Posted on May 30, 2013

Can You Make One or Two Really Quick Calls into Senate Offices Today?

Roy Beck, Numbers USA, May 30, 2013

Every day for the next two weeks before the Senate votes on the giant amnesty bill (S. 744), we have to have phones ringing in Senate offices.

Senate staffers who oppose the bill tell us that even Senators we should expect to vote against it are considering supporting the bill. The reason, they say, is that the wealthy campaign-contributor special interests who want the bill are telling Senators that the low rate of phone calls against the bill indicates the public will give them a pass on voting for something even if the public opposes it.

Many in the news media are using the same argument to try to make Senators feel safe to support a bill that they know the majority of the citizens are against. What matters is not what most voters want but what Senators feel voters are passionate about. The phones are their key measuring stick.

I talked to several news reporters yesterday who taunted me with the same line, all of them saying something to the effect of: “You’re going to lose this time because the public just doesn’t care like it did in 2007. The low rate of phone calls shows that.”

Just ask the operator to connect you to your Senator (come back later for your other Senator).

If you’ve never made one of these calls, everybody is amazed at how easy the first time is. Tell the staffer your name and where you live and that you are calling about S. 744.

You can simply say that you oppose it and hope the Senator will vote NO and then hang up.

Or you can talk for a minute or two and give reasons. If you don’t have something else burning that you want to say, we suggest you talk about the two big numbers that are running in our TV ads in nearly half the states this week.

33 million

S. 744–the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill–would offer a minimum of 33 million lifetime work permits IN THE FIRST DECADE alone.

It may at first be hard to believe this number because most of the publicity on S. 744 has treated it as an amnesty bill for approximately 11 million illegal aliens.

But S. 744 is far larger than just an amnesty. Nearly every special interest in Washington has had a hand in ensuring that certain high levels of legal immigration continue and are expanded — by a lot.

The 33 million would go to:

    • 11 million — The estimated minimum number of foreign citizens in this country who crossed our borders illegally or who violated their visas and did not go home when they promised they would. The bill’s amnesty provisions would give these foreign citizens work permits immediately (even before any additional workplace and border enforcement).
    • another 11 million — These would be new legal immigrants brought in a continuation of the current system which is already three times higher than the traditional average of 3 million a decade before 1990.
    • 5 million — These are all the people who have previously applied to enter the country but who have exceeded the limits placed on their categories to protect American workers. Most of them are chain migration relatives of previous immigrants. Many of them are relatives of the millions of illegal aliens who were legalized in the 7 amnesties between 1986 and 2000).
    • 6 million — New immigrants who would come through brand new categories and expanded existing categories.

The 33 million new work visas IN A SINGLE DECADE would be almost half as many as ALL immigrants who have ever entered the U.S. in its history through today (1407-2013)!

20 million!

These are the totally forgotten people in the immigration debate.

They are our friends, relatives and neighbors who can’t find a full-time job to support themselves and their families. The simple fact is that our nation is awash in too many workers seeking too few jobs.

The 1st Quarter reports from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau find that 20 million American citizens who want a full-time job still cannot find one.

Why would the Senate even consider such a bill? The news media have reported that more than 1,700 special-interest lobbyists–representing major campaign contributors to Senators–are pushing the bill they helped to write.

What do the special interests want? Many corporate entities want to increase the over-supply of various types of workers to lower the wages for everybody in those occupations in order to increase profits.

The issue is pretty much as clear as what you see in 30 seconds on the video.

Will we abandon 20 million of our fellow Americans who need a job by allowing lobbyists for wealthy special interests to persuade the Senate to pass the immigration bill?

Please make the phone calls today. And keep up with the latest news at www.NumbersUSA.com.

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