Speech #1090120003

That is interesting but not very good for this country. and exactly the wrong strategy for the longterm economic health of America. Employment rates for individuals lacking a high school diploma. you will see that nearly onehalf of U.S.-born workers without a high school diploma are without a job. Immigrant workers. on the other hand. many of whom come here without a high school diploma. find work in high numbers. I have a picture of some immigrant workers that was given to me recently. These. by the way. were workers who came in by a contractor who hired them to help do work after Hurricane Katrina. undocumented workers who came into this country. andby the way. at the hearing I held on this. one of the people who testified was a fellow who ran a Louisiana construction firm. His firm was hired by a Halliburton subcontractor to do electrical repair work in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. But the Halliburton subcontractor changed its mind. and they hired a good number of people to come in who were undocumented workers and who didnt have adequate training to do electrical work at this particular base. It is the sort of thing that is going on all the time. and I think it is hurting this country. So the question is for this Congress. Who is going to talk about American workers? I know the subject is about immigration. but it has a profound impact on American workers. So who is going to come here today to talk about American workers? We are told that the corporate strategy here is that they cant find additional American workers without paying higher wages and they dont want to pay higher wages because they want to keep costs down. so they are going to import additional workers. They are now called guest workers. By the way. these are nonagricultural. these guest workers. This is in addition to H2A and H2B workers. agricultural and nonagricultural. who will still exist under law. I havent even described the people coming in under those two provisions. Yet we have people saying we must have this additional guest worker program. I understand people listening and those who feel very strongly that we have to have this immigration bill. including the guest workers. who will say: What you are talking about is antiimmigrant. That couldnt be further from the truth. I indicated that I think immigrants contribute a great deal to this country. Most of us come as a result of some immigration back a generation or several generations in our family. But the question is: What are we going to do to fix this issue. and what are we going to do to balance the immigration legislation and the proposal for guest workers against the needs of American workers? I think what is going on here is going to pull the rug out from under American workers. I dont understand this at all. Let me put up a chart that shows the average wagesperhaps I should show you the New York Times story of March 17. a couple of weeks ago. about a businesswoman in New York. Sister Ping is her nickname. She was sentenced to 35 years for running one of New York Citys most lucrative immigrant smuggling rings and for financing the infamous Voyage of Golden Venture. the rusty freighter that ran aground with 300 starving immigrants in its hold. Sister Ping said she would be happier in prison in the United States than free in her rural village in China. Let me describe what persuades Sister Ping and others to attempt to bring lowwage income earners to this country.