Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) took to the mic on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Friday and unleashed one of his most passionate rebukes of billionaire big businessmen who are attempting to push so-called comprehensive immigration reform through Congress.
Specifically, Sessions took exception to the tech executives’ push for more guest workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
Sessions earlier this week cited data from the U.S. Census Bureau revealing that a stunning 74 percent of American STEM workers currently aren’t working in a STEM field at all, but have had to find work elsewhere.
“Rutgers Professor Hal Salzman has documented that the U.S. graduates two STEM workers for every one STEM job opening,” he told Yellowhammer. “This may be a surprising statistic, but evidence confirms this trend. A new U.S. Census Bureau report shows that 3/4 of America’s STEM graduates don’t have STEM jobs. There is a surplus of STEM-trained Americans who can’t find employment in their chosen field. Yet the President wants to double the number of temporary guest workers who are allowed to enter the country to take jobs in these fields. These guest workers are brought into the U.S. at lower wages for the specific purpose of filling jobs for which Americans are applying. These are not ‘jobs Americans won’t do’ – these are jobs Americans are trained to do but which President Obama’s policies are denying them.”
In his Senate floor speech today, Sessions hammered the tech executives by name. A partial transcript of his remarks can be read below, and a video can be seen above.
Three of our greatest ‘Masters of the Universe,’ I like to refer to, have join in an op-ed in the New York Times just last week to share their wisdom from on high and to tell us in Congress how to do our business and to conduct immigration reform that they think should be pleasing to them.
I’m sure other super billionaires would have been glad to join with these three super billionaires and could agree on legislation that would be acceptable to them.
Sheldon Adelson… Warren Buffett… and Bill Gates… all super billionaires, aren’t happy, apparently. They don’t have much respect for Congress, and by indirection the people who elect people to Congress, it appears by the tone of their article.
‘You know, the American people — that great unwashed group of nativists, narrow minded patriots, possessors of middle-class values — they just don’t understand like we know, we great executives and entrepreneurs.’
So they declare we need to import more workers in computer science and technology and engineering because they country is quote, ‘badly in need of their services.’
[…]
But this is the headline from Microsoft today, ‘Microsoft to cut up to 18,000 jobs next year.’ …[That’s] part of the tech titan’s efforts to streamline its business under its new CEO.’ That is a significant thing… And the company laid off 5,000 in 2009. Yet their founder and former leader, Mr. Gates, says we’ve got to have more and more people into our country to take those kind of jobs.
‘Watching American corporations fire American workers while appealing for more immigration, is a disheartening spectacle,’ Mr. Byron York (of the Washington Examiner) says. I think that’s true…
[Bill Gates] questions whether the members of Congress who don’t pass laws like he wants on immigration are honoring their duty to the 300 million Americans that we collectively represent. I feel a deep duty to the millions of Alabamians I represent and the whole country, and I do my best every day to ask what’s in their interest. And as far as I’m concerned… those three billionaires [Gates, Buffett, Adelson] have three votes. The individual who works stocking the shelves at the grocery store, the barber, the doctor, the lawyer, the cleaners operator, [and] the person who picks up our garbage are every bit as valuable as they are. So I know who I represent. I represent citizens of the United States of America…
Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims
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