About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Senator Tom Cotton's Constitution Day Celebration Speech

Tom Cotton official Senate photo.jpg 
 
Thanks to Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn for sending the October issue of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College with over 3,700,000 readers per month – this edition of Imprimis is adapted from a speech given by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (photo above) on September 18 in Washington, D.C., @ Hillsdale's Eight Annual Constitution Day Celebration. 
 
Student's of the Constitution are well aware that this past September 17 marked the 230th anniversary when the Constitution was unanimously passed by all the states represented @ the Constitutional Convention thereby starting the ratification process that made the Constitution the supreme law of the land – one of the greatest gifts God ever gave to man.
 
The speaker @ the above mentioned Hillsdale College event, Tom Cotton, was elected by the voters of Arkansas to the U.S. Senate in 2014 where he serves on the Senate Banking Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, & the Senate Armed Services Committee.  In 2005 Cotton enlisted in the U.S. Army but did not pursue a commission as an officer @ the rank of Captain in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the U.S. Army that someone of his education would normally aspire to; instead he pursued a route with his recruiter that guaranteed his enrollment in Officer Candidate School after which as an Army officer he deployed to Iraq with the 101st Airborne & to Afghanistan with a Provincial Reconstruction Team.  His military decorations include the Bronze Star Medal, Combat Infantry Badge, & Ranger Tab.
 
In short, Senator Cotton is a good guy as the following excerpts from his Constitution Day Celebration speech indicate: 
 
1.  Citizenship is the most cherished thing our nation can bestow. Our governing class ought to treat it as something special. We ought to put the interests of our citizens first and welcome those foreigners best prepared to handle the duties of citizenship and contribute positively to our country.
 
2.  The word naturalization implies a process by which foreigners can renounce their former allegiances and become citizens of the United States. They can cast off what accident and force have thrust upon them—race, class, ethnicity—and take on, by reflection and choice, a new title: American.
 
3.  Government now takes nearly half of every dollar we earn and bosses us around in every aspect of life, yet can't deliver basic services well. Our working class—the "forgotten man," to use the phrase favored by Ronald Reagan and FDR—has seen its wages stagnate, while the four richest counties in America are inside the Washington Beltway.
 
4.   For years, all Democrats and many Republicans have agreed on the outline of what's commonly called "comprehensive immigration reform," which is Washington code for amnesty, mass immigration, and open borders in perpetuity.
 
This approach was embodied most recently in the so-called Gang of Eight bill in 2013. It passed the Senate, but thankfully we killed it in the House (where Cotton served for one two- year term), which I consider among my chief accomplishments in Congress so far. Two members of the Gang of Eight ran for my party's nomination for president last year. Neither won a single statewide primary. Donald Trump denounced the bill, and he won the nomination.
 
Likewise, Hillary Clinton campaigned not just for mass immigration, but also on a policy of no deportations of anyone, ever, who is illegally present in our country. She also accused her opponent of racism and xenophobia. Yet Donald Trump beat her by winning states that no Republican had won since the 1980s.
 
5.  While we wish our fellow man well, it's only our fellow citizens to whom we have a duty and whose rights our government was created to protect. And among the highest obligations we owe to each other is to ensure that every working American can lead a dignified life. If you look across our history, I'd argue that's always been the purpose of our immigration system: to create conditions in which normal, hard-working Americans can thrive.
 
Look no further than what James Madison said on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1790, when the very first Congress was debating our very first naturalization law. He said, "It is no doubt very desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us, and throw their fortunes into a common lot with ours."  "The worthy part," not the entire world. Madison continued, "But why is this desirable? Not merely to swell the catalogue of people. No, sir, it is to increase the wealth and strength of the community."
 
"To increase the wealth and strength of the community." That's quite a contrast to today's elite consensus. Our immigration system shouldn't exist to serve the interests of foreigners or wealthy Americans. No, it ought to benefit working Americans and serve the national interest—that's the purpose of immigration and the theme of the story of American immigration.
 
