Donald Trump has a new target for his criticism of the nation's immigration policies - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Trump said he wants to require employers to pay H-1B workers much more money, which he said would discourage companies from hiring them and boost job prospects for Americans. He also wants to have tech jobs offered to unemployed Americans before they can be filled by workers with H-1B visas.
"This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg's personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities," Trump wrote in his immigration plan. Rubio is also seeking the Republican nomination for president.
Zuckerberg started a public interest group called Fwd.us to push for immigration and lobbying reform along with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Neither Facebook(FB, Tech30) nor Fwd.us had an immediate comment on Trump's criticism of Zuckerberg.
Trump says that there are plenty of graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, known as STEM, to fill tech jobs. That means that employers don't need H-1B visas to fill jobs, and are using them instead to keep wages low.
Employers are supposed to pay a typical wage to anyone hired under a H-1B visa. But in reality, employees on these visas are typically paid 20 to 45% less than U.S. workers who they are are often replacing, said Ron Hira, a Howard University public policy professor who has studied the visa's pay scale.
"I don't think you should eliminate the H1-B program. The problem is it's being abused and it's a source of very cheap labor," said Hira.
WASHINGTON--The Internal Revenue Service said identity thieves' penetration of one of its computer databases was much more extensive than previously reported, with more than 300,000 taxpayer accounts potentially affected and more than 600,000 breaches attempted.
The IRS reported in May that cyber crooks used stolen Social Security numbers and other data acquired elsewhere to try to gain unauthorized access to prior-year tax return information for about 225,000 U.S. households. That included about 114,000 successful attempts and 111,000 unsuccessful ones.
On Monday, the agency said its review showed that an additional 390,000 taxpayers were potentially affected. That includes about 220,000 additional households "where there were instances of possible or potential access" to prior-year return data, the IRS said in a statement. It also includes about 170,000 additional instances of "suspected attempts that failed to clear the authentication processes," it added.
As before, the IRS said it would move immediately to notify affected taxpayers and take other steps, including offering free credit protection and special identification numbers to reduce instances of tax-refund fraud.
The breaches occurred in an online application called "Get Transcript" that allowed taxpayers to obtain prior-year return information. The system was shut down when the problems came to light.
"The IRS takes the security of taxpayer data extremely seriously, and we are working to continue to strengthen security for `Get Transcript,' including by enhancing taxpayer-identity authentication protocols," the agency said.
Weird how CNN can devote space to such nonsense from someone who served as ambassador to Hungary during Grandma’s reign of error at state and who’s reportedly a Clinton mega-donor.
In a recent opinion piece posted on CNN, Carly Fiorina launched a deeply unfair and profoundly inaccurate attack on Hillary Clinton’s record as secretary of state. Fiorina went so far as to insinuate that Hillary Clinton did not have even one single accomplishment in that role. She could not be more wrong. I should know; I served with her as U.S. ambassador to Hungary and watched her fight for the American people every day.
These are all historic achievements. But to name any one, single event of Clinton’s tenure is to overlook her most important contribution: rebuilding America’s relationships with friends, allies and partners around the world.
Weird, could’ve sworn we’ve had sanction of some kind against Iran dating back decades. But Hillary did it all by herself! And tell us, where in the world is our standing improved since 2009? How can anyone possibly write this with a straight face?
As a diplomat, she wielded the star power of one of the world’s most well-known female leaders. And finally, she had the right kind of work ethic, the right brand of wonkiness, to be embraced quickly by her 70,000 new employees at the State Department.
Now she’s in a world of trouble and under FBI criminal investigation. But she’s got star power! Weird how she totally ignores the Benghazi disaster that Mrs. Clinton still has not been held accountable for.
For three and a half years at my post in Budapest, I started my mornings reading Clinton’s daily schedule. Hillary Clinton traveled to more countries than any other secretary in the history of the department, logging nearly a million miles and visiting 112 nations.
We’ve heard this all before. You can fly a gazillion miles and still be an abject failure, like Mrs. Clinton. Sigh:
Scott Walker stood on the Soapbox in Iowa today and responded to several protesters by saying that he’s stood up to 100,000 protesters and their union bosses and he won’t be intimidated by them. Awesome!
When an NLRB director in Illinois made the decision last year to allow student athletes at Northwestern University to organize as a union it raised a lot of eyebrows. (How does one organize the labor of people who don’t get paid?) But that question has now been effectively scrapped as the full NLRB has said no to the proposal.
The National Labor Relations Board on Monday overturned a historic ruling that gave Northwestern University football players the go-head to form the nation’s first college athletes’ union, saying the prospect of union and non-union teams could throw off the competitive balance in college football.
The decision throws out a March 2014 ruling by a regional NLRB director in Chicago who said that college the football players are effectively school employees and entitled to organize. Monday’s decision did not directly address the question of whether football players are employees.
