GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham has hired an advocate from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to work as his chief immigration counsel.
Graham runs the influential Senate judiciary committee, and his hiring of Amy Nice spotlights his long-standing efforts to provide additional labor to his South Carolina business donors, said pro-American advocates.
“She worked in the Obama Department of Homeland Security, so I think she will fit with Lindsey Graham’s viewpoint on immigration quite well,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA.
Graham’s press secretary declined to provide a statement about Nice’s hiring to Breitbart News.
Graham is facing reelection in 2020. He needs to win the GOP’s nomination, and he zig-zags between interventionist views on foreign policy and pro-business domestic policies, which include support for centrist judges and opposition to immigration reforms which would raise Americans’ wages.
In 2012, for example, Graham launched the “Gang of Eight” amnesty, which would have amnestied at least 11 million illegals and would have doubled annual immigration rates to two million people, or up to one immigrant for every two American births. The bill would also have spiked housing prices, shifted wages from employees to investors, and allowed an unlimited inflow of foreign graduates into the U.S. labor market. In January 2013, Politico reported:
[Democratic Sen. Chuck] Schumer said that shortly after the [2012] November election, he received a call from South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) who wanted to restart negotiations on a comprehensive immigration package.
“Lindsey said ‘the band is back together!’” Schumer said.
Graham informed Schumer that [Sen. John] McCain was on board as well.
“My heart went pitter patter,” Schumer said. “That meant we could get something done.”
Graham’s bill was blocked by GOP primary voters in June 2014 when they defeated Rep. Eric Cantor.
Graham’s push also helped sink Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential ambitions in 2016 and helped put New York real estate developer Donald Trump into the White House.
But Graham keeps pushing for more immigration. In January 2018, for example, he opposed President Trump’s plan to reduce the inflow of legal immigrants, saying:
We need more legal immigration … I don’t want green cards just for computer engineers. If you are out there working in the fields, if you are a construction worker, I want some of those people to have a way to stay here, because if you are running a business and you have a guest worker who is really good, and would add value to our country, I want them to have a chance to get a green card. I just don’t want to be a country in the future of just computer engineers or high-tech people.
Graham’s support for business is tightly linked to his donors’ desire for cheap labor. For example, in 2012, Graham pressured the Department of Labor to provide Jamaican workers to a local resort and golf course. In 2016, Graham supported Gov. Jeb Bush, who promised to expand the economy by importing new consumers and workers, And Graham also sharply criticized candidate Trump.
His new hire, Amy Nice, was the executive director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when it helped Graham push for the 2013 amnesty. She later joined Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, where she worked as a lawyer to help employers gain more imported workers.
She was forced out of DHS in January 2017 as Trump’s inauguration speech promised a policy of “Hire American.”
In December 2017, she wrote a report for an immigration lawyers’ advocacy group which opposed reforms that would pressure U.S. companies to hire young Americans graduates instead of hiring foreign graduates. Her report said:
this approach ignores the importance of employers engaging in legitimate on-campus recruitment at U.S. universities to hire newly-minted graduates, where some selected as the ideal candidate are foreign-born students who have education-related visas. Such new hires would almost universally be entry-level professionals earning level 1 wages, and such employers would be at a severe disadvantage in ever employing such a foreign student on a long-term basis under the proposed H-B cap lottery framework.
DHS is reportedly preparing a regulation which would implement the pro-American reforms opposed by Nice.
Nice’s bio says she has won awards from the immigration lawyers’ association: “in 2000, 2004, and 2012, Nice received the AILA Presidential Award based on her achievement and excellence in government liaison.”
Graham’s renewed 2019 push for immigrant labor may cause problems in his 2020 reelection campaign, Jenks said.
“He has been quite forthright. He wants more cheap labor to mow the lawns on the golf course, and he’s definitely playing for the donors,” she said. But the state’s voters still backed him after the 2013 amnesty, so “he’s gambling that immigration will not be the top priority of South Carolina voters.”
The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor.
That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland, California.
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