Posted on May 18, 2007

Amnesty Update—Grim Outlook . . . Need Your Help

Only YOU can stop the Senate amnesty now—UPDATE on details of bill up for Monday vote

ATTENTION RECENTLY JOINED MEMBERS: We are in a legislative crisis. Ordinarily, you may get 1-2 Alerts from me a week. But during a crisis, you will be receiving more than one Alert a day—sometimes several a day—until the final votes. Please be patient and take as many actions as possible. DEAR FRIENDS,

I spent the day with our NumbersUSA Hill Team visiting many Members of Congress and their staffers.

The amnesty compromise has been reached (at least 95% of it, anyway). Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Sen. Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Pres. Bush have negotiated a grand compromise between those who wanted a massive increase in foreign workers and those who wanted a blanket amnesty for illegal aliens and virtually unlimited family chain migration. Nobody involved represented the American people’s interest in immigration reductions.

The first key vote will be next Monday night.

Senators are admitting privately that the bill will increase the number of greencards (for permanent settlement) by 20 million over the next 13 years. Added to the number that will be given out based on current law, that means 30-35 million greencards in just the next 13 years!

To give you an idea of how radically these Senators want to change our nation and communities, consider that there are around 25 million foreign-born now living in this country who have been given green cards over the last 75 years. That number already has overwhelmed and changed thousands of communities.

But the Senate negotiators and Pres. Bush want to raise that number of greencard holders in our communities from 25 million to 60 million in just the next 13 years!

(See below for more of the devastating components of the amnesty agreement.)

SENATORS SAY THEY ARE WILLING TO VOTE FOR AMNESTY BECAUSE THEY AREN’T GETTING THAT MANY PHONE CALLS OPPOSING THE NEGOTIATIONS

I picked up some more unsettling and startling information on the Hill today. Such as this:

Many Senators are telling staffers and other Senators that they are inclined to vote for the giant Kennedy/Bush amnesty bill (S. 1348) next week because they say they have been surprised at how few phone calls of protest they’ve gotten during the last two months of highly-publicized negotiations to create the amnesty.

They are concluding that the citizens of their states just aren’t all that worked up about granting an amnesty. And they’re interpreting that as a green light to give corporations the huge new supplies of legal foreign labor they desire.

These are Senators who have voted against amnesty in the past.

This makes me heart-sick. While we have given you a number of opportunities to make phone calls to express concern about the amnesty negotiations, we haven’t pushed you hard until this week because the Republican negotiators assured us at every step of the way that they would not agree to anything that gives permanent legalization to illegal aliens.

Now that the “deal” has been revealed as a nearly total blanket amnesty for 12-20 million illegal aliens, it is obvious that the Republican negotiators and their staffs misled us, and misled you when you called.

At this time, only 15 Senators are thought to be likely to vote against the amnesty next week.

Everybody on the Hill says constituent pressure the rest of this week and next week is the only thing that can add more NO votes. But they feel a lot of Senators’ support for the amnesty bill is shallow and can change once they realize how politically risky it is to vote YES—and to learn more details of the really horrible and costly parts of the bill.

I should tell you that Rosemary Jenks (our director of government relations) remains optimistic that our grassroots mobilization can eke out 41 NO votes next week in a cloture vote—that would kill the amnesty in the Senate. But that will happen only if tens of thousands more of you than normal pick up a phone and make a call.

ACTIONS FOR TODAY

I hope thousands of you will have enough information in this Alert to start making phone calls right now. And I hope the rest of you will start sending faxes and making phone calls as soon as we send you more specific action links with talking points.

Go to your Action Buffet corkboard every morning and afternoon until this is over. Send the faxes. We’ll be putting up new faxes every day.

www.NumbersUSA.com/actionbuffet

MAKE A PHONE CALL TO YOUR TWO SENATORS AT:

202-224-3121

I know that most of you have never made a phone call. Your faxing totally dominates the written communications in offices. But our phone presence just isn’t powerful enough. We need far more phoning to give more weight to the piles of faxes they are getting.

THE SENATORS ARE PARTICULARLY MEASURING PHONE CALLS RIGHT NOW.

Many of you will have enough information from this Alert to make phone call as soon as you finish reading this.

But for those of you who have never make a call before, you may want to wait until you get an email with a link to a phone action note that will give you talking points and make it easy for you.

The opposition is doing everything possible to try to convince Senators that our movement represents loud people but not very many people. We need every one of you to step forward and be heard to convince Senators that our voice is the voice of the majority.

Combined with high fertility among the foreign born, immigration is currently on a trajectory to lead to 100 million more people crowded into American communities before mid-century.

But if this Kennedy/Bush/Kyl Amnesty (the KBK Amnesty) passes into law, this nation will have to handle 100 million more people in just a few decades, long before mid-century.

KEY COMPONENTS OF THE KBK AMNESTY

Although we don’t have the legislative language yet, here are the key components:

* WE LOSE—by getting an immediate amnesty for nearly all 12-20 million illegal aliens who will get legal status for residence and jobs (with assurance of green cards no later than 13 years).

* IN EXHANGE FOR—we get mandatory workplace verification and a lot of extra enforcement (with a lot of typical Kennedy loopholes) to try to slow the flow of the next 12 million illegal aliens enticed by the amnesty;

* WE LOSE—by getting a tripling of the rate of chain migration of extended family from around 250,000 a year to around 750,000 a year for about a decade;

* IN EXCHANGE FOR—after about a decade, there should be no more chain migration (assuming that Kennedy doesn’t add it back in by then);

* WE LOSE—by getting new flows of 400,000 temporary foreign workers each year, bringing their families and having anchor babies who will be given U.S. citizenship;

* IN EXCHANGE FOR—at least the temporary workers are supposed to leave and not be able to apply for greencards and permanent residency.

WHY THE REPUBLICANS ARE STAMPEDING TO BACK THIS AMNESTY

The majority of Republican Senators last year voted against the S. 2611 amnesty that passed.

But at a noon meeting today with nearly all GOP Senators, Sen. Kyl outlined the amnesty agreement he had negotiated with Sen. Kennedy. Our sources say only about three Senators raised concerns. Most of the rest were saying things like, “If you think this is a good idea, John, I guess that should be good enough for us.”

Pres. Bush and staff have been brilliant in moving Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Martinez (R-Fla.) into a more secondary role and persuading conservative leader Kyl to lead the negotiations. Kyl is able to lead many Senators to follow him who would otherwise not support an amnesty of any kind.

At the moment, the only Senators whom we feel relatively certain are opposing this new amnesty are Sen. DeMint (R-SC), Enzi (R-Wyo.), Crapo (R-Idaho), Vitter (R-La.), Allard (R- Colo.), Sessions (R-Ala.), Chambliss (R-Ga.), Grassley (R-Iowa).

Let us know what you find out when you call the other offices.

GOOD LUCK,