The Stimulus: 300,000 Jobs for Illegals
By Robert Rector
Heritage Foundation | Thursday, February 05, 2009
If enacted, the Senate stimulus bill would fund over $100 billion in new government construction projects with the goal of providing additional jobs to unemployed Americans. The House-passed stimulus bill contains explicit language to bar employment of illegal immigrants in these construction projects. However, the Senate bill deliberately omits this language.
If the Senate version of the bill becomes law, a great number of the workers employed in government construction programs will, in fact, be illegal immigrants. About one out of seven (or 15 percent) of workers employed in construction in the U.S. is an illegal immigrant.[1] Unless strong mechanisms are put in place to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants, it is reasonable to expect that a similar proportion of workers hired for construction projects under the stimulus bill would be in the country illegally.
Construction Funding and Employment of Illegal Immigrants
The Senate stimulus bill would provide roughly $104 billion in funding for a variety of construction projects including highways, schools, and renovation of public housing. This funding will be spread over five to seven years. Normal government estimates indicate that each $1 billion spent on construction will create around 19,500 construction jobs, each lasting a year.[2] Thus $104 billion in funding in construction projects would ostensibly create construction-related jobs for about 2.04 million workers over several years. Without specific mechanisms to ensure that workers are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants authorized to work, it is likely that 15 percent of these workers, or 300,000, would be illegal immigrants.
House Bill Blocks Employment of Illegal Immigrants
The House-passed version of the stimulus bill (H.R. 1, the American Recovery an Reinvestment Act) contains explicit language, introduced by Congressman Jack Kingston (R-GA), requiring that all contractors receiving funds under the bill use the federal E-Verify system to determine whether workers are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants authorized to work.
E-Verify is a real-time, web-based verification system run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. E-Verify can determine with great accuracy the authenticity of the personal information and credentials offered by employees and new hires.[3] In most cases, verification occurs almost instantly.
Some 99.4 percent of lawful workers receive immediate positive verification, while the other 0.6 percent of lawful workers receive positive verification after a brief visit to their local security office, generally lasting only a few minutes. Despite years of use and screenings of millions of employees, there has never been a single instance in which a lawful worker lost permanent employment as a result of erroneous information provided by the E-Verify system.[4]
E-Verify is a very effective mechanism for determining the legal status of potential workers. E-Verify is inexpensive for employers to use, costing between $4 and $20 for each employee screened.[5] E-Verify is in wide use; currently about one in 10 new hires in the U.S. economy are screened through the E-Verify system.
At present, all federal employees are checked by the E-Verify system, but outside contractors receiving federal funds (such as construction firms) are not required to use the system. Requiring contractors receiving stimulus funds to use E-Verify will greatly reduce the probability that those funds will be used to employ illegal immigrants.
Senate Bill Does Not Block Use of Federal Funds to Employ Illegal Immigrants
The stimulus bill currently being debated in the Senate deliberately omits the E-Verify provision from the House bill. Later this week, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) will introduce an amendment to include the House E-Verify language in the Senate bill. However, if the current Senate bill were to become law without language requiring contractor use of E-Verify, the inevitable result would be billions in federal funds spent to employ illegal immigrants.
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From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Monday 2FEB09 4 p.m. EST
We launched national TV campaign to expose dirty secret of firing Americans & hiring foreign workers
DEAR FRIENDS,
Please help spread the excitement about the ads that many of you have already seen on the major cable news TV networks today.
This is an extended national TV campaign to tell the truth about importing foreign workers that the mainstream media and national politicians are attempting to keep Americans from knowing.
Click to see the ad and a number of actions that you can take immediately.
The ad presents two simple facts that, taken together, create an outrageous image that the government doesn't want the people to know.
Please help with the educational campaign by sending the ad page to everybody you know.
So far you haven't seen these stats in the mainstream media. You haven't heard national politicians talking about them. They resolutely refuse to allow the people to hear about these government statistics.
And the 2 banned statistics are . . . .
2.5 million Americans lost jobs in 2008
The federal government brought in 1.5 million new foreign workers to take jobs in 2008
On February 2, 2009, NumbersUSA with the Coalition for the Future American Worker launched the "elevator ad" to put these obscene statistics in the living room of most Americans.
Without your actions -- and those of hundreds of thousands of others -- I have no doubt that the federal government will continue its shameful conduct of running an immigration system that throws hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work.
NumbersUSA has been doing everything in its power the last three months to persuade the nation's political leaders and media leaders to address this incongruous policy.
NUMBERS THAT ARE TOO EXPLOSIVE FOR JOURNALISTS TO SAY
I have done dozens of newspaper interviews, always emphasizing the fact that our system is set up to bring in an average of 138,000 new foreign workers each month unless Congress and Pres. Obama make a change.
To date, I am not aware of a single newspaper that has dared to put that statistic in a story.
In fact, NumbersUSA members have sent us examples of where they have submitted letters to the editor using the number. But the newspaper will change 138,000 to "thousands" before printing.
Friends, "138,000 a month" is an inconvenient truth that apprently is too incendiary to be allowed for public viewing. Neither will the mainstream media or national politicians utter the aggregate (rounded-down) number of "1.5 million foreign workers brought in every year."
So, we have had to resort to an ad campaign to force these numbers into the public sphere.
You know the numbers must be powerful because the Establishment of America is committed to censoring them.
Please help us spread the word about this ad campaign. Go look at the page with the ad on it and forward that page far and wide before taking the actions suggested there.
Also, you will find on that page the link to the airtight government statistics that back up the numbers on the ad that the Establishment doesn't want anybody to know.
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