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IMMIGRATION CONCERNS -- (House of Representatives - November 18, 2004) GPO's PDF
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The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, in yesterday's Congress Daily published by the National Journal, there was an article stating that some of the Nation's largest high-tech companies are pushing for a big increase in the H-1B visa program. This is the program that grants visas to so-called skilled foreigners such as computer specialists, engineers, and technical medical researchers. This program already allows 65,000 foreigners each year to come in and take some of the best jobs this country has to offer.
Now, these giant corporations are waging what Congress Daily described as an ``intense lobbying'' campaign to get 30,000 to 40,000 more of these foreign workers, and this goes on every year and has undoubtedly let in hundreds of thousands or even more over the last several years.
This, of course, is on top of the many millions of illegal aliens we already have here, probably at least double or triple the ten million illegals the government estimates are here based on what I have read and heard and seen.
I realize the H1-B program is a way to get here legally, and I do commend those involved for at least going through the proper legal channels. But over the last 16 years since I have been in Congress, I have had many parents and grandparents bring me their college graduate children or grandchildren who cannot find good jobs. And these are good-looking young people with very good grades.
All over this country there are many thousands of college graduates who cannot find good jobs so they work as waiters and waitresses and go to graduate school or more often law school. Sometimes people with masters degrees or even PhDs are having trouble finding good jobs. Our unemployment is low, but our underemployment is terrible. Yet we bring in many thousands more foreign workers each year while we continue to send huge numbers of good jobs to other countries with our astounding $1 million-a-minute trade deficit.
Many years ago I read that our government estimated that half the people of the world wanted to come here to live. Consistent with that I read in the last few months that half of the people in the world have to get by on $2 or less a day and do not have a second pair of shoes. We simply cannot take 3 billion more people in to this Nation, especially over a short period of time. Already our schools and hospitals are overrun with illegal immigrants in areas near our borders.
God has blessed every nation in this world with either natural beauty and natural resources and usually both that could make those countries rich if they had a free market, free enterprise system. However, all over this world people have fallen for the myth that government can solve all problems, and they have either voted in or had governments forced on them that were liberal, left-wing or socialist. And all over this world all big government has done is to ruin economies and wipe out the middle class.
Big government means a few elite rulers at the top, a huge underclass, usually near starvation, and almost no middle class. Today with many of our trade and immigration policies, our own big government is slowly wiping out our own middle class to try to benefit a small number of huge multi-national companies. The big giants are growing bigger in large part because of government favoritism, government contracts, tax breaks, free land. Big government, though, really only helps extremely big business and the bureaucrats who work for the government. Everyone else gets the crumbs or the shaft.
There really cannot be such a thing as big government conservatism. That is an oxymoron. Only in a very small government, truly free market system does the little man or a person without great capital have a real chance.
Big government liberalism, while always claiming to help the little guy, has actually been the best friend extremely big business has. And this proposed expansion of the H1-B program is just another example of this big government, big business duopoly that is in the long run bringing down American small business and our great
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