Visa Lottery Amendment Pulled From H.R. 1 Voting -- So We Need To Get Co-Sponsors For New Bill To End Lottery Permanently

An interesting post from http://www.numbersusa.com/ about the opportunity to put an immigration bill before the House. This follows this post about the latest on the Immigration Bills before the House of Representatives and this post which shows that there are 30,000 openly illegal immigrants in the border town of El Paso. On a related note, you can read about Miss Kentucky Latina here, an interesting article about Jessica Alba here or another article about Salma Hayek here. For more that you can do to get involved click HERE and you can read a very interesting book HERE!

Visa Lottery Amendment Pulled From H.R. 1 Voting -- So We Need To Get Co-Sponsors For New Bill To End Lottery Permanently



We didn't get a vote on a one-year suspension on the visa lottery this week, despite all your thousands of phone calls. But we did get introduction of a new bill to permanently end the raffling off of 50,000 permanent work permits to foreign citizens each year regardless of their skills, education or whether any U.S. jobs need them.






Read the news story about the new bill. And send a fax to your U.S. Representative urging him/her to to start pushing this toward a House floor vote by co-sponsoring it.






Our NumbersUSA motto since we began in 1996 has been that we expect to lose some of the time but we always try to gain something while losing. And we always follow a setback with immediate action. Please take action now.






I regret to tell you that none of the immigration amendments on H.R. 1 (the big stop-gap spending bill) were allowed to come up for a vote. We had been promised by our contacts on the Hill that the amendments had been cleared by leadership and would get roll call votes.






I yelled a little bit at Rosemary Jenks (head of our Capitol Hill Team) when she first told me Friday that we were NOT going to get any votes (not that it was her fault). But I was so frustrated about all the work so many of you put into pushing these amendments. Now, we have no record of where these 435 Members of the House stand on these issues.






Rosemary tells me not to read too much into why House leaders could find time to have roll call votes on hundreds of amendments about other issues but not about immigration. Nonetheless, you can read some of my speculation in my Friday blog. If I'm right, the only way we are going to get votes on immigration is to double and re-double our pressure on the Members of Congress. Until the leaders of both Parties fear the voter power on this issue, they will keep punting on it.






So, did we gain anything from all your effort this week?






After discussing with my staff and thinking awhile, I have to conclude that all of your phoning and faxing this week really did advance the cause. Nearly a hundred new Members of Congress and their staffs discovered that immigration is a very hot issue that can keep the phones ringing. They have dozens of issues pressing on them. Most of the new Members are spending their first months in office trying to figure out how they can keep from taking stands on most issues. Your phone calls put them on notice that they won't be able to avoid showing their cards for very long.






It should be a lot easier to find co-sponsors for the new lottery bill now that every office has had so many phone calls from you explaining why the lottery is a terrible idea. Read my Wednesday blog for why the lottery and other immigration categories are so harmful to efforts to deal with the federal budget crisis.