From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA Thursday 7 DEC - 06
What to do if nobody answers phone in Senate -- Stop the Cornyn doubling of foreign workers
UPDATE ON TODAY'S CRITICAL BATTLE
No. 1:Many of you are telling us that nobody is answering the phone when you call Senators this morning.
That is a wonderful sign. It means that NumbersUSA Network members are keeping all the staff busy so they can't answer every phone call that comes in.
If nobody answers the phone in the DC office, then look up the Senator's home state offices and start calling some of them. http://www.numbersusa.com/congressinfo/
The point will be to cause every state office staff person to understand that this issue is THE BIG ISSUE of the week for their constituents. Believe me, somebody from those offices will be getting in touch with the Washington office about the uproar.
No. 2: Just keep all phones busy -- DC and home state -- but make your calls short so others can get through.
No. 3: Those of you who will be directly affected if Cornyn succeeds -- those in tech, engineering, physical therapy, science, nursing fields -- need to keep calling DC and home state offices of the leadership list I sent you in the middle of the night.
No. 4: We will likely be changing the information on our home page at least once an hour today to reflect any changes in the situation here. Keep up to date at: http://www.NumbersUSA.com
No. 5: We may send out several Action Alerts today. If you don't want to be kept that informed and receive so many emails, make sure you are registered for MODERATE ACTIVISM on this page: http://www.numbersusa.com/user
If you want ALL of our Action Alerts, make sure you are registered for TOTAL ACTIVISM.
No. 6: Be assured that your NumbersUSA Capitol Hill Team -- though nothing of the size of the swarm of Microsoft lobbyists -- is making contacts throughout the Senate this morning (as it has the last two weeks) trying to avert this disaster.
Their reports to me in the last 15 minutes indicate that either almost nobody has any idea what leadership is about to do on the Cornyn bill or they are in a conspiracy of silence.
Our best friends in the Senate and the House were telling us late last night that they feared they were not going to be able to hold back the Microsoft lobbying surge. No change in that information this morning.
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The rest of this information is a repeat of what I sent in the middle of the night. #############################################################################
YOU'VE STOPPED EVERY OTHER IMMIGRATION DISASTER THIS YEAR ...
... NOW STOP THIS LAST ATTEMPT BEFORE CONGRESS GOES HOME
Please phone the congressional leaders listed below and urge them:
"Do NOT entertain debate on Sen. Cornyn's H-1B bill. Oppose all increases in H-1B visas."
Capitol Switchboard 202-224-3121
By the time you wake up later this morning and read this, Sen. Cornyn (R-TX) will be well on his way to ramming through a bill to radically increase foreign workers in the tech, nursing, physical therapy, science and engineering fields.
Believe me, the only way to defeat this last-minute desperation attempt by Robber Baron Tech Corporations to keep wages low is if Senate offices are stunned today by the public outcry against this disreputable maneuver.
A swarm of Microsoft lobbyists -- surely reeking of the musty odor of giant wads of campaign contributions -- buzzed and stang their way through Senate offices Wednesday, demanding that they and others of their ilk be given hundreds of thousands more foreign workers next year.
Will you let them once again get their way at the very last minute of a Congress?
CALL YOUR U.S. SENATORS
I am asking you to call your own Senators on this matter.
(I have sent a separate alert to the members of our Network who are in the affected fields of work, asking them to phone the leadership in both House and Senate.)
Please call both of your Senators.
If you aren't sure about the identity of the two U.S. Senators, you can find your Senators and Representative by clicking on this link:
http://numbersusa.com/myMembers
Tell your Senators to NOT let Cornyn's bill come up on the floor for any kind of discussion. in this email: 1. Call your two U.S. Senators
2. A key fact for your call
3. The short background to understand today's battle
4. MORE ARGUING POINTS . actions in brief: Phone your two U.S. Senators to stop giant increase in foreign skilled workers.
Refer all friends to the http://NumbersUSA.com website.
