Rosemary Jenks: Amnesty Advocates Declaring 'War on American Workers'

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland–On Thursday, one of the country’s top experts on immigration said that the permanent political class in Washington has declared war on American workers by pushing for widespread amnesty and rampant legal immigration that includes more guest-worker visas. 

Speaking at “The Uninvited II” national security forum across the street from CPAC, Numbers USA Director of Government Relations Rosemary Jenks quoted Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “If the farmer and the wage worker are well off, it is absolutely certain that all others will be well off.” 

Jenks said that the country has “gone far astray” from that quote as the unemployment rate has dropped only because “Americans have given up hope and dropped out.”

She said that “in spite of this,” every single Democrat in the Senate “voted to declare war on the American worker” by voting for comprehensive immigration reform last year. She also noted “14 Republican senators joined the battle.” 

Jenks stated that the comprehensive immigration reform legislation that the bipartisan political establishment prefers would even double legal immigration and the number of guest workers that “employers can import to take American jobs.” 

“That is war on the American workers,” she declared. “We need to hold them accountable for waging war on us because that is what they did.”

Jenks said that for Democrats immigration reform is about “cheap votes.”

“If you don’t have a big enough voter base, import it,” Jenks said. She said for Republicans “it’s also fairly easy: money.”

Jenks stated that the House GOP leadership gets distracted when people like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg are “waving dollars at them” and saying they will protect establishment Republicans from their base with millions of dollars in ads so long as they pass amnesty legislation. 

She blasted big-business interests for trying to “buy access to larger pools of cheap foreign labor, which means we get cut out.”

“How is that fair?” she asked. 

Yet, Jenks said the House GOP leadership is determined to join Democrats in waging this war on American workers. 

Jenks, a Harvard Law School graduate who was a featured speaker at least year’s inaugural “Uninvited” event, thanked the organizers for “allowing immigration to be a topic” and said she had been looking forward to speaking at the forum.