Sneaky Immigation Policy Right Under Our Noses

The Senate immigration bill would require that foreign construction laborers here under the guest-worker program be paid well above the minimum wage, even as American workers at the same work site could earn less.

The bill "would guarantee wages to some foreign workers that could be higher than those paid to American workers at the same work site," says a policy paper released this week by the Senate's Republican Policy Committee. "This is unfair to U.S. workers, inappropriate, and unnecessary."

Not only do they wish to give them Amnesty for breaking our laws, but under their provisions for a "Guest-Worker" program, ***cough**amnesty**cough***, they want to pay them higher wages than real American citizens.

They really must want that Hispanic voting block, don't they?

I despise both the Republican and Democrats that are pulling this crap.

Across the Capitol, House Republicans are no more charitable about the Senate's immigration bill. They announced yesterday seven new House hearings for later this month into how bad they think the Senate bill is. One such hearing is titled: "Do the Reid-Kennedy bill's amnesty provisions repeat the mistakes of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?"

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The Davis Bacon Act of 1931 (DBA) requires that the local prevailing wage be paid to all workers employed in federally contracted construction or projects done for the District of Columbia. Those wages -- up to four or five times higher in some fields than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour -- are set by the Department of Labor.

The Senate's immigration bill would require that the higher wages be paid to foreign temporary workers in all construction occupations, even if the project isn't federally funded and doesn't otherwise fall under DBA.

"In other words, foreign workers employed in a construction job for which a DBA wage rate has been determined could be guaranteed wages higher than those paid to American workers doing the same job on the same private construction project for the same employer," the policy paper reports.

The DBA wage rate for an air conditioning mechanic in Alexandria or Montgomery County, for instance, is $30.27 an hour. That mechanic also is guaranteed paid holidays for New Year's Day, Martin Luther King's birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

And the Flip-Flop of the day goes to.....

Less than two months after voting overwhelmingly to build 370 miles of new fencing along the border with Mexico, the Senate yesterday voted against providing funds to build it.

Sneaking that by with barely a peep from anyone, barely a blip on bloggers radar, or the news, under the cover of what is happening with Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, we find that they managed to break their word yet again. Our government officials wore flip-flops to vote down funding to build the wall / fence along the border of Mexico.

Our Government officials waffled so fast it put Waffle House to shame.

But the May vote simply authorized the fencing and vehicle barriers, which on Capitol Hill is a different matter from approving the federal expenditures needed to build it.

"If we never appropriate the money needed to construct these miles of fencing and vehicle barriers, those miles of fencing and vehicle barriers will never actually be constructed," Mr. Sessions told his colleagues yesterday before the vote.

Virtually all Democrats were joined by the chamber's lone independent and 28 Republicans in opposing Mr. Session's amendment to the Homeland Security Appropriations Act. Only two Democrats -- Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Thomas R. Carper of Delaware -- supported funding the fence.

All told, 34 senators -- including most of the Republican leadership -- voted in May to build the fence but yesterday opposed funding it.

Senators Waffle House is hiring, and they want YOU!!
They say you make the BEST WAFFLES!!

The overall bill, which appropriates more than $32 billion to the Homeland Security Department, including $2.2 billion for border security and control, passed on a 100-0 vote last night.

Link

So they voted for authorizing the building of the wall 100-0.
Hey we are the security conscious senators, build the wall, yes, we are all for it....

But when it comes time, these Senators are serving waffles and wearing flip-flops to vote down funding what they were 100 percent for earlier.

Did you think we would miss this while Israel, Gaza and Lebanon occupy the news and the blogs?

Mr. Sessions said that if his colleagues were serious about building the fence that they promised, they would find the funding.

"We will rightly be accused of not being serious about the commitments we've made to the American people with regard to actually enforcing the laws of immigration in America, which many Americans already believe we're not serious about," he said. "They don't respect what we've done in the past, and they should not. We have failed, and it's time for us to try to fix it and do better."
To prove his point, Mr. Sessions offered another amendment, which appropriated another $85.7 million to enable Homeland Security to hire 800 more full-time investigators to probe immigration-law violations. The vote against that amendment was 66-34.

Better believe it!

Illegal Immigration is still a hot topic and just because the Israel/Gaza/Lebanon conflict occupies most American's thoughts at the moment, does not mean that when the dust settles that they will forget about where they left off with Illegal Immigrations and see the flip-flop tracks you have left behind.

Kris Kobach, who was a counsel to the attorney general under John Ashcroft, told a House subcommittee last week that one of the most unusual aspects of the Senate bill is a provision -- slipped into the more-than-800-page bill moments before the final vote -- that would require the United States to consult with the Mexican government before constructing the fencing.

"I know of no other provision in U.S. law where the federal government requires state and local governments -- every state and local government on the border -- to consult with state and local governments of a foreign power before the federal government can act," he said.

"Now, from my experience as a Justice Department official, when we had consultation requirements with the State Department, just getting two agencies in the executive branch to consult took months or years," said Mr. Kobach, now a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. "If you add this, three levels of government and a foreign power, your delay" will never end.

Where in history have we had to consult with a foriegn government before initiating actions on our own soveriegn soil?

Sometimes I wonder just what or even IF our Senators are thinking things through at all.

What is next? Asking permission from the UN before we pass any Laws for our own Nation? Consulting with other countries before our Courts make any major decisions regarding legalities or whether something is Constitutional or not?

If someone can point out where in our history we ever consulted with a foriegn power before initiating action on our own soil before, I would be greatly interested.