Crowding Out U.S. Workers

Article subtitle: 
The GOP needs to oppose the White House’s immigration plan and expose its flaws.
Article author: 
Jeff Sessions
Article publisher: 
The National Review
Article date: 
Monday, January 6, 2014
Article category: 
National Issues
Medium
Article Body: 

Several prominent amnesty advocates, including Mark Zuckerberg and top Obama administration officials, have argued that amnesty is a civil right. The claim is, of course, preposterous...

To say that amnesty is a civil right is to effectively declare to the world the right to enter the United States without permission, to bring one’s family, and to receive all of the financial benefits our nation provides. To say that one has a right to freely violate our immigration laws is to deny the very idea that a nation can establish enforceable borders.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s motivation is not elusive. He heads a lobbying group representing many of his industry’s wealthiest CEOs, and their companies wish to extract generous guest-worker programs from Congress....

The upside-down conception of rights increasingly articulated by amnesty activists would mean that when an illegal worker seeks a job sought or held by an American worker, the civil-rights equity is on the side of the illegal worker...

Republican officials reflexively collapse into a defensive posture, offering assurances that they will pass undefined “immigration reform” because we need to “fix our nation’s broken immigration system.” But does doubling the annual flow of immigrant workers fix a broken system, or make it dramatically worse? Is our goal just to do “something,” or to do the right thing?

— Jeff Sessions is the junior United States senator from Alabama and the ranking Republican member on the Senate Budget Committee.