Posted on 01/20/2015 4:24:14 PM PST by Extremely Extreme Extremist
Offers amendment to increase H-1B visas to help improve, retain high-skilled labor force
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) today presented an amendment to the Gang of Eight immigration bill that would improve our nation’s legal immigration system by increasing high-skilled temporary worker visas, called H-1B visas, by 500 percent. The measure would effectively address the needs of our nation’s high-skilled workforce by helping meet the growing demand for workers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. It will also make block grants available to states to promote STEM education efforts and increase domestic STEM professionals. The committee voted against the amendment 4 to 14 with every Democrat voting against it on a party-line vote.
Legal immigration is a fundamental pillar of our nation's heritage, and I was pleased today to offer legislation that would have improved and expanded legal immigration by dramatically increasing the cap for high-tech temporary worker visas. This amendment would not only improve the current system, but would also encourage economic growth and create new jobs in America. There is currently a serious shortage of workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, yet every year we send thousands of high-tech graduate students back to their home countries to start businesses and create jobs. This makes no sense. I’m disappointed in the committee’s vote to reject expanding high-tech immigration. Although the Gang of Eight's bill makes a modest step towards improving high-tech immigration, it does not go nearly far enough. There is no reason to arbitrarily cap high-tech visas at 110,000 when these jobs are going unfilled. We need economic growth here and now.”
Sen. Cruz’s amendment would:
Immediately increase the H-1B cap by 500 percent from 65,000 to 325,000.
• To truly fix our broken immigration system and take into account our nation’s economic needs, we must put more emphasis on increasing employment-based immigration. (EEE's comments in red - No mention of reducing the size, scope, and power of Fedzilla, which would unleash jobs on its own). There is a current shortage of qualified high-skilled workers in the U.S., with an estimated 230,000 advanced-degree STEM jobs going unfilled by 2018. Shortage caused by the feds sticking their grimy paws in the economy and picking winners and losers.
• Additionally, more H-1B workers mean more jobs for American workers – according to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, for every additional 100 H-1B workers, 183 jobs are created for U.S. citizens. How? What was this study based on and who funded it?
Help retain the high-skilled workers that are trained in the U.S. by allowing “dual intent.” What exactly is this?
• This would allow foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities to enter the U.S. on a temporary H-1B visa if they intend to get a Green Card once they complete their studies. This is Roman-style suicide for any nation
• Currently, about 300,000 students come to America annually to be educated, but are required to return home upon completing their education. Why can't they get edumacated in their own crapholes and improve their country's way of life?
Create block grants for states to promote STEM education in their public schools by raising H-1B fees. More borrowing and spending that we can't afford. I thought Cruz was a fiscal conservative?
• These block grants will encourage educating our children in these high demand fields, opening more doors of opportunity to future generations. According to the Joint Economic Committee, between 2010 and 2020, demand for STEM graduates is expected to grow by 17 percent, while employment for those graduates will increase only 14 percent, partly because American graduates are not available or qualified to fill these jobs.
• The block grant program would be funded by raising H-1B fees from $750 to $1,250 for businesses with fewer than 25 employees, and from $1,500 to $2,500 for those with 25 or more employees.
Aw, thank you from my heart for your prayer.
I will put you in mine, (((reasonisfaith)))
You can lay off the nonsensical lies about me not supporting Cruz, and about you and I ever discussing him, as you kept hammering your pro immigration nonsense on this thread.
You were laying your democrat party immigration arguments down as heavy as you could, and that is the topic you and I have been discussing.
The left wins because they passed a law in 1965 to replace the American voters.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s.
In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.
After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
115 posted on 1/20/2015, 8:15:46 PM by ansel12
The reason I’m not a democrat is they’re communist.
The reason I oppose communism: it’s the devil’s ideology. Marx was a Satanist.
The only way liberals can advance their agenda is to make it look like the exact opposite of what it is. And everything it produces is opposite its initial claim. Demonic.
I really don’t feel strongly about legal immigration. My stand on illegal immigration has been that it needs to stop, for going on thirty years.
Cruz is untouchable on this legal immigration thing.
