WTAS: more praise for the RAISE Act

 

THE WHITE HOUSE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 3, 2017

 

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING: MORE PRAISE FOR THE RAISE ACT

 

Rep. Lamar Smith: “Each year one million legal immigrants are admitted to the United States. Our immigration system is the most generous in the world. However, our current system fails to prioritize immigration based on skills and abilities. Less than 15 percent of green card holders are admitted based on education and skills. Existing immigration policies do not prioritize the interests of American workers and taxpayers. The RAISE Act ensures that our legal immigration system admits those with the highest training and abilities to spur economic growth and innovation. These reforms make sure that our immigration policies protect hard-working Americans. I thank Senators Cotton and Perdue for introducing the RAISE Act. We’ve been working with the senators for months on this effort and I plan to introduce the House companion bill soon. We appreciate President Trump’s support of this legislation and his help in fulfilling the pledge we made to make our immigration laws better serve America.”

 

Rep. Lou Barletta: “I commend Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue for introducing this legislation to move our country toward a skills-based immigration system that will raise American workers’ wages, create jobs, and benefit our economy.  We have immigration laws in this country for two basic reasons: to protect national security and to preserve American jobs.  This bill reinforces those principles. For more than a decade, I have argued that fixing our broken immigration system will create greater economic opportunities for American workers and families.  Yet, for decades, politicians in Washington have supported policies that benefit foreign workers at the expense of American workers.  Just one out of every 15 immigrants to the United States comes here because of their skills.  This influx of low-skilled immigrant labor has decreased wages for those without college degrees by nearly 20 percent since the 1970s, and threatens to place the American Dream out of reach for far too many workers and their families.  That has to change if we want to help American workers find jobs and remain competitive in today’s increasingly global economy.  I look forward to working with the White House and my colleagues in Congress, particularly Rep. Lamar Smith (TX-21) and Senators Cotton and Perdue, to follow through on President Trump’s promise to reform our immigration system so that it puts America first.”

 

Rep. Jim Banks: “It’s been a long time since the United States has updated its immigration laws, which are very outdated. And this is a common sense reform. … I broadly support these reforms because it’s been a long time coming. And there’s hardly anything radical about these reforms. Establishing a skills-based, merit system to help govern our immigration policies. This is a lot like what we see around the world: countries like Canada and Australia have exactly this type of design of their immigration policy too. So we should take into account the skills gaps in our economy as we attract immigrant labor – both low-skilled and high-skilled labor (and) I think this is a common sense way to approach it.”

 

Rep. Mo Brooks: “As a backdrop, America has by far and away the most generous immigration system on the planet.  However, we only accept between 5-12% of immigrants based on education and skill level.  I applaud Senators Cotton and Perdue for their leadership in introducing the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act (RAISE).  The RAISE Act replaces the current permanent employment-visa framework with a skills-based system that rewards applicants based on their individual merits.  Further, the legislation eliminates the diversity visa lottery as well as the immigration preferences for extended family and adult family members of U.S. residents, while maintaining preferences for the spouse and minor children of U.S. residents – thereby encouraging the unification of nuclear families. America must recognize our challenges and opportunities, and be much more selective in our immigration policies to ensure incoming immigrants are both self-sufficient and are able and willing to be properly absorbed into American society.  If we aren’t, American workers will continue to have their wages undercut by the importation of cheaper, foreign labor and America will lose its special place in history.  I am proud to support this key component of President Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda and appreciate the President’s continued leadership and dedication to making America’s economy great again.”

 

Dr. James Carafano, Vice President, the Heritage Foundation: “Legal immigration reform has been off Washington’s to-do list far too long. Heritage has long argued for legal immigration policies designed to serve America in the 21st century, not those tailored to past decades. We have long favored ending blanket chain-migration, and replacing it with a rational, skills based-migration system. We have looked at the lessons from the Canadian and Australian models for reform to see what might best serve the United States’ immigration system. The RAISE Act seeks to reduce low skill immigration which is very costly to U.S. taxpayers, while promoting a modernized, skills-based migration system that makes sense for all Americans. We look forward to Congress taking this issue seriously, rolling up its sleeves and delivering legislation that establishes a legal immigration system designed for the demands of the 21st century.”

 

Radio Host Rush Limbaugh: “This is a reform of legal immigration. Merit-based is what has the left in a tizzy. And of course the English language is preferred. To them, merit-based is discriminatory. Merit-based is insulting. And the reason for that is that not everybody will qualify if it’s merit-based. That’s kind of the definition of it. It’s rooted in wanting the best and the brightest and the most qualified, which exactly should be our requirements!”

 

Columnist and Political Commentator Charles Krauthammer: “I love the hypocrisy of the liberals who are so shocked by this, people who swoon over Canada’s progressivism, with its national healthcare and its matinee star liberal Prime Minister, who want him to be the leader here. All of a sudden when the U.S. proposes essentially the Canadian system, the merit-based system, are shocked at how mean and racist it is. This is a no-brainer. Here’s the analogy: The United States is the place everybody wants to go, every immigrant. You find somebody on a raft on the South China Sea—where do they want to go? United States. We have the top 500 draft picks for the N.B.A. and instead we choose to pick people randomly out of the Karachi phonebook. This does not make sense. We should be doing what Canada and Australia are doing and cashing in on the fact that the world wants to come here. This is so obvious, it’s almost amazing that we haven’t done this and that I think is the core of the issue.”

 

Radio Host Mark Levin: “The RAISE Act, a bill to roll back the nation’s unprecedented levels of unfettered immigration in favor of a merit-based immigration system, is outstanding… Trump’s position used to be a very basic government positon of Presidents in both Democrat and Republican parties. Immigration is not a policy for the benefit of the third world or any part of the world. The purpose of immigration is to benefit the American citizen.”

 

Daniel Horowitz, Editor Of Conservative Review: “There is broad consensus among the public that immigration should a) be limited to those who have unique skills; b) cultivate the assimilation of American values and the English language; and c) that it should be a net positive for all Americans, not just the corporate-D.C. cartel. This is the message Trump ran on, and it is the message that Cotton and Purdue have restored with this legislation.”

 

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