Watch the video. Ted Cruz talked about his father coming here with a student visa. After graduating, he started up a company and created jobs in this country.
May 14, 2013
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.
“I strongly support legal immigration. 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.
Help retain the high-skilled workers that are trained in the U.S. by allowing “dual intent.”
Create block grants for states to promote STEM education in their public schools by raising H-1B fees.
The native born create more jobs than immigrants do. Immigrants use our welfare system to a greater extent than the native born. 20% of legal immigrants lack even a high school degree. We don't have a shortage of skilled labor in this country. We have a surplus of labor. If we didn't, wages would be going up, not down. We have a shortage of jobs.
“I strongly support legal immigration. 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.”
A huge, big lie to satisfy his corporate paymasters who want cheap labor. We have the lowest labor participation rates in 38 years and wages are declining. We don't need to expand the number of guest workers annually from the current figure of 640,000 a year. We need to reduce it. We also don't need 1.1 million legal permanent immigrants a year. We have just had the two highest decades of legal immigration in our history. In 1970 one out of 21 was foreign born; today. it is one out of 7 the highest in 105 years; and within a decade it will be the highest in our history. In 1970 we had 9.7 million foreign born and today it is 41.5 million. 87% of legal immigrants are minorities as defined by the USG. Immigrants and minorities vote more than two to one Dem.
Here is how a real conservative, Jeff Sessions, talks about immigration:
When Americans went to the polls in 2012, the following was true: Work-force participation had sunk to its lowest level in 35 years, wages had fallen below 1999 levels, and 47 million Americans were on food stamps. Yet Mitt Romney, the challenger to the incumbent president, lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.
And what did the GOP’s brilliant consultant class conclude from this resounding defeat? They declared that the GOP must embrace amnesty. The Republican National Committee dutifully issued a report calling for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that would inevitably increase the flow of low-skilled immigration, reducing the wages and living standards of the very voters whose trust the GOP had lost.
Over the past four decades, as factories were shuttered and blue-collar jobs were outsourced or automated, net immigration quadrupled. Yet the corporate-consultant class has pronounced that an insufficient level of immigration is the problem. A more colossal misreading of the political moment has rarely occurred.
Perhaps the most important political development now unfolding in the U.S. is the public’s growing loss of faith in our political and financial elites of both parties. To open the ears of disaffected voters, the GOP must break publicly from the elite immigration consensus of Wall Street and Davos. Republicans have a clear path to building a conservative majority if they free themselves from the corporate consultants and demonstrate to the American public that the GOP is the only party aligned with the core interests, concerns, and beliefs of everyday hardworking citizens.
“Most business leaders have long favored more open immigration. Different businesses want different kinds of people,” a prominent GOP fundraiser declared on TV. “A restaurant may want waiters and cooks; a hospital wants nurses and doctors; a university wants physicists; a business like Exelon needs more engineers.” Asked by the interviewer about hiring U.S. workers for open jobs, he replied that many of those now unemployed are “unable to compete for them.”
Is that the message of a winning party? It might win a majority of votes at a dinner party in a gated community in Bel Air, but it is an act of profound delusion to think that plan can form the basis of a nationwide Republican resurgence.
Democrats in Washington have already cast their lot. A recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows that all net employment gains from 2000 to 2013 — a period of record legal immigration — went to immigrant workers, and yet the immigration plan championed by the White House and congressional Democrats would triple the number of immigrants given permanent legal status over the next decade, and it would double the annual flow of guest workers to compete for jobs in every sector of the U.S. economy. The Democrats’ plan delivers for international corporations, open-borders groups, and even workers now living in other countries — all at the expense of American workers.
So Republicans have a choice. They can either join the Democrats as the second political party in Washington advocating uncontrolled immigration, or they can offer the public a principled alternative and represent the American workers Democrats have jettisoned. Republicans can either help the White House enact an immigration plan that will hollow out the American middle class, or they can finally expose the truth about the White House plan and detail the enormous harm it will inflict.
The last 40 years have been a period of uninterrupted large-scale immigration into the U.S., coinciding with increased joblessness, falling wages, failing schools, and a growing welfare state. Would not the sensible, conservative thing to do be to slow down for a bit, allow wages to rise and assimilation to occur, and help the millions struggling here today — immigrant and native-born alike — transition from dependency to self-sufficiency? Indeed, the heart of the GOP’s pro-worker, pro-middle-class agenda should be a bold reforming of our welfare system. The current welfare structure is unfair both to the taxpayers who fund it and to the struggling Americans it has failed to rescue from poverty.
What if, instead of applying for guest workers, companies applied to hire workers receiving job training at a local welfare office? Able-bodied adults, in turn, would be required to accept employment or lose benefits. In other words: instead of a guest-worker program, a welfare-to-work program.
From AEI's study, adding 100 H-1B workers results in an additional 183 jobs among US natives.
“I strongly support legal immigration. 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....”
