Monday, March 9, 2009

Stimulus Loophole Gives 300,000 Jobs to Illegals

Monday, March 9, 2009
By: David A. Patten
from Newsmax.com

An estimated 300,000 construction jobs paid for by the stimulus plan will go to illegal workers after leading Democrats removed a provision requiring verification of citizenship, a leading immigration expert tells Newsmax.

The House version of the $787 billion stimulus bill required verification of the legal residency of anyone put to work by its spending. But that provision was removed from the bill before members of Congress met to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the bill.

Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), tells Newsmax the verification provision was deleted by Democratic leaders even before the bill reached the conference committee, where differences between House and Senate legislation are normally ironed out.

“When it got to conference, the top people -- not just the conference members, but the top people: Reid, Pelosi, and Obama -- chose to kill the provision and not include it,” Camarota says. “This was a purposeful decision.”

The provision would have required that workers’ names to be vetted through the Internet-based E-Verify system. E-Verify, a joint project of the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, gives employers a quick means of verifying employee eligibility.

“E-Verify is our most effective tool for preventing illegal immigrants from getting jobs, and they chose not to use it,” says Camarota.

The estimate of 300,000 construction jobs is based on U.S. Census and other studies showing that approximately 15 percent of U.S. construction workers are illegal immigrants.
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