Immigration policy bought paid for?

Ref. (extracts) Tim Murray March 11, 2008 http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2235

Summery: The American people have spoken on immigration but the political elite will not listen because they are paid by their corporate benefactors not to listen...In America today, anything's for sale, even democracy.

For a decade polls have consistently recorded a wide discrepancy between the attitude of ordinary Americans toward immigration and the attitude of those who govern them. 60% of the public thought current immigration levels to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," as compared to only 14% of the country's leadership. This 46% gap compared to a 37% gap revealed by a 1998 poll. 70% felt that reducing illegal immigration should be a "very important" foreign policy goal compared to only 22% of the political elite.

Polling done by TM, inc. in October 2006 confirmed these results. While the U.S. Senate passed a bill (S2611) supporting a large increase in legal immigration, 68% of voters thought the number of immigrants, legal or illegal, was too high, 34 times the number who said it was too "low".

71% said that low paying jobs could easily be filled if employers paid American workers decent wages rather than import low-skill labour. And 62% agreed with a statement that Canadian viewers of CBC immigration sob stories have frequently observed, "The media coverage of illegal immigrants is mostly devoted to human interest stories like how illegals risk their lives (to get here), rather than the costs they create and the Americans, particularly low-wage American workers, who may be harmed by their being here."

The polling company Inc./Woman Trend in October of 2006 found 66% in agreement that the population increase caused by the present level of immigration would negatively impact the environment. A Zogbylcis poll of April 2006 revealed that 67% of Americans wanted less immigration to promote the assimilation of those who were already here. A poll conducted a month earlier by the same company found that 60% wanted their congressional representative to support more restrictive immigration policies.

What is interesting about sampling public opinion about immigration is that no apparent or substantial fault lines appear between ethnic groupings. Now it is understandable that African-Americans, given their socio-economic standing, feel the direct brunt of illegal Hispanic labour competition , and would therefore take a severe position on the issue. In fact, 59% of black Californian voters favour imposing stiff penalties on employers who hire illegal aliens, (Field Poll, April 2006), and 66% of them favour building a border wall along major sections of the U.S./Mexico line.

American Latinos believe:

"76% of Hispanics said in a December 2007 poll done by Arizona State University-Southwest that illegal immigration is a serious problem."

"53% would change the 14th amendment so a child born to an illegal immigrant in America could not automatically become an American unless the other parent was a citizen."

"56% of Latinos favour increasing the number of border patrol agents by a third."

"Cultural diversity is the fig leaf of naked corporate exploitation."

To further quote Murray,

"A report by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre found that Americans and established immigrants suffer an 11% wage drop when they work alongside new Hispanic immigrants. Harvard Professor Dr. George Borgias has accumulated similar data and has made the shocking assertion that American workers lose an incredible $152 billion per year in wages from immigration. Immigration provides a ready-made source of cheap labour, by growing the labour pool it weakens the bargaining power of American-born workers and reduces the clout of their unions, if they still have them."

Medical benefits not borne by the employer are subsidized by the taxpayers who also pick up the educational costs of their children.

Mass immigration is favored by the affluent, liberal and conservative alike.

"So blue-collar attitudes to immigration are easily explained, ordinary people are simply following their class interests. And class interests can explain the open borders position taken up by America's opinion leaders and decision makers too. They are much more affluent and educated than the people they lead and attempt to influence, and feel no threat from the illegal immigrants they hire as nannies and gardeners or tip at fine restaurants."

On the presidential trail

The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by a look at campaign financing. McCain, Clinton and Obama are, to put it bluntly, Wall Street candidates. The big banks, the financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity firms pay the pipers. But, according the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP) , the Democrats are the clear favorite. Hillary Clinton took in $106.1 million and Barack Obama $102.1 million for all of 2007.

McCain received substantially less at $41,102,178. Hillary Clinton received $1.3 million from private equity firms, while Obama received $1 million. McCain finished a distant fourth at $ 395,000. Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory.

Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal tax rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Clinton and Obama have also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests. Corporate law firms gave Clinton over $11 million and Obama over $ 9 million. McCain only got just over two and a half million dollars, the most for Republican candidates. As of February 22, 2008, bagmen have raised over $138 million for Obama, over $134 million for Clinton, and over $53 million for McCain.

Hi-tech and cheap labor

Between 1998 and 2006 almost $83 million in political contributions in the form of individuals donations, PAC contributions, and soft money were made by 40 technology companies. Amounting on average to just $295,708 per company per year of lobbying, it was money well spent.

The concession Bill Gates wanted, the H-1B Visa program that allows cheap technology workers into the country, reaped profits a hundred times that investment. But Microsoft wanted to be more certain the fix was in. Over that seven year period they gave $5,7888,286, with half of Congress on its payroll it would seem. AT+T donated $3,504,773, Apple $3,620,823, and Vericon $4,237,884 (http://www.news.com.com/2009-1028-6050978.html)

Data for the 2008 campaign showed Obama at $981,459 and Clinton $954,325 as the leading recipients of "computer-internet" donations, with McCain getting a third of their take. To put all of this in perspective, Hillary Clinton, the great white hope of progressive liberalism, received only 11% of her PAC money from labour, but 56% from business. It would be difficult to imagine that the AFL-CIO could match the donation dollars put up by Wall bankers and law firms.

Population growth is big money

Real estate interests (including mortgage brokers, homebuilders and property developers) gave $4.8 million to Clinton, $2.7 million to Obama and $1.9 million to McCain. The conventional interpretation of their motive is that they want access to the winner when an expected crackdown over predatory lending and a troubled housing finance system reaches the top of the legislative agenda. But there is an alternative, or at least supplementary explanation...The land tenure system that characterizes Anglo-American societies encourages speculation, and much money is to be made simply by population growth.

Note: can one smell "subprime" handed out to illegal aliens?

Go along or die

What then became of the candidates who challenged the corporate open borders agenda? Their campaigns died from lack of funds. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado is a case in point. Wall Street likes pro-immigration candidates for obvious reasons and so they will reward those who sing their tune. Tancredo insisted on singing an objectionable note, like a three year moratorium on immigration. So he paid the price...

An examination of Clinton's voting record should confirm that big business is getting what it paid for. Clinton was co-sponsor of Bill S-2109 to help employers import cheap high tech workers while the big law firms who gave to her campaign are counseling them how to use the legal system to avoid hiring qualified U.S. workers. Her support of Senate bill 2109 helped expedite the processing of the infamous H-1B visas that depress wages and displace workers.

She supported an amnesty of illegal agricultural workers (S bill 1340) and another one of a similar nature (S. bill 2137) that would have brought an amnesty to another 860,000 workers family excluded. Clinton's support of Kennedy's bill S 2381 would have meant amnesty to almost all illegal aliens...

An Obama policy statement maintains support for "improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world's most talented people to America." But H-1B visa holders are not paid as much as Americans, and even Microsoft admits that salaries have not kept pace with inflation. That would do much to explain a so-called labor shortage in the field.

As for Obama's goal of attracting the best and the brightest, the vast majority of H-1B holders make in the $60,000 range (Intel's median salary is $65,000), but top talents in the industry capture more than $100,000. And ironically the great majority of awards for innovation have fallen to Americans, indicating that the industry is not shackled by a domestic cognitive deficit that needs relief by a massive injection of foreign Einsteins.

It isn't just Democrats

John McCain...got the ball rolling in 1986 when he signed the 1986 amnesty for illegals and thereby gave the green light for aspiring border-crossers who knew that American law could be violated with impunity and that trespass be retroactively forgiven.

He ran his nomination race on a full-throttle amnesty platform until he found religion earlier this year and back-pedaled. He has voted for S-1639 to double legal immigration, to continue chain migration and the ridiculous annual jackpot lottery of 50,000 applicants from third world nations called "Diversity Immigration". McCain's problem is that he is a dark horse and Wall Street, while hedging its bets, likes to back winners. So his take of their money is but one-third of Obama's and Clinton's.

Note: McCain continues the lie saying "I heard you" then advocating the same open borders amnesty trash as before.