Alabama candidate for the U.S. Senate Tommy Tuberville, former Auburn University football coach, has hired the chief Republican aide for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s organization dedicated to lobbying Congress to import more foreign workers to take American jobs.
In May, the Tuberville campaign announced that it had hired consultant Rob Jesmer — Zuckerberg’s chief GOP aide for FWD.us, the billionaire’s cheap labor lobbying group that advocates giving amnesty to illegal aliens, as well as allowing Silicon Valley tech giants to have an unlimited supply of white-collar foreign workers.
Tripp Skipper with the Tuberville campaign confirmed to Breitbart News in an email that Jesmer remains a part of the former football coach’s media team.
Jesmer, as Neil Munro reported, was influential in lobbying GOP members of Congress to support an immigration agenda that favored amnesty for illegal aliens with the promise of border enforcement, coupled with additional foreign guest workers for multinational corporations like Facebook. As recently as 2017, FWD.us had lobbied Congress to pass the Dream Act — legislation that would give amnesty to the majority of the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S.
Most recently, FWD.us pushed a green card giveaway plan that rewards Big Tech’s business model of using the H-1B visa program to import foreign workers over hiring American graduates.
The plan ensures a green card system where only temporary foreign workers on H-1B visas are able to obtain employment visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals. This process would solidify that employment-based green cards only go to temporary foreign visa workers that have been imported to the U.S. by corporations to replace American workers.
Jesmer’s role on the Tuberville campaign gives insight into the immigration positions that the Senate candidate has taken thus far. For example, during a number of speeches in recent months, Tuberville has said that while he is opposed to illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the nation’s economy needs those foreign workers to fill American jobs that would otherwise go to native workers.
During a July speech, Tuberville said:
We got 100,000 people a month coming across the border. We don’t know who they are. We need them. But at least we got to know who they are. [Emphasis added]
Similarly, in a August 3 speech at the Shoals Republican Club, Tuberville said he wanted foreign workers to come across the southern border to take U.S. jobs so long as they are vetted:
I’m for the border, again I can go through all this, I’m for the border, I’ve been down there, I’ve seen it. There are people coming across the border that need jobs, okay, and we want them to come over here, we just need to know who’s here, okay. Put the wall up, then we let them come in, and become citizens like we all became citizens. But there’s some people coming across there border that are not coming over here to get jobs, they’re coming to kill you, you, and you. And they’re going to take this country over. And we, you know what I’m talking about. And we better start talking about it. [Emphasis added]
When Tuberville was pressed by local Alabama radio host Dale Jackson about what level of legal immigration he would like to see — the U.S. currently admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants annually — the Senate candidate reiterated that despite American workers being laid off from their white-collar jobs and forced to train their H-1B visa foreign replacements, the nation “need[s] workers.”
JACKSON: Do we allow too many people to come into the legal status as well? Because legal workers, we all know illegal workers surpress the wages of folks who are the lower economic spectrum. Legal workers and I’m not talking about just from Mexico, but we’re talking about from India and other places that come in and do jobs that Americans will do but suppress the wages. You saw it at Disney World. We saw it in the tech industry. There’s a lot of legal immigration that’s suppressing wages. Is that a problem too? [Emphasis added]
TUBERVILLE: Yeah, I think there’s going to continue to be a problem, but, but again, we need workers. Dale, I’m going to tell you … you see homes going up and you don’t see Americans. [Emphasis added]
During a conversation with the Huts and Nuts podcast on August 5, Tuberville said all residents in the U.S., including native-born citizens, are immigrants as justification for his position that businesses need foreign workers:
First thing, no matter what we do, with any immigration law or any path to citizenship, we’ve got to put up a wall. We’ve got to stop the flow of people coming in and out. We got to know who’s here. Then you start going through DACA and all the things in terms of amnesty, and figure out what direction we need to go. We can’t do anything in immigration until you stop the flow of people coming in. Again, we need people here.”
“We need people in this country that will work,” Tuberville continued. “We are all immigrants. We just got to know who is here and we got to limit it to the point where people come the right way. And once we do that we can make the tough decisions on the DACA and the amnesty and all those things.”
On local Alabama radio’s Jeff Poor Show, Tuberville said there was “no doubt” that immigration, illegal and legal, has an impact on Americans’ wages but that the nation needs “smart workers.”
“I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” Tuberville said. “The problem is we’re getting to a point where we don’t need just workers. We need smarter workers – people that can come here that have skills.”
When asked by Breitbart News if Tuberville acknowledged the economic impact that mass legal immigration has on American workers, Tuberville said his position was based on comments made by President Trump:
President Trump said, “I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in,” he told a group of reporters from regional newspapers. “We need people.” [Emphasis added]
Now Alabama has the best workforce in the world. Our workers are second to none. We may not need these workers in Alabama. But if President Trump says he needs people in some places then I trust him. [Emphasis added]
Last year, U.S. businesses and corporations attempted to outsource nearly 420,000 American jobs to foreigners through the H-1B visa program — a number that outpaces the population of Tampa, Florida.
As Breitbart News previously reported, more than 2.7 million H-1B foreign workers have been approved to come to the U.S. to take American jobs between 2007 and 2017. During that same period, businesses tried to outsource almost 3.5 million American jobs to foreign workers instead of hiring Americans.
About four million young Americans enter the workforce each year, many looking for white-collar jobs in the STEM fields. Those Americans’ prospects of finding work are crippled by the country’s legal immigration process, which admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers annually. Already, the wage-cutting business scheme has led to foreign-born workers outnumbering Americans in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, California.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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