(Above: Sessions speaks on the Senate floor Sept. 12, 2014.)
WASHINGTON — Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) took to the Senate floor Thursday to criticize the White House and Senate Democrats for “surrender(ing) their constituents’ jobs to the open borders lobby,” which is being led by FWD.us, an advocacy group founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and backed by other tech executives.
“The administration is meeting with the elite, the cosmopolitan set, who scorn and mock the concerns of everyday Americans who are concerned about their schools, jobs, wages, communities, and hospitals,” Sessions said. “These great and powerful citizens of the world don’t care much about old fashioned things like national boundaries, national sovereignty, and immigration control—let alone the constitutional separation of powers.”
Another “old fashioned thing” that Sessions said Zuckerberg does not seem to care for is the widely held tradition that leaders do not go to a foreign capital to criticize their own country. Zuckerberg recently traveled to Mexico City to deliver a speech slamming the United States’ immigration laws.
“Mr. Zuckerberg has been very busy recently. One of his fellow billionaires, Mr. Carlos Slim—maybe the world’s richest man—invited Mr. Zuckerberg down to Mexico City to give a speech,” Sessions explained. “(Y)oung Mr. Zuckerberg maybe doesn’t know there is a deep American tradition—a tradition in most developed nations—that you don’t go to a foreign capital to criticize your own government. I suppose he doesn’t know about that. They probably didn’t teach him about that when he was at one of the elite schools he attended.”
Sessions then drilled down on what he views as the hypocrisy of billionaires who push for open borders while living a lifestyle that keeps them walled-off from common people.
“Well, the ‘masters of the universe’ are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and fenced-off estates,” Sessions quipped, before reading an excerpt from a Business Insider article discussing the great lengths to which Zuckerberg has gone to maintain separation between himself and common folks.
According to the report, Zuckerberg bought four homes surrounding his current Palo Alto estate at a cost of $30 million in an effort to give himself “a little privacy.”
“That is a world the average American doesn’t live in,” Sessions declared.
“So I would pose a question to Mr. Zuckerberg. I read in the news that Facebook is now worth more than $200 billion. Is that not enough money to hire American workers for a change? Your company now employs roughly 7,000 people. Let’s say you want to expand your workforce 10 percent, or hire another 700 workers. Are you claiming you can’t find 700 Americans who would take these jobs if you paid a good wage and decent benefits?”
Sessions has been extremely critical of tech executives who insist that the the U.S. economy is in desperate need of more skilled workers from overseas to fill jobs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
To fill those jobs, the “open borders lobby,” as Sessions calls it, is calling for the expansion of the nation’s H-1B visa program.
The Associated Press explains:
The H-1B program allows employers to temporarily hire workers in specialty occupations. The government issues up to 85,000 H-1B visas to businesses every year, and recipients can stay up to six years. Although no one tracks exactly how many H-1B holders are in the U.S., experts estimate there are at least 600,000 at any one time. Skilled guest workers can also come in on other types of visas.
An immigration bill passed in the U.S. Senate last year would have increased the number of annually available H-1B visas to 180,000 while raising fees and increasing oversight, although language was removed that would have required all companies to consider qualified U.S. workers before foreign workers are hired.
Critics of the plan say there is no evidence that there is a shortage of STEM workers in the U.S., because if there were, wages would be rising, when in reality wages have actually fallen for programmers in recent years.
The lack of wage growth combined with the influx of foreign labor has led to a backlash among American STEM workers who are frustrated with their inability to land jobs in their chosen fields.
Data recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed 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,” Sessions told Yellowhammer in July. “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.”
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