Amnesty Vote Tuesday, Call Your Senators

Eagle Forum June 10, 2013 Harry Reid filed a Motion to Proceed on S. 744, the Chuck Schumer — Marco Rubio Amnesty bill. This means there will be votes on the bill on Tuesday afternoon. Your Senators need to hear that you expect them to vote NO on every vote related to this bill!  That includes all cloture votes. Cloture votes are the motions to end debate, and they require a 60-vote threshold, so those are the only votes conservatives can win. This bill got worse, not better through the Committee process, and the bill is so bad that no amendments can save it. Tell your Senators you expect them to vote NO on this bill at every turn! Our activists report that they are hearing cop-outs from Senators defending their support for the bill such as, “Our immigration system is broken and something needs to be done.” The system is broken, but this bill does not provide real solutions. This bill does more harm than good and only succeeds in making payoffs to special interests that make the problem worse. We need you to tell your Senators that passing this bill is worse than doing nothing! S. 744 was drafted by eight Senators behind closed doors with little more than one day’s worth of marathon hearings on the many aspects of this sweeping legislation. Only well-funded unions, corporations and special interests were allowed behind the Gang of 8’s closed doors, and the 1,000 + page bill is full of cleverly disguised payoffs to those interests. Direct stakeholders, like immigration enforcement employees, legal immigrants and jobless Americans were excluded from the process. Even if the broken promises on border security are addressed, S. 744 contains too many other fatal flaws to be fixable. Several Senators will introduce amendments they claim will fix the border security but those amendments are wholly inadequate to truly secure the borders, and they do not touch other problems with the bill, like the fact that it guts interior enforcement. Do not allow your Senators to get away with saying that this bill can be improved through amendments, it simply cannot! Several of the bill’s flaws are addressed in the excellent Dear Colleague letter signed by Senators Cruz, Grassley, Lee and Sessions, including the fact that the bill: Provides immediate legalization without securing the border Rewards criminal aliens, absconders and deportees and undermines law enforcement. Contains extremely dangerous national security loopholes. Facilitates fraud in our immigration system. Creates no real penalties for illegal immigrants and rewards them with entitlements. Delays for years the implementation of E-Verify Does not fix our legal immigration system Advanced through a process predicated on a deal struck before mark-up. Rewards those who have broken our laws by offering a special path to citizenship. Additionally, the bill thoroughly guts interior enforcement of immigration laws, and like ObamaCare, S. 744 grants enormous power and discretion to the Secretary of Homeland Security, who has a well-established policy of NOT enforcing immigration laws and of legalizing as many people as possible. Gang of 8 members say we need this bill because we currently have de facto amnesty, but this bill simply codifies amnesty, empowers the Secretary of Homeland Security to continue the policy of inaction, and relaxes the already-enacted laws that are not being enforced. The bill weakens control on asylum seekers, even in the wake of the Boston Marathon terrorist attack, which was perpetuated by foreigners who were granted asylum in the United States. S. 744 also out sources the job of guiding aliens through the amnesty process to ACORN-like, liberal community organizer groups. Finally, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation conservatively estimates that the amnesty portion of the bill alone will cost taxpayers $6.3 Trillion, and reports indicate the bill will flood 33 million people into the country over the next 10 years to compete in an already difficult job market and untold numbers of temporary workers. S. 744 creates extravagant new programs, and because the authors of the bill declared that these programs are “emergency spending,” they are exempted from the “pay as you go” requirement. Even worse, S. 744 combined with ObamaCare will make newly amnestied aliens more attractive to employers than American citizens or legal immigrants, since employers will not have to pay ObamaCare penalties for newly amnestied illegal aliens, because they are not eligible for ObamaCare. This bill is unjust and harmful on so many levels. We need you to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Schumer-Rubio Amnesty bill because it only makes the broken immigration system worse. Take action!  Senator Hatch 888-978-3148                                       Senator Lee 888-978-3094 We need you to tell all your friends, family members and other activists that your Senators’ phones need to be ringing off the hook Monday and Tuesday!  We are hearing that Senators want to vote for this bill to make the issue go away, but they are afraid their constituents will find out what’s in it. Tell your Senators you know how bad this bill is and that they must reject it!