Senior White House aides are currently working with major corporations to “expand the executive actions President Barack Obama takes on immigration,” according to a report by Politico, and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is not happy about it.
The president initially planned to only slow deportations of illegal immigrants and make other alterations to immigration enforcement policies. However, large companies like Accenture, Cisco and Intel are now pushing the White House to do more, and their ideas are being well received by the administration.
“The outreach (to big business) is an effort to broaden the political support for Obama’s decision to go it alone on immigration,” wrote Politico’s Anna Palmer and Carrie Budoff Brown. “[It’s] another sign that suggests the White House fears a backlash in November, particularly among independent voters in battleground Senate races where Republicans are seizing on the issue.”
This is not the first time that the Obama administration has sought to circumvent Congress and implement changes to immigration law that are advantageous to big business. In early May, the President took executive action to unilaterally provide corporations with 100,000 additional guest workers.
Sen. Sessions, who often refers to the amnesty-seeking business leaders as the “Masters of the Universe,” has risen to national prominence as the Senate’s most vocal opponent of the president’s immigration policies.
He lashed out again on Monday, excoriating the White House and corporations for “scheming” to bring in more foreign labor, even while the companies continue to lay off American workers.
“The same group of CEOs who helped write the Senate’s Gang of Eight immigration bill in secret is now scheming with the White House to extract by executive fiat what was denied to them by the American people and Congress,” Sessions said. “Even while they demand more foreign workers, these companies are laying off current employees in droves… Overall, mass layoffs in the tech industry are up 68% from the prior year. As for the construction industry, there are seven unemployed workers for every one job opening… The increases in foreign workers demanded by corporate lobbyists would be in addition to the Administration’s plan to implement amnesty by executive fiat, providing work permits to 5–6 million illegal immigrants and visa overstays who will be able to take any job in any industry, public or private.”
Sessions urged his Senate colleagues to stand up for American workers, who he says are the ones being harmed the most by the president’s immigration policies.
“This Administration is actively working against the interests of the American worker,” he said bluntly. “And Senate Democrats, instead of defending Congress and their constituents, are handing their vote over to Leader Reid and President Obama. Not one single Senate Democrat has publicly stood up to their Democrat leaders and demanded a vote on the House bill to block this executive amnesty. As a result, they are as complicit as if they sat in the room with these executives themselves.
“We have communities throughout America that are barely scraping by,” he continued. “Tens of millions of Americans are on welfare, unemployment, and public assistance. Yet the White House and their Senate Majority seem more concerned about the economic demands of large corporations, or the citizens of other countries, than about getting our own citizens back to work into stable jobs that can support a family and uplift a community.”
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