Sens. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) together are promoting new legislation to reform the H-1B visa program, after scores of abuses by companies including Disney, Southern California Edison and more.
The bill, the American Jobs First Act of 2015, is essentially an antidote to the woes of the H-1B program. The bill, which represents a crackdown on immigration program abuses by special interests, has several components.
First, it requires companies that use H-1B workers to pay such visa holders “either what an American worker who did identical or similar work made two years prior to the recruiting effort, or $110,000,†whichever is higher. What that does is it takes the incentive to pay foreigners less than Americans away from corporations, thereby ending the ability for the program to be abused in that regard.
Second, the bill requires that within 730 days—two years—of “an employee strike, an employer lockout, layoffs, furloughs, or other types of involuntary employee terminations other than for-cause dismissals,†a company cannot bring aboard any H-1B labor. That means it wouldn’t be able to replace Americans with foreigners. The bill also has more transparency requirements throughout.
Cruz, in an appearance on Breitbart News Daily with Stephen K. Bannon on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel on Friday morning, laid out the importance of the bill.
“Jeff Sessions and I together we launched a major reform bill on the H-1B visa program. As you know, the H-1B visa program was designed to bring in high-skilled workers,†Cruz said.
Simple, undeniable fact: Cruz let stand his 500% support for H1B until it recently became untenable. Now he is laying the politician and lawyer game of defining the definition of is. I’m not buying it. If he really didn’t believe in the increase, he’d have said it much earlier this year. Now, it is not credible and his explanations do him discredit. Can’t trust him, especially when you consider who is funding his campaign, who his wife and family are aligned with. I don’t trust Cruz to not sell us out.
We are all well aware of Cruzs’ “flexibility” on issues that hurt him in the polls. We have seen him change his positions to ones more popular with the voters many times. So many times in fact that some of us wonder just that the heck Cruz really believes.