NEWS ANALYSIS
DOUBLE TALK: RUBIO STILL PUSHING AMNESTY?
Critics say his actions speak louder than words
Garth Kant
WASHINGTON – Presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., says he’s had a change of heart on amnesty.
One of the authors of the doomed bill on comprehensive immigration reform, or amnesty, that passed in the Senate in 2013 but died in the House, Rubio now says he has learned his lesson: Border security must come first.
But, critics say, a close reading of what he has been saying and doing shows Rubio is still supporting amnesty by a different name, as well as immigration reform, before securing the border.
They say it shows itself in two ways: his continued support for amnesty for younger illegal immigrants and his sponsorship of a bill easing immigration requirements that is supported by big business.
DACA by any other name?
On Saturday, Rubio forcefully reiterated his oft-repeated new public stance on amnesty and “secure the border first” mantra in front of 100 people packed into a New Hampshire living room at a quasi-campaign event.
Before doing anything else on immigration reform, he stressed, Americans must feel illegal immigration has stopped, and, “You have to show them that you’ve secured the southern border.”
The point seems clear: No immigration reform, including amnesty, before securing the border.
However, as Breitbart reported on Monday, following a Spanish-language interview with Univision, what the senator is proposing is to replace executive amnesty under President Obama with legislative amnesty under a President Rubio, even if the border has not been secured.
Rubio’s chief campaign spokesman Alex Conant confirmed that, if elected president, Rubio would not require a secured border before giving legislative amnesty to those who benefited from Obama’s first executive amnesty, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
Conant said Rubio would also allow illegal immigrants who have received executive amnesty under DACA to keep their legal status until a legislative replacement is enacted, when they would then receive permanent amnesty.
The so-called DREAM Act, which never passed in Congress, was effectively put into law by Obama’s first DACA executive order. Obama then lowered the DACA eligibility requirements by executive order in November.
DACA originally made more than 2 million illegal immigrants eligible for legal status, including Social Security cards, Medicare and federal tax credits.
If the courts uphold Obama’s extension of DACA, it will make will make as many as 6 million illegal immigrants eligible for legal status.
Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., who stunningly unseated former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., last June, largely by running against amnesty, has been scathingly critical of putting the DREAM Act into law.
On Monday, he told radio host Rusty Humphries (in the Washington Times), “The ‘dream,’ unfortunately, is the cynical use of language that George Orwell could only come up with where logic is flipped on its head, so you call something that’s illegal ‘a dream.’”
“I taught ethics for 18 years … and to say it’s morally good to violate the law is something that no ethicist I know believes in.”
“It’s cynical. We’re having another catastrophe at the border right now. We had one a year ago when the kids come in,” he added. “You put up a green light again – that’s what the DREAM Act does – puts up a green light and says, ‘If you make it over the border, don’t worry about it, you’ll be taken care of and benefits and we’ll provide you even a pathway to citizenship with amnesty.’ It’s a cynical policy … it’s no way to run a country.”
That is a sentiment shared by most conservative lawmakers. Rubio has often been called a tea-party conservative, but he is the only prominent one to support DACA, even if implemented legislatively rather than by executive order.
Skilled worker shortage or surplus?
Big business representatives are coming to Washington, D.C., on Friday to lobby for Rubio’s I-Squared bill and other pro-immigration reforms.
The event called “Understanding and Improving the High-Skilled H-1B Visa Program” will be held in the Senate Visitors Center and is sponsored by such organizations as American Immigration Lawyers Association, Business Roundtable, Council for Global Immigration, Information Technology Industry Council, National Association of Manufacturers, National Venture Capital Association, Semiconductor Industry Association, Society for Human Resource Management, and TechNet.
The U.S.Chamber of Commerce and Partnership for a New American Economy (run by Bill Marriott, chairman of the board of Marriott, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg) will be there, too.
Rubio and Sens. Orin Hatch, R-Utah; Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Chris Coons, D-Del.; and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., are sponsoring the I-Squared bill.
They say it would reform the H-1B visa by increasing quotas for temporary highly skilled workers by making them more legally mobile.
H-1B workers can pursue a green card while working on a temporary visa.
Critics of the bill say there is no shortage of skilled workers in America, and, as shown by stagnant wages, there is actually a glut.
And, they say, the high-tech industry just wants cheap foreign labor.
And that this bill would just needlessly increase the number of immigrants competing with Americans for good jobs.
“The answer isn’t to import 7 billion people here. The average American knows this. I think there’s only about 7 percent in favor of this crazy immigration policy,” added the former economics professor.
An aide to another member of Congress bluntly told WND the Rubio bill is really a massive uncapped green-card increase plus a tripling of the H-1B program.
Brat zeroed in on what he saw as the cause of a bad idea supported by many Republicans.
“[W]e’re scared of our shadow, we’re especially scared of the 2016 presidential election. The buzz is that we have this demographic issue with African-American, Hispanic voters and instead of saying, ‘Hey these are our brothers and sisters in the Judeo-Christian tradition,’ we backtrack on our first principles and pay attention to what some of the crony capitalists want, and they want cheap labor. It’s just a bad brew.”
He summed up, “And the workers know it, but it all comes down to … the big money.”
That view was summed up by another academic, Rutgers professor Hal Salzman, who said, “The I-Squared green card provisions are just a means, by another name, to create a glut of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers who will flood the labor market, with the predictable consequences of any market glut.”
“And, along the way, it will erode the nation’s innovation foundation anchored in American universities as they close their doors to U.S. students, just as the California State University system did when it decreed that its graduate programs were closed to state residents and, to increase revenue, effectively favored admissions to foreign students who now comprise over 90 percent of some STEM master’s programs.”
On Thursday, Hot Air reported that Rubio has been raking in money from pro-amnesty Republicans by touting his “immigration record” behind closed doors, while continuing to call for securing the border first, in public.
Follow Garth Kant @DCgarth
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/double-talk-rubio-still-pushing-amnesty/#1OhB9LeiOZ1AUhLO.99My comments: It appears that Rubio is just another double talking politician.
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