No changes in S.1348 since debate began on Monday

This is from an e-mail from Numbers USA:

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) lost again in his bid to protect American workers from increased foreign labor competition through a large new guest worker program.

His amendment to strip the new guest worker program from the S. 1348 Kennedy/Bush amnesty bill failed by a vote of 31 to 64 Tuesday evening.

His amendment to do the same thing with the Senate amnesty a year ago failed by a 29-68 vote.

At the time of this posting (afternoon of May 23), the large amnesty and immigration bill representing a “grand compromise” among Pres. Bush, Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Kyl (R-Ariz.) and a dozen other Senators has held with no changes since debate began Monday night. Get the latest updates here.

As it stands, S. 1348 would allow up to 600,000 new foreign workers annually.

The bill has some good language to require the workers to go home for one year after every two years of working here, and a life-time limit of six years of work. It has no path to permanent residency.

But it allow workers to bring families and to have anchor babies. And it fails to require implementation of an entry-exit system that would keep track of whether guest workers every go home.

It seems unlikely to me that left-liberal Democrats would vote for this tightly-controlled guest worker program, which from their point of view is demeaning to the foreign workers, unless they have it in their thought that the limits on the workers, such as having to return home (with their families!) for one year every three years, is not enforceable and will be dropped once the bill is passed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 23, 2007 05:58 PM | Send