HOW I SEE IT: Stimulus punishes American workers

The economic stimulus signed by President Barack Obama Tuesday punishes American workers and reduces the desired effects the $787 billion spending package could have on our economy.

The reasons for this are related to the federal government’s trade and immigration policies that are part of a “New World Order” globalization scheme being forced on U.S. citizens and the world by free-trade-at-any-cost fanatics in Congress and our presidents.

The jobs created by the stimulus bill cost the American tax-payers between $250,000 and $500,000 each. One would think it is not necessary to ensure that only American citizens and legal immigrants be given jobs created by American taxpayer dollars, but that is not the case.

The E-Verify System is an automated government system that allows employers to validate a new employee’s Social Security number in about one minute. E-Verify is used by thousands of U.S. employers and has proven to be 99.5 percent accurate.

The House, but not the Senate, put provisions in the stimulus bill that would require any employer who receives stimulus money to use the E-Verify system to verify the citizenship and legality of all new employees. The final version of the Bill had the E-Verify requirements removed.

With the E-Verify requirement removed from the bill, employers who receive stimulus money are free to hire illegal immigrants.

Now, it is estimated that as many as 500,000 illegal immigrants will get jobs paid for with taxpayers’ money — jobs that should go to American citizens and not legal immigrants.

Illegal immigrants in the U.S. typically spend only what is necessary to survive. The rest of their dollars are sent back to their native country.

This type of transfer of U.S. currency to foreign countries amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars each year. In 2008, Mexico received more than $25 billion in transfer payments.

If this $25 billion had been paid to American citizens, the money would have been spent or saved in the U.S. economy. In this and many other ways, employing illegal immigrants is detrimental to our economy.

To make matters worse, our government encourages 500,000 legal immigrants to enter the U.S. every year as part of 12 government-sponsored foreign worker programs.

With more than 12 million Americans currently unemployed, where are these new legal immigrants going to find a job? Clearly, we already have millions more workers than jobs. Shouldn’t there be a moratorium on all immigration until full employment is attained in the U.S.?

The U.S. has a trade deficit of about $700 billion. That is, we have purchased $700 billion more from other countries than we have sold to other countries. The Center for American Progress estimates that each $1 billion in trade deficit represents 20,000 U.S. jobs lost. A $700 billion deficit, then, represents 14 million U.S. jobs lost.

The free-trade-at-any-cost fanatics in Congress and our presidents, past and present, are largely responsible for this situation — slowly but surely they are trading away our country.

Our only hope of changing these conditions is to write and phone our senators and congressman weekly and tell them to level the playing field for American workers.

If they refuse, vote them out of office.