John Cornyn: “the amendment Senator Kennedy is proposing guts the worker protection amendment agreed to by the Senate yesterday. It…”

“the amendment Senator Kennedy is proposing guts the worker protection amendment agreed to by the Senate yesterday. It would do so by allowing workers to self-petition for legal permanent residency if they produce some documents which might indicate they are currently employed, but they will be necessarily retrospective in nature. In other words, you do not have a document necessarily that shows you are employed today or will be employed tomorrow. You may have a pay stub from the last week or the last month. So there is no way to determine whether the individuals who are self-petitioning, under this proposal by the Senator from Massachusetts, are actually going to be working. No. 2, if they are working, there is no protection for American workers--first, that the Secretary of Labor certify that there were no sufficient U.S. workers willing, able, and qualified to perform those jobs. If the proponents of this bill are serious when they say that certain provisions are needed because immigrants will do work that Americans won't do, then they should support the amendment agreed to yesterday and vote against the amendment that has been proposed this morning. President Bush, again, has said the concept of a temporary worker program is to provide additional legal workforce for jobs that there are not enough Americans to perform. Yet this proposed amendment simply sidesteps that requirement entirely.…”