‘Freeze’ on immigration urged to put Americans back to work

Citing census and Labor Department reports showing that most new jobs are going to foreign-born workers, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) on Tuesday said America should fully stop illegal immigration and letting another 3 million legal immigrants into the United States until the country figures out how to get Americans into those jobs.

“My call to Republicans, my call to the president, the administration, is freeze what we’re doing, figure out what the state of affairs is, remove the people who have come here illegally, repatriate them where they’re supposed to be, reestablish the rule of law, secure the border first,” Roy said.

“Border security first. If you want America First, get that done and then have a serious and robust conversation about the state of our workforce,” Roy said at a conference hosted by the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

Roy arrived well armed with numbers to help make his point that legal and illegal immigration is changing the culture of America.

He said the immigrant population in America is the highest in number and percentage in U.S. history. He said there are 51.5 million foreign-born people in the U.S., or 16% of the population.

The last time the foreign-born population neared such a high percentage was in the early part of the 1900s. At that time, he said, the federal government “pumped the brakes” for nearly 40 years before hitting the “accelerator” again.

“I think we’ve let in more people than every country in the world combined,” he said.

Roy said that arguments made by businesses for foreign tech workers make little sense since America graduates many STEM workers. But, he said, most of those never take STEM-related jobs.

“What are we doing?” Roy asked. “We’re subsidizing big corporations to hire cheaper foreign labor while we subsidize American workers not to work or go take a job in some field that is not related to their STEM degree. That’s what’s actually happening.”

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And he mocked years of calls for immigration reform, claiming that Washington doesn’t want it and instead is giving corporations the cheap foreign labor it seeks.

“We hear all of this chatter about H-1B, and the need to have a reformed immigration system, as if this is somehow new, as if we haven’t had this conversation now for decades in which basically big corporate interests want cheap labor at the expense of American labor, while the culture of our country is getting twisted around, while our open borders are being ignored, and while Republicans go out and campaign on securing them, never fully secure them, and never undo the damage of the fact that they were unsecured in the first place,” Roy said, adding, “That’s the truth.”