Say Anything Blog

Here are some of the worst things that the Feinstein Amnesty bill attached to the emergency Iraq War funding bill will do:

The AgJOBS amendment would require the Department of Homeland Security to grant “emergency agricultural worker status” (i.e., amnesty) for up to five years to as many as 1.35 million illegal aliens, plus their spouses and children, if the illegal alien:

· Can show that he/she worked 863 hours or 150 work days ( 5.75 hours of work per day), or earned at least $7,000 in agricultural employment between January1, 2004, and December 31, 2007. In other words, if the illegal alien can show that he was illegally employed in agriculture for a grand total of less than 22 weeks during a four-year period!

· Filed an amnesty application with a “qualified designated entity,” or with DHS directly if he is represented by an attorney or a nonprofit organization, during an 18-month application period that would begin six months after enactment of the amnesty.

· Was not a known terrorist or convicted criminal who has been convicted of one or more felonies or three or more misdemeanors. So, a couple of convictions for domestic violence or drunk and disorderly are fine, since those are generally misdemeanor offenses. Mahmud Abouhalima, an illegal-alien cab driver in New York, qualified for the 1986 agricultural amnesty before going on to drive a bomb into the World Trade Center in 1993.

· Paid a “fine” of $250.

Once an illegal passes these requirements, he will be entitled to:

· Bring his spouse and children here to join him, or legalize their status, if they are already here illegally.

· Official U.S. government identification documents, including a valid social security number—with which he would be able to apply for a driver’s license—and a work permit for him and his spouse.

· Immunity from prosecution for committing social security fraud if he had been working illegally with a false or stolen social security number.

Last Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee added these immigration amendments to the version of the Iraq Supplemental they were marking up.

· First was the Feinstein AgJOBS-lite amendment, which passed by a recorded vote of 17-12;

· A Mikulski H-2B amendment--for the next three years, it would exempt from the annual cap of 66,000 any H-2B workers who were admitted during the previous three years. (The impact on the numbers could be exponential--they could rise from 66,000 in FY 2008 to over 400,000 by FY2011.) This passed by a recorded vote of 23-6!

· Third was an amendment by Sens. Murray and Gregg to “recapture unused” employment-based visas from the past couple of decades. Since any employment-based visas that are not used in one year are added to the number of available family-based visas for the following year, there are no “unused” employment-based visas, and so there are none to “recapture.” However, Murray and Gregg’s deceptive manipulation of visa numbers would add an estimated 218,000 (total) employment-based visas to the annual cap of 140,000, until they are all used (again!). This amendment passed by voice vote.

The Democrats are obviously playing games with our soldiers’ lives. While they defeated the Iraq spending bill in Congress, they were busy adding these amnesty items in the Senate Committee. This is about as blatantly anti-American and against American Citizens’ wishes as you can get. They want to let our soldiers die protecting our country while they give away our nation and refuse to protect our borders in the legislature.

If you’ve never sent your Congressman or Senator an email, now would be the time to do it. 186,000 faxes were sent yesterday.