6.  The economy we're living in today is in no small part a result of the 1965 Act, which opened the door to mass immigration of unskilled and low-skilled workers, primarily through unlimited family chain migration. And that's not an economy anyone should be satisfied with.
 
Today, we have about a million immigrants per year. That's like adding the population of Montana every year—or the population of Arkansas every three years. But only one in 15—one in 15 of those millions of immigrants—comes here for employment-based reasons. The vast majority come here simply because they happen to be related to someone already here. That's why, for example, we have more Somalia-born residents than Australia-born residents, even though Australia is nearly twice the size of Somalia and Australians are better prepared, as a general matter, to integrate and assimilate into the American way of life.
 
In sum, over 36 million immigrants, or 94 percent of the total, have come to America over the last 50 years for reasons having nothing to do with employment. And that's to say nothing of the over 24 million illegal immigrants who have come here. Put them together and you have 60 million immigrants, legal and illegal, who did not come to this country because of a job offer or because of their skills. That's like adding almost the entire population of the United Kingdom. And this is still leaving aside the millions of temporary guest workers who we import every year into our country.
 
7.  Unlike many open-border zealots, I don't believe the law of supply and demand is magically repealed for the labor markets. That means that our immigration system has been depressing wages for people who work with their hands and on their feet. Wages for Americans with high school diplomas are down two percent since the late 1970s. For Americans who didn't finish high school, they're down by a staggering 17 percent. Although immigration has a minimal effect overall on the wages of Americans, it has a severe negative effect on low-skilled workers, minorities, and even recent immigrants.
 
Is automation to blame in part? Sure. Globalized trade? Yes, of course. But there's no denying that a steady supply of cheap, unskilled labor has hurt working-class wages as well. Among those three factors, immigration policy is the one that we can control most easily for the benefit of American workers. Yet we've done the opposite.
 
I know the response of open-border enthusiasts: they plead that we need a steady supply of cheap unskilled labor because there are "jobs that no American will do." But that just isn't so. There is no job Americans won't do. In fact, there's no industry in America in which the majority of workers are not natural-born Americans—not landscapers, not construction workers, not ski instructors, not lifeguards, not resort workers, not childcare workers—not a single job that over-educated elites associate with immigrants. The simple fact is, if the wage is decent and the employer obeys the law, Americans will do any job. And for tough, dangerous, and physically demanding jobs, maybe working folks do deserve a bit of a raise.
 
8.  But the harmful impact on blue-collar workers isn't the only problem with the current system. Because we give two-thirds of our green cards to relatives of people here, there are huge backlogs in the system. This forces highly talented immigrants to wait in line for years behind applicants whose only claim to naturalization is a random family connection to someone who happened to get here years ago. We therefore lose out on the very best talent coming into our country—the ultra-high-skilled immigrants who can come to America, stand on their own two feet, pay taxes, and through their entrepreneurial spirit and innovation create more and higher-paying jobs for our citizens.
 
To put it simply, we have an immigration system that is badly failing Madison's test of increasing the wealth and strength of the community. It might work to the advantage of a favored few, but not for the common good, and especially not the good of working-class Americans.
 
This is why I've introduced legislation to fix our naturalization system. It's called the RAISE Act: Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy.
 
The RAISE Act will correct the flaws in the 1965 Act by reorienting our immigration system towards foreigners who have the most to contribute to our country. It would create a skills-based points system similar to Canada's and Australia's. Here's how it would work. When people apply to immigrate, they'd be given an easy-to-calculate score, on a scale of 0 to 100, based on their education, age, job salary, investment ability, English-language skills, and any extraordinary achievements. Then, twice a year, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would invite the top scorers to complete their applications, and it would invite enough high-scoring applicants to fill the current 140,000 annual employment-based green-card slots.
 
We'd still admit spouses and unmarried minor children of citizens and legal permanent residents. But we'd end the preferences for most extended and adult family members—no more unlimited chain migration. We'd also eliminate the so-called diversity visa lottery, which hands out green cards randomly without regard to skills or family connections, and which is plagued by fraud. We'd remove per-country caps on immigration, too, so that high-skilled applicants aren't shut out of the process simply because of their country of origin. And finally, we'd cap the number of refugees offered permanent residency to 50,000 per year, in line with the recent average for the Bush era and most of the Obama era—and still quite generous.
 