Obviously, no one in Cruz’s family works in the tech sector.
“Increase the H1-B’s by 500 percent?Why would any American kid want to go to college with the job market swamped with foreign workers?”
It’s a chicken-egg thing. A lot of our kids can’t major in the hard sciences or engineering because our dumbed down schools don’t prepare them for it. So we need to import that talent. Which creates less of a demand for American students to go into those fields.
But the real culprit is liberal control of education.
‘Legal immigrants go through the trouble because they respect our system. They know the value of becoming American.’
Agreed. Legal immigrants become citizens; illegals are just leaches.
I don’t see one of his positions that you posted that I would not be thrilled to see implemented.
He’s got my vote in 2016.
“In my severely depressed state, I guess I’m not able to completely comprehend.”
What’s wrong? i’ll keep you in my prayers!
Schools were bad in the 70s-80s when I went.
But you can’t hold smart people down.
The smart kids don’t have a problem excelling. They always have and they always will.
The average to dumb kids will easily be hoodwinked by schools into doing and thinking very stupid things.
The smart kids can be indoctrinated to be immoral or lazy, but if they’re talented with math and science, you’ll do well in those fields.
The elites just want those smart engineering/science kids to have to work for peanuts their whole life, that’s all.
There is ZERO need to import workers into America.
It’s a complete lie composed by those who want to destroy the American economy for all but the power elites.
Aw, thank you so much, dearest Hardens Hollow.
I’ve sort of crashed and burned (again) but now have new anti-depressant meds.
My cherished DrO died on my birthday last year.
I’ve got grief issues.
ReasonIsFaith,
If you are trying to make a case that Ansel12 is anti-Cruz, you’re in left field.
He may not agree with you on this issue where immigration is concerned, but he is solidly in Cruz’s corner.
Some of us are aware that all politicians work for the power elite.
Wherever you see an Ivy-league educated politician, you know right off the bat who he’s working for.
Politicians have a public persona that identifies with either the “left” or “right”, but ultimately it’s all just a show for the public.
LOL, Socon, you know I don’t hide that tinfoil !
Seriously, let’s go down the list of Ivy Leaguers who are “conservative”.
It’s the neocon movement.
They’re all simply well-trained agenda-pushing operatives.
Mind you, very conservative by Republican standards, I’ll certainly admit that.
You can’t get any more of an establishment guy than an Ivy League Republican.
The Ivy League simply never helps small business or true Christian values. They sell out halfway, saying they did the best they could, thus ends another Act in the Great Play. The Ivy League is the school of the top people in the GOP establishment, the half of the American establishment that says it is “pro-business”. The other half, the liberal “we’re for the common man” establishment - with it’s roots in the same New England elite families, - is all intertwined WITH them by family, business and political ties. They just don’t mention all those ties to the sheeple. It would spoil the show. The same people who think FDR was a “man of the people” and would be shocked to find out he was working for world financial elites would also be shocked to learn that Will Geer, “Grandpa Walton”, was in real life a homosexual communist.
Oh my, I’ve got the vapors.
You know most H1B visas do not vote....right ? Most take years to get citizenship & a lot go home. I’m talking about the millions of poor, uneducated family members who pour into the States year after year through chain immigration & family reunification....those millions, but you know that. I’ve been in this game a long time, so don’t waste your time on me acting as if visa applicants are the main issue.
And no, we don’t need hundreds of thousands more H1Bs taking American jobs.
Hate to say it so bluntly but we have a bunch of blooming idiots here that seem as bent on destroying the Nation as the Left that they claim to despise.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that Cruz might have put this amendment forward, knowing it would get shot down (only three other Republicans supported it?), just to make a point.
That being that if immigration conveys all the benefits a lot of people believe it does, why not crank the doors further open, especially in areas (like STEM) that are critical to US national and economic security? Or at least make a bunch of bought/paid for Senators vote on it?
I mean, if Cruz came out tomorrow with a bill to jack the minimum wage up to $50 an hour we’d all know what he was doing, why he was doing it, and would be so singing his praises for having the courage to do it.
Is it possible that this was done in that vein?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.