The next OFIR meeting has been moved back to the Best Western Mill Creek Inn in Salem.  It will be on Sunday, January 19th at 2:00pm

We owe a debt of gratitude to the staff at Best Western Mill Creek Inn.  They have stood by us for years.  At the meeting we will briefly discuss why we changed the meeting location back to the Best Western.

Lorraine Woodwark, National Director of Attorneys United for a Secure America will be our special guest speaker.  Russ Walker, President Trump’s Oregon Campaign manager, will be speaking as well as

We will discuss what we can do to prepare for the 2020 election.  President Trump will likely face off with an open-borders candidate.

Your participation is encouraged as OFIR forges the way into 2020.  Please plan to attend and invite a friend!

We hope to see you at the meeting!

H.R. 5038 is called the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019.  It’s a massive amnesty bill disguised as “modernization.”  It should be called the Ag Amnesty and Indentured Servitude Act.  Or just the "Ag Amnesty bill".  It’s on a fast track in the House, scheduled for Rules Committee on Tuesday, Dec. 10, with floor vote likely Wednesday, Dec. 11.

Please call your Representative and voice your objections. In speaking to the U.S. Representative’s office, refer first to the bill number, H.R. 5038.  Phone numbers are given below.

Here are a few key facts, compiled by NumbersUSA.  They have prepared a more complete analysis here.

Amnesty -- H.R. 5038 would give amnesty--including work permits, green cards, and a path to citizenship--to illegal aliens who have been unlawfully employed in agriculture at least part time during the past two years. In fact, illegal aliens who spent just most weekends working in agriculture over two years would qualify.

H-2A Expansion -- Rather than providing incentives for mechanization to reduce the need for manual labor, or even just streamlining the existing H-2A program, the sponsors of H.R. 5038 decided that it is time to complete the hollowing out of several other industries, in addition to seasonal farm work. They kept the numerically unlimited H-2A category for seasonal work, but created a new, non-seasonal, year-round category so that at least 20,000 (and potentially many more) low-paid foreign workers can be imported each year to work at dairies, meat-packing plants, fish canneries, nurseries, and more.

Indentured Servitude -- Congress knows that giving amnesty to illegal agricultural workers will fail to produce a stable, legal workforce, because they've tried it before. Congress passed an agricultural amnesty in 1986, as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). But there was a catch: most of the amnestied ag workers left agriculture for better-paying jobs as soon as they got their work permits. The sponsors of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act decided to address this problem by regressing to the 17th Century practice of indenturing these newly amnestied agricultural workers for various durations, mainly four to eight years.

In its Alert on H.R. 5038, NumbersUSA says it's “important for every office's staff to know that WE THE PEOPLE know the amnesty vote is coming. And that WE THE PEOPLE probably know more about what is in the amnesty bill than their boss the Representative knows. For example, do they know this is a bill that re-establishes indentured servitude in this country.  Let's cause those staffers to start scrambling to see what is actually in this bill.”

If you have not signed up with NumbersUSA to receive its Alerts directly and to use its free messaging to Congress, we recommend that you do.  NumbersUSA staff watch Congress constantly, and the NumbersUSA website has a large fund of pertinent information.

The last thing the U.S. needs now is another massive amnesty for illegal aliens.  There have been too many amnesties already in recent decades, resulting in disrespect for immigration law and law in general. Amnesties stimulate further illegal immigration.  Oregonians face congestion already, along with widespread homelessness, expensive housing, climate crisis, drug crisis, etc. The future will be even grimmer as more and more people from other countries pour into the U.S.  See this trenchant commentary on H.R. 5038 by Bob Dane, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Phone numbers for Oregon’s Representatives

You can reach the Washington office of any Representative by calling the U.S. Capitol switchboard number: 202-224-3121 (not a toll-free number). Then ask the operator to connect you with the Representative to whom you wish to speak. 

