On Corker amendment – like larger bill – Senators make promises their legislation won’t keep (sign petition)
by JEREMY BECK
If you haven’t read the Corker-Hoeven amendment to the Senate immigration bill, you aren’t alone. Congress hasn’t read it either. The Gang of Eight and the cosponsors of Corker-Hoeven spent the last couple of days boasting about the amendment, and making promises about what it would do, then Majority Leader Reid sent the Senate home with a 1,000-plus-page reading assignment for the weekend. The text of the amendment wasn’t released until Friday afternoon. The Senate votes on Monday. Additional handwritten changes to the amendment have yet to be distributed to every Senator.
This is Senator Schumer’s version of “transparency.”
The plan is clearly to vote on the amendment before the public learns that they’ve been sold a bill of goods. The Corker-Hoeven amendment – like the larger bill – is a fraud, sold by the authors with falsehoods so these Senators might give their corporate donors the flood of labor they crave. Twenty million unemployed and underemployed Americans be damned.
We already knew that the Corker-Hoeven amendment would do nothing to change the legalization-before-enforcement sequence in the bill. All of the promised enforcement would come after illegal aliens were granted legal status, work permits, and Social Security numbers. But the amendment is much worse than simply failing to address the fundamental flaws in the bill. Corker’s amendment actually makes those flaws worse.
Here are a few of the hairy details that didn’t make the morning papers:
Legitimizes Illegal Immigration: The Congressional Budget Office concluded that 75 percent of illegal immigration would continue under S. 744, largely because it contained weak enforcement measures to stop visa overstays. The Corker-Hoeven amendment weakens the law even further. The amended bill would allow future illegal aliens who overstay their visas to stay in the U.S. and apply for green cards so long as they have worked legally in the U.S. for 10 years before overstaying their visa. An amended S. 744 would not just grant amnesty to illegal aliens here today, but would grant amnesty to illegal aliens who come tomorrow.
No Requirement to Deploy Technologies: Back when the Gang was against increasing the Border Patrol before they were for it, they declared that the technology required by their bill would be much more effective than boots on the ground. The Corker amendment would give the Secretary of Homeland Security full discretion as to how technology would be deployed, or whether it would be deployed at all.
No Fencing Requirement: If it seemed strange for the same gang members who just voted against fencing triggers to now support an amendment that sponsors claimed had fencing triggers, the actual language explains why. The amendment does not require the Secretary of Homeland Security to build fencing if she doesn’t want to.
The sequence of Senators promising one thing to voters only to have their legislation reveal something entirely different has become the hallmark of the Schumer-Rubio-Obama immigration push.
JEREMY BECK is the Director of the Media Standards Project for NumbersUSA
NumbersUSA’s blogs are copyrighted and may be republished or reposted only if they are copied in their entirety, including this paragraph, and provide proper credit to NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA bears no responsibility for where our blogs may be republished or reposted.
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Again, our Senators are about to pass a mammoth immigration reform bill that they have not even read. That’s right, they have not read the bill.
- The Schumer/Hoeven/Corker amendment is nearly 1,200 pages long, was just filed Friday afternoon, and will be voted on this Monday. We saw with Obamacare what happens when Congress rushes to pass such unwieldy legislation.
- The Schumer/Hoeven/Corker “border security” amendment to the deal doesn’t require that the border actually be secured, nor does it require any security enhancements before legalization occurs.
- This legislation makes the same mistake of the 1986 amnesty — legalization today for the false promise of border security tomorrow. It will encourage more illegal immigration and must be stopped.
Click Here to Contact Your Senators
- Whereas, our nation’s immigration system is broken and must be fixed.
- Whereas, any immigration reform must lead with real border security first.
- Whereas, the Gang of Eight’s bill does not secure the border and gives amnesty to those here illegally.
- Whereas, legal immigration should be supported and encouraged.
- Resolved, I request the Senate reject the Gang of Eight’s bill and instead pass legislation that actually secures our border. – See more a