Speech #1090133959

We have seen lots of upturns and lots of downturns. What happens when the downturn comes. when we are not building as many houses or office buildings. there arent many jobs available. and Americans begin to find that jobs are not available for them. they are unemployed. and there is just not the work for people? What happens if you have a temporary visa issued and say that visa is for a period of 2 years? That visa expires. and there is no more job available. In fact. there are Americans looking for work. That foreign worker goes home. When another job opens up. when the construction industry gets going again and there are opportunities for foreign labor because Americans can no longer provide all of the labor required. the visas would begin being issued again. and that individual could come back and begin working again. Perhaps there is some other industry in which the individual can work. In any event. the visa for that job would. after a year or after 2 years. expire. and if there is not a job available. you do not issue a new visa. The problem in the underlying bill is that once you get your temporary visa. you can apply or your employer can apply for you to turn that automatically into a permanent legal residency status or a green card status. And we know from that you can apply for citizenship. When you have a green card. it does not matter whether there is a job here for you. it does not matter whether we are in the middle of a recession and Americans are looking for work. you have a legal right to be in the United States and no one can kick you out. That is what legal permanent residency means. So there is no reason in a temporary worker program to be able to convert the temporary visa or permit into a legal permanent residency. In fact. there can be great harm done if the economy changes. the economic situations change. jobs are no longer available. and instead of having those visas expire. you have converted the individuals into people who have a permanent right to stay in the United States. This amendment does absolutely nothing to change the existing law with respect to how you can acquire a green card in the United States or convert other legal status into benefits under our immigration laws. You can still apply for a green card. You can still apply for other ways of remaining in the United States for differing periods of time. We do not change any of that. If you are somebody who wants a green card. there is still a way to get a green card. In fact. under different versions of the bill. the number of green cards is increased so that there are greater opportunities for green cards. The bottom line is. you do not have to convert the temporary worker program into a permanent worker program. There are economic studies which back up what I am saying. For the sake of time. I will not get into the details of some of the studies. Among other things. in previous times. going back to the year 2000. for example. in the skilled visa era where we issued large numbers of visas. there were economic studies that suggested we could have a continuing need for those visas on into the future for some number of years. and we were issuing those visas at a very high rate at that time. Little did we know that the economic conditions were going to change very rapidly. and very quickly those highskilled jobs fell off. Yet we had issued visas for people to come into the country at a time when. in fact. we were starting to go into a recession and. in fact. those jobs were not available for those people. If they had been able to permanently reside In the United States after they got their temporary visas. it wouldnt matter whether there were jobs available for them. they would be here. It would be legal. There would be no way to remove them. And of course. with green cards. they would be entitled to benefits which would flow from that status. The United States is going to have to pay a lot of unemployment compensation if we now have two bodies of workers. neither one of which can get a job or both of which are competing with each other. American workers and foreign workers.