PRESIDENTIAL IMMIGRATION VOTER GUIDE ON FOREIGN WORKER & ENFORCEMENT POLICIES

Approx. 7 million illegal foreign workers hold non-farm jobs in construction, manufacturing, hospitality and other service occupations. Mandatory E-Verify (electronic verification) -- including special provisions to deal with identity theft -- would block most illegal workers from payroll jobs. This would open most of those jobs to be filled from the nearly 60 million working-age Americans and legal immigrants already here who are not working. The Americans who would benefit the most are those with lower skills and educational levels similar to that of the illegal workers. Instead of depending on government benefits, charities and family, these currently non-working Americans would begin to support themselves.

The visa lottery and extended family chain migration categories add hundreds of thousands of permanent immigrants each year. Each gets life-time work authorization, with no regard to their skills and whether there are jobs that need their skill and labor, or how they would affect Americans with similar skills and education. These categories were not traditionally part of our immigration system. The lottery is restricted to people in countries with the least historic connections with the United States. Chain migration allows immigrants to bring in not only their spouse and minor children but also to petition for their adult children, brothers, sisters, and parents, with each of them able to do the same, resulting in petitions for the original immigrant's aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, plus in-laws and cousins of all kinds in unending chains.

The presence of higher-skilled foreign workers in larger numbers can depress the wages and decrease employment of Americans in the same occupations. Higher-skill immigration can make it more difficult for older, experienced American workers to retain their jobs or gain new employment. More difficult for American students to begin their careers, while discouraging younger Americans from pursuing education for those careers. Government investigations have found visa programs for higher-skilled foreign workers to be full of fraud and abuse by employers.

The highest levels of non-work are found among Americans with lower skill levels. There simply are not enough lower-skilled jobs for the number of lower-skilled Americans. The presence of large numbers of low-skilled foreign workers creates pressure for even lower wages and higher unemployment for workers who already may have poverty and near-poverty incomes.

Successive Presidents have refused to implement the law requiring a computerized, bio-metric check-in/check-out system for foreign citizens entering the U.S. Without a system to track every foreign citizen who enters the U.S. by air, sea or land, our government has little idea whether the more than 40 million foreign visitors a year are living up to the promises they made in obtaining their temporary visas. These visitors account for nearly half of the illegal foreign workers taking jobs from Americans.

Hundreds of thousands of foreign citizens are given lifetime U.S. work visas every year through the practice of granting automatic citizenship to every birth to a tourist, visiting student, temporary worker or illegal alien. Although they obviously don't immediately begin competing for jobs, they eventually do. In the short-term, these children of foreign citizens harm American workers because they are used to excuse their parents' illegal presence here, allowing many to continue to illegally hold U.S. jobs and creating pressure to give the parents amnesty and lifetime work permits to compete with any American for any job.