District 1 – Suzanne Bonamici – 202-225-0855

District 2 – Greg Walden – 202-225-6730

District 3 - Earl Blumenauer – 202-225-4811

District 4 - Peter A. DeFazio – 202-225-6416

District 5 – Kurt Schrader – 202-225-5711

If you don't know the name of your Representative, you can find it here:  https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/FindYourLegislator/leg-districts.html

The H-1B visa program has already displaced U.S. workers on a grand scale.  Now comes S.386, pending in the U.S. Senate, which would dramatically change our system for awarding H-1B employment green cards to further enrich businesses such as Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. at the expense of U.S. workers. This bill, S.386, is misleadingly named the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act.  It’s a companion bill to H.R.1044, which passed the House on July 10, with Oregon’s Congressional delegation all voting in favor of it.  Oregon’s Reps. Blumenauer and Bonamici were among the co-sponsors of H.R. 1044.  Both of Oregon’s Senators, Wyden and Merkley, are co-sponsors of S.386.

Groups of displaced U.S. workers are now organizing to fight against this injustice.  Many of them have been forced to train their foreign-worker replacements or lose any severance payments if they decline to train replacements.  Please help U.S. citizen workers by signing the White House petition.  President Trump’s office has set up a system enabling the public to initiate petitions, and any petition with enough signatures by a certain date will be reviewed by his office.  This petition (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/petition-not-pass-bill-hr-1044-s386-fairness-high-skilled-immigrants-act-2019) has been posted asking him to oppose both bills.

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Further Reading:  Excerpt from a report dated Sept. 18, 2019, by Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies:

This bill is anything but fair to U.S. workers, because it strengthens and perpetuates a system that is actively displacing them. It offers a major concession to employers who have bypassed U.S. workers for decades, without reforming the system to reduce guestworker admissions or prevent employers from replacing U.S. workers. This is one reason that DHS issued a statement opposing the bill when the House considered it earlier this year.

It eliminates a control known as the per-country cap, which meters issuance of green cards so that they are distributed to applicants from all countries before citizens of any one country can go above a certain number. Under this system, applicants from India now receive 20 percent of the employment green cards. Most of the applicants from India hold temporary visas (usually H-1B) as contract workers in technology occupations, and the number of green card applicants greatly exceeds the number of visas available, especially with the per-country cap. But according to USCIS, if the cap were eliminated, citizens of India would suddenly be able to claim nearly 100 percent of the employment green cards — for the next 10 years. So, applicants from all other countries would effectively be blocked for the foreseeable future. This also means that U.S. employers who want to sponsor new foreign workers for green cards from any other part of the world would no longer be able to do so.

The Indian contract workers who are waiting for the chance to apply for a green card may apply for a visa extension and are not forced to leave the United States. And they still have their jobs — unlike the Americans they replaced.

Sources tell us that an actual vote is highly unlikely; instead, a unanimous consent request from a senator is more likely, which allows them to bypass the committee process, hearings, amendments, and, most importantly, a public debate. Reportedly, even at this late hour, most offices still do not have a final version of the legislation to review.

The Senate version of the bill was co-introduced by Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had blocked it from unanimous consent because of concerns that it would reduce the admission of foreign nurses. Reportedly, Sen. Paul has recently agreed to let it come up if it includes a provision that would guarantee admission of 5,000 foreign nurses on temporary visas each year for the next 10 years. This will please U.S. hospitals, which generally prefer to import nurses from abroad rather than expand the number of slots for Americans to enter domestic nursing schools to fill the need. Since when is nursing a job Americans won't do?

The best solution to this issue is not to scrap the per country cap, or to increase the number of green cards, as some have argued, but to enact a merit-based system for awarding employment green cards that rewards the most qualified, talented, and likely to succeed, regardless of their country of origin.

It's that time of year! The Oregon State Fair will be opening Friday, August 23 and will run through Monday, Labor Day, Sept. 2.

OFIR will be hosting a booth at the State Fair inside the Jackman Long building again this year.  We do hope you will drop by and say hello!

You can find us in booth #235 inside the Jackman Long Building which is located just to the south of the Red Gate.

If you are interested in volunteering for a shift in our booth - just give us a call at 503.435.0141 or send us an email through our website at  www.oregonir.org

Hope to see you at the Oregon State Fair!