My goodness, there has been a flurry of immigration posturing and positioning since we last revised our Ratings of the Presidential candidates in 10 categories and calculated overall Worker-Protection Immigration Grades!
We've just finished our regular Grading Committee meeting (early Friday afternoon) here at NumbersUSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. We've sifted through the charges and counter-charges and focused on what the candidates are saying that really address what they specifically are promising to do about immigration policies.
Donald Trump stepped back from previous promises about protecting American workers and identified himself with both Marco Rubio and Mark Zuckerberg in extolling foreign tech workers. Marco Rubio overstated his protections for American workers with his efforts for H-1B expansion. Rick Santorum missed precision in some of his numbers but was in ballpark in focusing immigration policy on its relationship to labor force participation and stagnant wages. CNBC trotted out its own questionable anecdote to suggest that the country may have a labor shortage.
We sit on the precipice of the possibility that the most powerful and committed Republican House amnesty leader will become Speaker of the House.
My description of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is not based just on what I know but on what PBS proved Tuesday night with its premier airing of a two-hour documentary, IMMIGRATION BATTLE. It provided detail after detail of Ryan's back-room efforts to get a version of the Senate Gang of 8 amnesty through the House over the last two years.
Many of the news media have rushed headlines and speech summaries that state or suggest that Pope Francis today called on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform of some kind. I heard and read the speech and don't find that.
Posted Wednesday, Sep. 23 -- Today, Pope Francis avoided giving his opinions about what the U.S. should do with its immigration policies and instead stuck with broad principles.
The NumbersUSA Grade Committee met this week to consider all the immigration statements made by Presidential candidates since we last met. We changed a lot of ratings that led to an overall grade improvement for Rand Paul from a D+ to a C-minus, and a demotion of Chris Christie from C+ to a C and a demotion of Carly Fiorina from a C-minus to a D.
The dust is kind of settling after a week-long wind-storm of news media pressing Presidential candidates to express a position on various aspects of immigration policy.
We know a lot more now than we did a week ago. And we'll tell you what we know right here. This overview is the result of two long NumbersUSA Grade Committee meetings yesterday.
So much for the RNC's command after the 2012 election that the next round of GOP candidates had to embrace comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). None of the 17 candidates tonight dared speak for CIR and its doubling of legal immigration along with an amnesty.
Nobody repeated the CIR mantra that America needs lots of immigrants to do the jobs that Americans won't do -- or aren't smart enough to do. No talk of stapling green cards to the college degrees of foreign students.
Fox TV chose the 10 participants in its main GOP candidate debate Thursday night based on their ranking in popularity polls.
If instead, they had chosen the 10 with the highest overall grades on NumbersUSA's Presidential Hopefuls Worker-Protection Immigration Grade Cards, here are the 10 who would have been on stage in prime time. I list them here in the order of their scoring in the 10 categories of immigration that NumbersUSA calculates as to how they would affect American wage earners (their overall grade is in parentheses).