Grassroots Americans from across the political spectrum will march in Washington, D.C., from Freedom Plaza to Capitol Hill on Monday from 9:30 AM until the early afternoon.
Breitbart News will be broadcasting the event live online at Breitbart.com, (WATCH HERE) starting when speeches from members of Congress and leaders in the activist community begin on Capitol Hill at 11 AM EDT and continuing until 4 PM EDT.
Confirmed speakers at the event include Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), Reps. Steve King (R-IA) and Mo Brooks (R-AL), former Florida Republican Congressman Col. Allen West, conservative activist Wayne Dupree, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, the Rev. O’Neal Dozier, Bishop Felton Smith, retired federal immigration agent Michael Cutler, documentary filmmaker Dennis Michael Lynch, Tea Party Community co-founder Ken Crow, ConservativeMESSENGER’s K. Carl Smith, TheBlackSphere.net’s Kevin Jackson, Louisiana State Sen. Elbert Guillory who left the Democrat Party in May 2013, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s former executive director Frank Morris, political analyst Katrina Pierson and BALA founder and Progressives for Immigration Reform executive director Leah Durant.
Along with the live broadcast, the Breitbart News will have news coverage and analysis from the scene.
Durant told Breitbart News on Sunday evening that this event is meant to ensure that all working Americans, especially black Americans, get a voice in the immigration debate. “At a time when nearly 22 million Americans are either out of work or underemployed, it is our strong belief that now is no time to engage in policies that would artificially add millions more workers to US labor markets, dramatically increasing competition for scare U.S. jobs,” Durant said. “At 13.8%, black unemployment is nearly double that of the national average. Our coalition – the Black American Leadership Alliance reflects the views of everyday middle-class Americans rather than the political elites and big business interests from both the right and left, that have championed large-scale immigration to the US.”
A spokesman for Sen. Sessions told Breitbart News on Sunday night that the march and rally will be the first time the American working people’s voices are heard in this immigration debate over those of the special interests.
“We’ve heard from a lot of different special interest groups about what an immigration bill should look like,” Sessions spokesman Stephen Miller said in an email. “But tomorrow offers a chance to hear from the American people. As Senator Sessions has said, we need an immigration policy that serves the workers and taxpayers whose wages have declined and whose job prospects have diminished. But the comprehensive reform effort winding through Congress does the exact opposite – reducing wages and putting more Americans out of work.”
In a recent op-ed for the National Review, Sessions wrote that those pushing the Senate immigration bill have “abandoned and taken for granted the struggling worker.”
“By doing the right thing on immigration, the GOP can distance our party from the corporate titans who believe the immigration policy for our entire country should be modeled to pad their bottom line,” Sessions wrote.
If the Senate “Gang of Eight” bill ever became law, most analyses show, about 30 million new workers would be legalized under what is called future flow over the next decade, a figure that includes the legalization of America’s at least 11 million illegal aliens and the various visa program increases and chain migration, the act of immigrants bringing in their family members from abroad.
As Breitbart News has previously noted, members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have urged Congress to cast aside the Senate’s Gang of Eight bill because it would in their estimation “disproportionately harm” the black community. “In light of recent debates on comprehensive immigration reform, we are writing to address a rarely-discussed effect of granting legal status or effective amnesty to illegal immigrants,” three Civil Rights Commission members wrote to Congressional Black Caucus leaders a few months ago. “Such grant of legal status will likely disproportionately harm lower-skilled African-Americans by making it more difficult for them to obtain employment and depressing their wages when they do obtain employment.”
One of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission members, Peter Kirsanow, followed up in a recent op-ed with details of just how devastating this bill would be for black communities. “Indeed, it is no secret that the employment picture for low-skilled workers is abysmal,” Kirsanow wrote. “The national unemployment rate has been above 7.5 percent for more than four years and millions have dropped out of the workforce entirely. Among those without a high school diploma, the unemployment rate in May reached 11.1 percent, and for blacks without a high school diploma, it is more than 24 percent. The labor-force participation rate is at historic lows and long-term unemployment is the worst since the Great Depression. The workweek is shrinking, as well as wage rates. Barely one in two adult black males has a full-time job. A record 47 million people are on food stamps.”
Kirsanow added that the Senate immigration bill “has the potential to make things even worse” because it will force blacks to compete for already scarce American jobs against newly legalized illegal aliens and newly admitted low-skilled workers, and will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, drive down wages of those lucky enough to get hired.
Recent polling data shows most Americans favor reduced or unchanged immigration levels. Republicans want the same amount of immigrants per year or less than current levels by a 5 to 1 margin, according to the latest Gallup polling, and Democrats support the same thing by a 2.5 to 1 margin. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll likewise shows that those who earn under $30,000 per year prefer a reduction to an increase in current immigration levels by a 7 to 1 margin.