U.S. Chamber of Commerce - THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA'S BEST ALLY - KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED WITH HORDES OF ILLEGALS

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“What's needed to discourage illegal immigration into the United States has been known for years: Enforce existing law.” ….. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

 

Lou Dobbs Tonight Monday,

June 16, 2008

The massive corporate mouthpiece the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is holding a “North American Forum” to lay out its “shared vision” for the United States, Canada and Mexico – which is to say a borderless, pro-business super-state in which U.S. sovereignty will be dissolved. Undercover investigators have found incredibly lax security and enforcement at U.S. border crossings, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office. This report comes on the heels of a separate report by U.C. San Diego that shows tougher border security efforts aren’t deterring illegal entries to the United States.

Chamber of Commerce Says It Supports Path 'To Legitimacy' for 12 Million Illegal Aliens

Wednesday, January 12, 2011
By Penny Starr

Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said on Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011 that illegal aliens should be gain 'legitimacy' in the United States through 'comprehensive immigration reform' law. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

(CNSNews.com) - U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donohue, noting that 27 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up on finding a job, said his organization supports a "way" "to legitimacy" for the estimated 12 to 14 million illegal aliens who are working in the United States.

“Unemployment had exceeded 9 percent for 20 consecutive months,” Donohue said in his annual State of American Business address at the Chamber’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. “Some 27 million Americans are either unemployed, underemployed or have give up looking for work.”

“In fact,” Donohue said, “we must create 1.2 million jobs a year just to absorb the new entrants into our workforce.”

Later in his remarks, Donohue said the Chamber would continue its efforts in support of comprehensive immigration reform, which some conservative critics consider to be a form of amnesty.

“Almost all of us are sons, daughters, or descendents of immigrants,” Donohue said. “The Chamber will continue to pursue comprehensive immigration reform.” He also cited the "urgent" need to improve visa processing, oppose attempts to gut temporary worker programs, and increase the number of foreign worker visas.

At a press conference following his speech, Donohue was asked by CNSNews.com if comprehensive immigration reform included a so-called pathway to citizenship.

“We think the most important parts of comprehensive immigration reform would be, first of all, a way for the, shall we say 12 million here, to legitimacy so that they can easily participate in society, pay their taxes, drive cars and that sort of thing,” Donohue said. “Second we need a guest worker program,” he said. “People could easily come back and forth for work and some of that would be seasonally, for crops and for recreation organizations and so on.

“And third, we definitely need a way to deal with high-end, talented folks that are needed in this economy. Donohue called it "amazing" that after years of training in America, professionals such as Ph.Ds in chemical engineering are now finding it hard to stay here.

Donohue said citizenship for illegal aliens should not be the top priority. “I don’t think the citizenship thing is necessary right now,” said Donohue, adding that protecting the U.S. border was also important. “I think we ought to pick the four or five things that everybody needs and let’s get it done.”

Donohue also said that the United States should keep the promise it made to Mexico 15 years ago to allow “safe, carefully inspected” Mexican trucks to transport goods into the U.S., as called for in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Labor unions strongly oppose the plan.

Donohue said the U.S. economy is “in better shape than we found ourselves last year,” and he noted “a new tone coming out of the White House.”

One indication of warming relations between the White House and the Chamber, which represents 3 million mostly small businesses, includes a scheduled address by President Barack Obama at the group’s headquarters on Feb. 7.

Among the areas Donohue said the Chamber would concentrate on in 2011:

-- restraint and reform of the regulatory process, including stopping the EPA from enacting regulations to limit greenhouse gases – a task that should be left to Congress, he said.

--Expanding American trade, rebuilding the country’s infrastructure and developing U.S. energy resources, and reducing the federal debt and deficit also made the top four on Donohue’s to-do list.

Donohue concluded his remarks with his trademark line-in-the-sand approach while expressing optimism that the Chamber can “work together” with the Obama administration and Congress in the coming year.

“Our approach in Washington will be to call them as we see them,” Donohue said. ‘We’ll continue to have our differences with the White House on some issues but we’ll work together on other issues."

