Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act--Continued--

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, let me congratulate the Gang of 8 for their assiduous work on this immigration bill, as well as Senator Pat Leahy, the chairman of the committee, for doing a lot of good work.

There is much in this bill I support. I support the pathway to citizenship. I support the DREAM Act. I support providing legal status to the foreign workers who are working in agriculture. We have to have strong border security. I support that effort.

Let me tell my colleagues what I do not support. What I do not support is that at a time when nearly 14 percent of Americans do not have a full-time job, at a time when youth unemployment is somewhere around 16 percent and kids from California to Maine are desperately seeking employment, I do not support the huge expansion in the guest worker program that will allow hundreds of thousands of entry-level guest workers to come into this country.

This is important for at least two reasons. We have kids all over America who are wondering how they are going to afford to be able to go to college. Many of these young people are going out looking for summer jobs, looking for part-time jobs in order to help them pay for college. That is terribly important. We should not pass legislation which makes it harder for young people to get jobs in order to put away a few bucks to help pay for college.

Then there is another group of people, and those are young people whom we don't talk about enough. Not everybody in America is going to college. There are millions of young people who graduate high school and want to go out and start their careers and make some money and move up the ladder. There are others who have dropped out of high school. We cannot turn our backs on those young people. They need jobs as well. If young people--young high school graduates, for example--are unable to find entry-level jobs, how will they ever be able to develop the skills, the experience, and the confidence they need to break into the job market? And if they don't get those skills--if they don't get those jobs and that income--there is a very strong possibility they may end up in antisocial or self-destructive activities.

Right now, on street corners all over this country, there are kids who have nothing to do. And what are they doing when they stand on street corners? What they are doing is getting into drugs, they are getting into crime, they are getting into self-destructive activity. We already have too many young people in this country using drugs. We already have too many young people involved in criminal activity. As a nation, we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth, including China. Let's put our young people into jobs, not into jails.

As I have heard on this floor time and time again, the best antipoverty program is a paycheck. Well, let's give the young people of this country a paycheck. Let's put them to work. Let's give them at least the entry-level jobs they need in order to earn some income today, but even more importantly, let's allow them to gain the job skills they need so they know what an honest day's work is about and can move up the economic ladder and get better jobs in the future.

At a time when poverty in this country remains at an almost 50-year high, and when unemployment among young people is extremely high, I worry deeply that we are creating a permanent underclass--a large number of people who are poorly educated and who have limited or no job skills. This is an issue we must address and must address now. Either we make a serious effort to find jobs for our young people now or we are going to pay later in terms of increased crime and the cost of incarceration.

Now, why is this issue of youth unemployment relevant to the debate we are having on immigration reform? The answer is obvious to anyone who has read the bill. This immigration reform legislation increases youth unemployment by bringing into this country, through the J-1 program and the H-2B program, hundreds of thousands of low-skilled, entry-level workers who are taking the jobs young Americans need. At a time when youth unemployment in this country is over 16 percent and the teen unemployment rate is over 25 percent, many of the jobs that used to be done by young Americans are now being performed by foreign college students through the J-1 summer work travel program.

Other entry-level foreign workers come into this country through the H-2B guest worker program. We have heard a lot of discussion about high-tech workers and how they can create jobs and all that. That is an issue for another discussion. Right now, what we are talking about is hundreds of thousands of foreign workers coming into this country not to do great scientific work, not as great entrepreneurs to start businesses, not as Ph.D. engineers, but as waiters and waitresses, kitchen help, lifeguards, front desk workers at hotels and resorts, ski instructors, cooks, chefs, chambermaids, landscapers, parking lot attendants, cashiers, security guards, and many other entry-level jobs.

Does it really make sense to anyone when so many of our kids are desperately looking for a way to earn an honest living that we say to those kids: Sorry, you have to get to the back of the line because we are bringing in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to do the jobs you can do tomorrow?

The J-1 program for foreign college students is supposed to be used as a cultural exchange program--a program to bring young people into this country to learn about our customs and to support international cooperation and understanding. That is why it is administered by the State Department. But instead of doing that, this J-1 program has morphed into a low-wage jobs program to allow corporations such as McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, Disney World, Hershey's, and many other major resorts around the country to replace American workers with cheap labor from overseas.

Each and every year companies from all over this country are hiring more than 100,000 foreign college

students in low-wage jobs through the J-1 summer work travel program. Unlike other guest worker programs, the J-1 program does not even require businesses to recruit or advertise for American workers. What they can do is pay minimum wage. They don't have to advertise for American workers. And guess what. For the foreign worker, they do not have to pay Social Security tax, they don't have to pay Medicare tax, and they don't have to pay unemployment tax. So, essentially, we are creating a situation where it is absolutely advantageous for an employer to hire a foreign worker rather than an American worker.

So what I have done is introduced two pieces of legislation to address this
issue. No. 1 basically says while I strongly support cultural programs--bringing young people here from abroad is a great idea--at this moment, with high unemployment, we cannot have those people competing with young Americans for a scarce number of jobs. So we eliminate the employment element of the J-1 program.

The second bill says if we can't do that--and I hope we can--at the very least we need a jobs program for American kids, not just a summer jobs program but a yearlong jobs program. Let's not turn our backs on kids who want to get into the labor market, who want to develop a career. They need something in the summertime, they need something year round, and we have introduced legislation to do just that.

My time has expired. I yield my time, if he wants it, to Senator Grassley.

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