From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA Date: Monday 19DEC05 4 p.m. EST All of Specter's massive immigration increases stripped from just-passed Budget Bill CONGRATULATIONS AGAIN. House passed Budget Reconciliation bill with NONE of Sen. Specter's 350,000-a-year immigration increase! You will recall that all during November and early December, we were coming to you regularly to ask you to fight Sen. Specter (R-PA) and his at-first sneak effort to add this massive increase in foreign workers in the budget bill. You all sent thousands of faxes and made hundreds of phone calls to try to stop Specter's assault in the Senate Judiciary Committee. We lost. We told you to keep fighting. We then influenced Sen. Byrd (D-WV) to introduce an amendment on the floor of the Senate to strip out the outlandish Specter increases. You sent thousands of faxes and made hundreds of phone calls. We lost overwhelmingly. We told you to keep fighting. You sent TENS OF THOUSANDS FAXES and made thousands of phone calls to influence the Conference Committee process of resolving the terrible Senate bill with the benign House bill. And then we alerted you that our inside sources had tipped us off that House leaders were thinking seriously about letting ALL of the Specter increases to stay in the final bill in exchange for other matters entirely. You made even more phone calls. WE WON! The 350,000 permanent green cards for foreign workers and their families have been erased. The 30,000 extra H-1B temporary visas for high-tech workers have been erased. You created a climate on Capitol Hill that told people reading the political tea leaves that this was just not the time to pick a fight with the American people. Thanks to all of you who never gave up .... who took defeat after defeat and kept trying. As we told you earlier, Specter's efforts were facilitated by one of his staffers who has a close relationship with a Microsoft lobbyist. The massive increases were the work of Microsoft and its nearly endless supply of money to undermine American workers. But I told you repeatedly that collectively you all truly can and do have more power than Microsoft and more power than all of Bill Gates' dreams of a global workforce in which all Americans have to bid for American jobs in competition with all the rest of the world's workers.