“We’ll support the new House leadership on many occasions, and we’ll work with Democratic legislators as well, but no one should expect the Chamber to march in lock step with anyone,” Donohue said.

“We have a clear mission and agenda of our own,” he said. “It’s to continue to win important policy victories for our members and the American business community. It’s to support, protect, and advance the free enterprise system that made this country great. And it’s to help create good jobs and promising opportunities for all the people of our country so that they can achieve the American dream."

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Effort to Curb Illegal Workers' Hiring Blocked

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 11, 2007; 2:04 PM

A federal judge barred the Bush administration yesterday from launching a planned crackdown on U.S. companies that employ illegal immigrants, warning of its potentially "staggering" impact on law-abiding workers and companies.

In a firm rebuke of the White House, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer of San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction against the president's plan to press employers to fire as many as 8.7 million workers with suspect Social Security numbers, starting this fall.

President Bush made the effort the centerpiece of a re-energized enforcement drive against illegal immigration in August after the Senate rejected his proposal to overhaul immigration laws. But the court ruling -- sought by major American labor, business and farm organizations -- highlighted the chasm that the issue has opened between the Republican Party and its traditional business allies.

The case also called attention to the gulf between Washington rhetoric about the need to curtail illegal immigration and the economic reality that many U.S. employers rely on illegal labor, as well as to the government's inability for nearly three decades to develop adequate tools for identifying undocumented workers.

In a 22-page ruling, Breyer said the plaintiffs -- an unusual coalition that included the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- had raised serious questions about the legality of the administration's plan to mail Social Security "no-match" letters to 140,000 U.S. employers.

"There can be no doubt that the effects of the rule's implementation will be severe," Breyer wrote, resulting in "irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers."

The government letters are intended to warn employers for the first time that they must resolve questions about their employees' identities or fire them within 90 days. If they do not, employers could face "stiff penalties," including fines and even criminal prosecution, for violating a federal law that bars knowingly employing illegal workers, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said when he announced the plan Aug. 10.

The plaintiffs convinced the judge that the Social Security Administration database includes so many errors -- incorporated in the records of about 9.5 million people in 2003 alone -- that its use in firings would unfairly discriminate against tens of thousands of legal workers, including native-born and naturalized U.S. citizens, and cause major workforce disruptions that would burden companies.

"The government's proposal to disseminate no-match letters affecting more than eight million workers will, under the mandated time line, result in the termination of employment to lawfully employed workers," the judge wrote. "Moreover the threat of criminal prosecution . . . reflects a major change in DHS policy."

Breyer also said that the government may have ignored a 1980 law, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, that requires it to weigh the cost of imposing new regulations that would significantly burden small-business owners. Randel K. Johnson, a vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, said the ruling shows that "the government cannot do anything it wants simply in the name of enforcement. They've got to be careful about building their record and complying with the law."

In a statement, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said: "This is a significant step towards overturning this unlawful rule, which would give employers an even stronger way to keep workers from freely forming unions. . . . More than 70% of SSA discrepancies refer to U.S. citizens."

Chertoff expressed disappointment with the decision and said the administration will continue to aggressively enforce immigration laws while considering an appeal, which plaintiffs' attorneys said could take at least nine months.

"Today's ruling is yet another reminder of why we need Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform," Chertoff said. "The American people have been loud and clear about their desire to see our nation's immigration laws enforced."

Several analysts said the Bush administration's plan appeared to be designed to push business interests back into the debate by demonstrating that the failure of legislative reform efforts would carry costs, and to reassure conservative lawmakers who oppose illegal immigration that the White House is able and willing to crack down on offenders.

Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said the ruling "shows how ineffective the current laws are."

"It reinforces the opinion that many of us hold that until you have a better legal framework -- which requires new legislation -- we're stuck very much with the status quo," Meissner said.

In a statement, Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-Calif.), an opponent of Bush's approach who won election to the House last year on the issue, criticized the court. "What part of 'illegal' does Judge Breyer not understand?" he said. "At a time when the federal government is finally trying to enforce current immigration law, we cannot have activist judges stand in the way of doing what is right."

