The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, long notorious for pushing open-border policies, held a meeting yesterday to kick off a new initiative: America Works. Their new program consists of four major parts:
- Help Americans acquire the skills necessary to fill today’s open jobs.
- Improve educational and job training opportunities for the jobs of tomorrow.
- Remove barriers to entering the workforce.
- Expand the workforce through immigration reform.
That last item is certainly not the least. Bringing in more foreign workers is in fact central to the Chamber’s lobbying efforts. On their website, they explain that expanding the workforce through immigration reform will involve, among other moves, the following: doubling the cap on employment-related visas, discontinuing the inclusion of family members toward the caps, eliminating per-country caps, providing automatic work permits to foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, and expanding the opportunities for entrepreneurs to obtain permanent residency (i.e., the “E-2 visa” program, long rife with fraud.)
Speaking before the Chamber, Michael Bellaman, president of the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group, said:
We, right now, this year, need 430,000 workers [and] over the next couple years by 2023, we’re going to need probably another million. We need a merit-based, market-based, rule-of-law worker visa system that provides the necessary opportunities for [foreign] people that want to work in the United States, as well as for our employers to take those trained [foreign] individuals that have spent three years [working] in their companies, with the opportunity to sponsor them to a pathway to citizenship, a legal form of status, something more permanent, that will be a value to our industry.
Bellaman and the Chamber are thus proposing that hundreds of thousands of foreign workers be brought into this country with a promise of citizenship as an enticement.
This is what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls “sensible immigration policies.” Sensible, that is, for Mr. Bellaman’s building industry, for example, which continually complains that it cannot find enough Americans to help in their ongoing project to overbuild America and make a boatload of money in the process.
In response, Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, called the initiative a “deep betrayal of fellow Americans by the business interests.” He continued:
[W]hat people from George Bush, especially George W. Bush, on through President Biden have done — with some exception for President Trump — is to disconnect and basically free the elites of this country from any sense of ethical obligation to their fellow citizens.
The betrayal is sharper because “construction jobs have become the great prize for Americans who don’t have a college education,” he said, adding:
A large percentage of the manufacturing jobs that created middle-class life have disappeared, but construction work remains. It can’t be shipped overseas. It’s the prize for our American workers who don’t have college degrees which by the way, two-thirds of Americans don’t have college degrees. So this idea is one that basically says, “The middle class belongs only to those who get a college degree,” and we’ve seen just one occupation after another [that] the robber barons of our age have decided they’re not going to let Americans have.
For more, see Breitbart News.