PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) applauded the decision by Senate leaders to strip an amendment granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens from an Appropriations bill to fund our troops serving in Iraq. However, an amendment that would allow for hundreds of thousands of additional unskilled H-2B guest workers to be admitted to our labor force remains in the bill.
FAIR, which has consistently opposed all efforts to grant amnesty to illegal aliens and expand guest worker programs that undermine American workers, also objected to the inappropriate use of an emergency spending bill to enact major unrelated legislation. Compounding the abuse of the legislative process, the sponsors of these amendments cynically chose a bill to fund our troops who are engaged in active combat overseas as their vehicle for rewarding illegal aliens and cheap labor interests.
"In the end, the Senate leadership did the right thing by removing an unrelated and unjustifiable amnesty, authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), from an emergency measure to fund our troops in Iraq," stated Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "The leadership must also act to strip an amendment offered by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) that could result in the admission of more than 400,000 new unskilled workers over the next three years."
Amendments to the Iraq funding measure, granting outright or de facto amnesty to some 1.35 million illegal aliens, and adding hundreds of thousands of new guest workers to our weakening economy, were added last week during the Appropriations Committee mark-up. These far-reaching and unrelated amendments were added to the bill without notice or debate, and were clearly designed to achieve by stealth the amnesty and guest worker measures that the American public has repeatedly and emphatically rejected.
As soon as these amendments were added, FAIR began to publicize the attempted hijacking of the Iraq funding bill. As word of this back door effort to enact an illegal alien amnesty and increase the admission of new guest workers spread in the media and on the Internet, the American public reacted angrily.
"Linking support for our troops to rewards for people who broke our laws and more cheap labor for powerful business interests was not just wrong, it was shameful," declared Stein. "There is no justification for an illegal alien amnesty, no justification for adding new guest workers at a time when so many working Americans are hurting, and there is never any justification for using our troops to pass special interest legislation."
Source: Federation for American Immigration Reform