Add it all up and our annual immigrant pool would be younger, higher-skilled, and ready to contribute to our economy without using welfare, as more than half of immigrant households do today. No longer would we distribute green cards essentially based on random chance. Nor would we import millions of unskilled workers to take jobs from blue-collar Americans and undercut their wages. And over a ten-year period, our annual immigration levels would decrease by half, gradually returning to historical norms.
 

3 comments:

  1. I totally agree with Senator Cotton's assertion that " Citizenship is the most cherished thing our nation can bestow".
    Accepting immigrants and Citizenship for immigrants should both include a desire from immigrants to assimilate with our core values, adherence to our Constitution, and strong prospects of contributing to our economic growth.

    So then why do we have sanctuary cities and states? My new NJ elected governor stated NJ would become a sanctuary state.

    We need to identify the root driver for sanctuaries for illegal aliens. It is for the Elite Left obsession with control and power at virtually any cost. More illegals increase pool of current and future voters and voter fraud. They also drain our Treasuries and debt and increase odds of toppling whatever today remains of a partial capitalist system. The Elite Left are Marxist, Socialist, or Communist. All 3 are essentially the same. Fundamentally transforming the US is their goal.

    This is so clear, right in front of us. It angers me when I hear a journalist ask a conservative politician about the reasons for Elite Left immigration policy and the politician may say it may be due to guilt feelings.

    Guilt? Really?

    The Elite Left purposely ignores any guilt feelings that interfere with their drive for Marxism.

    How can the Elite Left feel any guilt when they:

    Support NFL players disrespecting the flag

    Are totally against 1st Amendment

    Trash Christians while apologizing for Sharia Muslims that kill gays while the Elite Left champions Gays for their votes

    Become apoplectic whenever
    a conservative attempts to speak at a college

    Apoplectic whenever Christians peacefully place mangers with Jesus, Mary, Joseph in public square

    Apoplectic whenever school athletes from both teams gather to pray together after games and pass laws disallowing head coaches to join them

    Apoplectic whenever anyone disagrees with them, totally against honest debate

    We can go on and on ... Americans must not stick their heads in the sand and get their asses kicked as a result. No violence please. Key point is that we must identify Clearly what the problem is before planning how to resolve it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So how do we resolve this?

    Get the word out to friends and neighbors.
    Tweet tweet tweet. Twitter is great at expanding solutions rapidly and broadly
    Especially tweet high profile politicians, economists, globalists, academics of the root cause of this problem.
    In your communication, argue that our immigration policy harms all Americans on multiple fronts. This includes economically and safety wise. No nation has as borderless immigration policy as the US. Immigration should improve our nation economically. We should not accept immigrants unless they clearly profess they champion our core values and culture

    Most of our immigration laws are sound. However, many are not enforced. And some that try to be enforced are thwarted by Elite Left judges, mayors, and governors.

    A nation's core #1 responsibility is to protect their citizens. The Elite Left fails miserably in this regard and must be called out in their plans for a stealth coup supplanting our constitutional democracy with an authoritarian Marxist regime.

    Call out the Elite Left on their hypocrisy and then champion traditional American principles such as free speech, free markets, equal justice for all, and above all our constitution.

    ReplyDelete
  3. For the record, my parents were Polish and Lithuanian prisoners of war via Nazi Germany. They came to the US pursuing traditional American values, joining few of their relatives in NJ. The US choice was clear after learning of the Communism that enveloped their native countries. They loved the US dearly, were devout Christians and extended that mind set to me, gifts I am most thankful for. They came to the US the right way for the right reasons and the US greatly benefited from them and similar immigrants who worked hard and became proud citizens. Yes- immigrants made this country greater, at a time when the US was very careful who to admit, in order to protect the safety and economics of its citizens.

    ReplyDelete