The scope of the problem is uncontested. A three-year government audit ending in 2001 found "widespread" misuse of Social Security numbers by illegal immigrants, who often present fake or fraudulent documents to obtain jobs. Overall, 7.2 million illegal immigrants account for at least 10 percent of low-skilled U.S. workers and 5 percent of the total U.S. workforce, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of 2005 census data.

Illegal immigrants make up even greater portions of workers in specific industries, including 24 percent in farming, 17 percent in cleaning, 14 percent in construction and 12 percent in food preparation. But the government's record in developing tools to screen such workers is spotty, largely because of successful efforts by employers, labor unions and civil rights groups to water them down.

A government program to verify the validity of new hires' Social Security numbers, proposed in concept in 1981 and launched in 1996, remains voluntary and covers only about 23,000 of 8 million U.S. employers. It is also hampered by a high false-alarm rate and the limited ability to detect identity theft involving stolen or fraudulent numbers. Between June 2004 and May 2006, it erroneously rejected 11 percent of foreign-born U.S. citizens and 1.3 percent of authorized foreign-born noncitizens, according to a report provided to Congress.

In protest, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) signed legislation in August that bars companies in his state from participating in the program until it is 99 percent accurate.

The federal government has mailed Social Security no-match letters to employers since 1994, but such notices were generally silent about workers' immigration status and employers did not face liability. In June 2006, the Department of Homeland Security proposed using the letters to combat immigration fraud involving existing employees, and it finalized its plans this summer. The AFL-CIO and the ACLU filed suit to halt the Sept. 4 start of the mailings, and they were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the trade associations for the agriculture, restaurant and construction industries.

On Aug. 31, U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney issued a temporary restraining order pending an Oct. 1 hearing before Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and is the brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

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Big Business Takes a Look at Troubled Border 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the nation’s largest business lobbies, released a report last week detailing its recommended “Steps to a 21^st Century U.S.- Mexico Border.”  (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Press Release, June 8, 2011)  The report addresses border issues that most affect the Chamber’s members and recommends action on topics such as trade, security, travel and immigration.  (See Steps to a 21^st Century U.S.-Mexico Border) The Chamber asserts that the U.S. and Mexico trade more than $1 billion worth of goods every day, and as such, building a strong and stable relationship with Mexico is of paramount importance to U.S. business.  (Id.) 

The Chamber of Commerce report makes clear that business industries in the U.S. are affected by the escalating violence and turmoil that have come to characterize our nation’s Southern border.  Drug cartel activity has made “extreme criminal behavior” a prominent threat to U.S. business trade with Mexico.  (Id.)  The report states that significant sums of money are being spent to secure employees and provide armored transportation.  Companies conducting business with Mexico must factor in the high costs of protecting both their employees and their product, a cost which is being passed on to the consumer. 

Despite these dangers, the Chamber’s report still promotes the controversial cross-border trucking provisions of NAFTA.  The report states that eighty percent of U.S. trade products with Mexico are carried across the border by truck.  (Steps to a 21^st Century U.S.-Mexican Border, p. 5)  The report, however, does not address the many concerns which have delayed implementation of the program for well over a decade, including concerns about drug-related violence.  (See FAIR Legislative Update, March 7, 2011; FAIR Legislative Update, Jan. 10, 2011) 

The Chamber also promotes expanding the Merida Initiative.  The Merida Initiative is an agreement through which the U.S. has agreed to support the governments in Mexico, Central America, Dominican Republic, and Haiti in their respective battles against organized crime.  (See U.S. Department of State)  The purpose of providing funds and other resources to these countries is to promote the national security interest of the U.S.; prevent further violence from spilling over the border; and deter drug and gang-related transnational criminal organizations from coming into our country.  (See Merida Initiative Fact Sheet) 

Finally, the report agrees that “illegal immigration is one of the most significant problems facing our border today.”  (Steps to a 21^st Century U.S.-Mexican Border, p. 20)  The Chamber calls for immigration reform to promote security in the U.S. and create economic growth, but argues that increasing legal immigration will actually decrease illegal immigration and the help ease the related security concerns hurting businesses.