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A KEY FACT FOR YOUR CALL
The United States has lost 700,000 high-tech American jobs in the past 4 years.
The country is awash in American tech workers who are now unemployed or working outside their field. While the tech lobbyists claim the companies face a labor shortage and won't be able to keep providing benefits to the economy without more foreign labor, there are plenty of skilled Americans available.
Same thing goes for nurses and physical therapists. Offer better pay for nursing and underemployed nurses will come out of the woodwork.
Each year, thousands of American students who qualify can't get into Physical Therapy schools because the schools feel no pressure to expand their enrollment while such a large percentage of physical therapy jobs are being filled by foreign therapists.
The message to Congress must be that it should NOT foreclose the future for our own American students who are seeking jobs in these fields.
The Short Story of Sen. Cornyn's Perfidy Against American Skilled Workers
Americans had been assured that the clock had already run out on this kind of sneak-pass play. Congress was supposed to be in town this week just to pass a Continuing Resolution to keep the federal government funded.
But tech industry lobbyists -- desperate to continue to hold down wages with foreign labor -- have stopped the legislative clock.
A near-football team of Microsoft blockers, tackles and fleet-footed lobbyists (10 of them!) roamed the Senate hallways Wednesday looking for a way score on their usual last-minute, rule-breaking, end-of-Congress style.
Many times in recent years, Microsoft and other tech lobbyists have sneaked through major increases in H-1B visas just as Congress was leaving town.
Since being publicly embarrassed in the late 1990s by debating the merits of this kind of legislation publicly, Congress has declined to pass these H-1B visa increases in the true light of day, with standard debate and using normal procedures.
But nearly all inside staffers told us they had received assurances from congressional leaders that no sneak play would be allowed this year.
On Tuesday, Senate staffers were stunned to see Sen. Cornyn suddenly emerge as the person willing to bring shame on himself by carrying the Robber Barons' water and force his pet project ahead of all others.
We sent an email to all our members last Friday, asking for steady pressure on Senators to make sure they knew public sentiment in case something like this happened.
Then Tuesday afternoon, we got word that Cornyn was trying to ram his bill onto the Senate floor. We went to all of our members in about a dozen states with Senators who often fight for American workers against foreign labor importation. We stirred up a flurry of phone calls.
We were pleased that by late Tuesday, many of those Senators had placed "holds" on Cornyn's bill. But those holds tend to have power to only slow the process down for awhile and can be overcome if Senate leadership decides to do so. The word we had late Wednesday was that the "holds" were breaking as Microsoft's lobbyists gathered more support.
You are calling the congressional leaders just stop the bill from moving to the floor and to concentrate instead on spending bills.
MORE ARGUING POINTS
Prof. Norm Matloff of the University of California has given this advice to tech professionals and engineers:
"Ask to speak to someone who handles immigration issues. Do NOT be long-winded. Keep it down to two or three sentences, something like 'I OPPOSE any increase to the H-1B program. The program is just used as cheap labor. Thank you.' If you are asked to elaborate ("Isn't it true that our schools aren't producing enough programmers and engineers?"), then do so, but otherwise keep it SHORT AND SIMPLE. And make sure they understand that you OPPOSE the H-1B increase (some of the staffers get it wrong)."
Dr. Matloff has done many papers showing that there is no shortage of programmers and engineers.
For much more information about this issue go to our page at:
http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/hightech.html
For me, the clincher in the debate is that the tech industry has resolutely fought any effort inside Congress to require that their solicitation of foreign workers be entirely public and transparent. If they truly need the workers, then they should not object to posting these jobs on a special internet website so that all Americans would first have the opportunity to apply for the jobs and then for that website to keep a record of each company that ends up hiring foreign workers, the number of workers for each company and a description of the job duties and pay for each. This would expose a lot of the fraud that currently is in the program. But the tech companies want nothing of that kind of good-faith behavior.
THANKS,
-- ROY Do you
