deserve a job as much as the Americans in our soup kitchen, meaning more of these Americans will remain jobless. Can the Senators even see these faces?

Honestly, I don’t know what these Senators think when they read the phone logs of their staff who tabulate all the faxes and phone calls from the readers of this blog. What could cause them to decide over this last week that several hundred thousand of the Stimulus jobs are to go to illegal aliens? 

The U.S. House of Representatives in its Stimulus bill prohibited Stimulus jobs to illegal aliens by requiring use of E-Verify.  But the Senate rejected this.  That means that several hundred thousand unemployed Americans who would have gotten jobs will remain unemployed (based on current hiring patterns under current enforcement).

I wish those 60 Senators who told Majority Leader Reid that he could shut off amendments could stand in the basement of our church across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia and look into the faces of the working-age men and women who have been cast off as unneeded by our economy. Many of these men and women live near our church in one of the oldest free-black neighborhoods in the state. Their families have been in this country for 10-16 generations. Most of their ancestors endured slavery and Jim Crow, gaining full political rights only in the last four decades. But the Senate has decided that these unemployed Americans — as all unemployed Americans of all races and ethnicities — are not allowed to move to the front of the line ahead of illegal foreign workers who were enticed here by unscrupulous businesses.

Why can’t most Senators see these faces of America’s unemployed?

Is it because they are too busy looking into the faces of the lobbyists for the greedy industries that insist on hiring illegal aliens?

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA