Senate stimulus plan would provide jobs for up to 300,000 illegal aliens

The U.S. Senate is always looking out for you, provided that you want billions of dollars from the stimulus plan to be spent giving a paycheck to illegal aliens. See this for the details from Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation:

The Senate stimulus bill would provide roughly $104 billion in funding for a variety of construction projects including highways, schools, and renovation of public housing. This funding will be spread over five to seven years. Normal government estimates indicate that each $1 billion spent on construction will create around 19,500 construction jobs, each lasting a year.[2] Thus $104 billion in funding in construction projects would ostensibly create construction-related jobs for about 2.04 million workers over several years. Without specific mechanisms to ensure that workers are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants authorized to work, it is likely that 15 percent of these workers, or 300,000, would be illegal immigrants.

It would actually probably be a bit less than 15%, since most illegal aliens are employed in the low-skill side of home construction, rather than the higher-skilled heavy construction that most of that money would (apparently) go towards. However, it would still be a significant figure, and have no doubt that the Mexican government would be more than willing to send even more of their citizens here in order to take advantage of any weaknesses in the plan.

Note that the House version included language designed to block illegal aliens from being employed with stimulus funds by requiring those obtaining such funds to use eVerify. That language is missing from the Senate version, but even the language in the House version might have loopholes.

Wed, 02/04/2009 - 20:36 · Importance: 9