03/03/2011
I wanted to send out a legislative update on immigration issues. There are other important issues, but this issue above all others relates to the survival of our country and state.
Most immigration bills are processed by the State Affairs committee in the Texas House. Last session, Chairman Burt Solomons killed most of the good immigration bills. Rep. Solomons seems to have gotten the message this session, however, as he is one of the main sponsors of a bill to ban sanctuary cities. However, Mr. Solomons is no longer chair of the State Affairs Committee. That honor has fallen to Rep. Byron Cook.
Here’s what Rep. Cook has done so far:
He has scheduled a number of good bills for a hearing. Remember last time that the main way Solomons killed bills was by delaying or denying hearings. So far, it appears Rep. Cook is playing fair with the immigration bills.
However, there is one particular bill that has not yet been scheduled for a hearing and it happens to be, in my opinion, the most important immigration bill we must pass. It also happens to be the bill that the Cheap Labor Lobby, and the traitor wing of the Republican Party, will fight the hardest against.
This bill is HB 296, which requires state contractors and grant recipients to use the E-verify system. E-verify, as you may know, is an optional system that lets employers check social security numbers of employees against the federal database. Since many illegal aliens present fake documents to get jobs (and many employers are happy to play along, and are prohibited from investigating even if they smell something fishy due to oppressive "civil rights" laws), E-verify removes the jobs magnet for many illegals, who are usually incapable of anything more sophisticated than the petty fraud of forged documents, which E-verify effectively curtails.
As Roy Beck with NumbersUSA has stated many times, the Left likes to make immigration into a false choice: either we round up and deport people in an inhumane way, or we have to grant amnesty. The simplest solution is to remove the jobs magnet with a system like E-verify and people will self-deport. For example, it’s a lot cheaper to be unemployed in a foreign country like Mexico than in Texas. Then, these foreign governments will have to deal with their own social problems instead of pushing them onto American taxpayers.
There’s also a moral side to this issue. The law of supply and demand determines who gets rewarded in a free market system. For example, the main inputs into the production of aluminum are bauxite and electricity. It makes sense that if, for example, energy prices are really high (indicating high demand), that electricity producers would make more profit during those times.
Many so-called Republicans are hypocrites when it comes to the price of labor. Whenever wages go up because of high demand from employers, the first response of the cheap labor traitors is to demand increased immigration levels to suppress rising wages. As a result, we have gone in a generation from a country where a high school graduate could support an entire family to a country where the average person can barely make it on the market wage unless they reduce themselves to a Third World standard of living. When the cheap labor traitors can’t get wages beat down enough through legal means, they have used their political influence to stop enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws so that they can hire illegal labor at even lower wages.
We see this kind of corruption- the use of government policy to manipulate the labor market- up and down the economic ladder. America’s richest man, Bill Gates, has the audacity to ask Congress for more H-1b visas so Microsoft can have an army of indentured servants programming for $30,000 a year instead of employing Americans at the market wage. At the other end we see the massive fraud and criminality of the meat processing industry, which used to be a place where average Americans could earn a decent wage doing an unpleasant job.
Cheap Labor Lobby companies like the Tyson Corporation make billions of additional profits by lowering their direct labor costs at the expense of American workers and jobs, while simultaneously pushing untold billions of additional social spending onto American taxpayers for the health care and education required by law to be provided to illegal aliens.
On a related note, I think we would all prefer our computers to run more reliably if more software companies like Microsoft would invest in talented American programmers instead of Third World coding sweatshops.
A friend of mine from college told me the story of his father, who used to make six figures programming mainframes. He was laid off right before retirement and looked for a similar job (even at reduced pay) for over two years; he now works in the electronics section of the local Wal-mart. You see, technology companies don’t want to hire a 50-something family man when they can get an Indian programmer on an H-1b visa to work 60 hour weeks, under threat of deportation, for $15 an hour.
I’m sure many of you could tell me similar stories. There is a real human cost to the cheap labor traitors' corrupting our government to distort the free market. We are denying our own domestic wage earners their God-given right to be paid the market wage in times of high demand.
Under our republican form of government, we are all essentially members of a covenant to respect each other’s property rights, even in situations where it does us personal harm. I have no right, for example, to demand that the electric company charge me less than market price, even if my personal situation is desperate and I cannot afford to pay. When we import Third World labor, we are bringing people into this country whose culture does not share our respect for free markets and property rights. If they did, first of all they wouldn’t violate our nation’s property rights by illegally entering and trespassing. Secondly, their home countries would not be such a mess, a long history of bloody demagogues and continual revolutions with each new leader as corrupt as the last. People generally get the government they deserve, as the old saying goes.
Thus, for short term profits, the cheap labor traitors ruin the long-term prospects of freedom, the very system that enabled them to generate their wealth. That’s why Democrats are so smug in this state, despite their recent electoral punishment. They know that, in the long run, demographics largely driven by illegal immigration make it inevitable that Texas will turn blue like California. It will take longer than they expect, but it will eventually happen unless something is done to reverse these ominous trends.
Once this happens, you can forget about a conservative President. You can forget about the Supreme Court, a primary reason so many of us hold our nose in Presidential elections and vote for the lesser of two evils. The game will be over if Texas falls; between New York, California and Texas the Democrats will have a lock on the Presidency. Our national government will then be under total occupation by Barack Obamas, Sonia Sotomayors and Ruth Bader Ginsburgs. The tattered remains of our much-abused but still-alive Constitution will finally be discarded by a permanent revolution of the Left.
Mandating E-Verify in Texas is a positive first step to counter these trends. The Cheap Labor Lobby will fight it tooth and nail, because it cuts to the heart of their criminal profits.
Peter Morrison is a businessman living in Lumberton, Texas with his wife and four children. He currently serves on the Lumberton ISD School Board and as treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party. He says "I believe deeply in the principles of limited constitutional government, the sanctity of life and that our state and nation should be run under Thomas Jefferson’s principle of 'Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None.'" This article is from his free newsletter, which features commentary about current events of interest to Texans — sign up here.
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