The labor dispute goes to the heart of American college sports, where universities and conferences reap billions of dollars, mostly through broadcast contracts, by relying on amateurs who are not paid. In other countries, college sports are small-time club affairs, while elite youth athletes often turn pro as teens.
From the beginning of this brouhaha I’ve felt that this was a solution in search of a problem. It seems to me that we either have to jointly decide that college athletes are amateurs or they are professionals. It’s a distinction which applies outside of colleges as well, and you can still compete in other sports at the highest levels while retaining amateur status. (The US Open in golf, for example. Also, almost all boxers start out as amateurs for a while before they can take their first professional fight.) If they are amateurs then they need to put in their time until they can turn pro. But if we are to treat college athletes as professionals who are owed some sort of compensation – particularly the football and basketball players – then the entire idea of this being a “side activity” in support of their education pretty much goes out the window.
But at the same time, it’s getting rather hard to ignore the hypocrisy inherent in the system. We’ve seen far too many stories about student athletes who graduate and receive a degree and some of them can barely read. This is something of an embarrassment for those who wind up in the NBA or the NFL, but it’s an absolute disaster for the kids who can’t make the cut and find themselves out on the streets with a sheepskin, but no skills and no ability to get a decent job outside of sports. Still, it seems like setting them up with some cash while supposedly being amateurs working on their studies compounds the problem rather than confronting it.
One last point to note is the reaction of the NLRB themselves. If they say no to unionizing somebody… it must be a really bad idea.
Joseph Schaeffer documented many major media outlets' connections to abortion giant Planned Parenthood in a Wednesday item for Crisis, an online Catholic magazine. Schaeffer, a former managing editor for The Washington Times National Weekly, spotlighted how Planned Parenthood's "surprisingly close ties to major media corporations can help explain why leading disseminators of the news in the U.S. have shown so little interest in the [fetal organ harvesting] controversy."
The writer first pointed out that "some media outlets were so brazen in their support for Planned Parenthood that they were directly listed as donors on the sites of local affiliates." Schaeffer cited how the abortion group's local affiliate in the Washington, D.C. area "listed Gannett, the owners of USA Today and several other major newspapers...as financial supporters." He continued that "as recently as 2014, the San Jose Mercury News and Yahoo, which runs the popular Yahoo News site, were listed as donors to Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo in Northern California."
Schaeffer also pointed out other major newspapers' connections to Planned Parenthood:
Discover the Networks, a website run by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, liststhe New York Times Company Foundation as a PP donor.
And while there is no evidence that new Washington Post owner Bezos is a personal donor, customers at his Amazon.com site can directly support an abortion clinic with a portion of their purchases via the Amazon Smile program.
The former editor later spent much of his article detailing how several of the abortion giant's major donors are tied to media corporations:
Beyond these overt acts of support, however, there lies a far more elaborate network of personal connections, business ties and charitable foundation links between Planned Parenthood and a stunning number of major media outlets, including all four of the major television networks.
The Ford Foundation has been a major supporter of abortion rights and Planned Parenthood for decades, with the data on its financial support of the organization running far too long to detail....
In fact, sitting on Ford's Board of Trustees at this moment is none other than Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.
The foundation has made a major effort to involve itself in U.S. media in recent years, even giving grants to the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in 2012 as part of what it called "an investment in quality journalism."
Ford also sponsored an NBC News report on "Poverty in America," as foundation "Media Officer" Barbara Raab, a former "senior newswriter for NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," proudly reports on the group's website.
Near the end of his item, Schaeffer spotlighted how "former and even current Planned Parenthood officials themselves are also currently part of the management teams at corporations that own major American media outlets." Most prominently, the "senior program officer" for the Hearst Foundations, "the charity arm of the Hearst Corporation, which owns the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle and a dizzying array of television and radio interests," once worked for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
For years, many self-professed conservatives mocked and derided Barack Obama’s two successful presidential campaigns as substanceless self-affirmations that exposed the vapidity of many in the voting public. It should be clear now that a few of those conservatives really only wanted an Obama of their own.
The genius of Obama’s image-makers was to craft a candidate with malleable policy positions just vague enough to allow the voter to project onto him their individual hopes and aspirations. Obama was whatever you wanted him to be whenever you wanted him to be it. Donald Trump is the right’s Obama, insofar as his policy preferences are ill-defined, pliable, and reflective of whatever the audience immediately before him wants them to be. Not everyone eats this act up, but those who do have access to booming microphones that create the impression they represent more than a modest plurality of the Republican primary electorate. Nevertheless, that even this small number of self-identified conservatives has become swept up in the right’s “hope and change” moment is dispiriting.
Those conservatives that continue to support Trump’s presidential bid are now doing so in spite of an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that indicates he was an orthodox liberal until only recently. Those voters who consider themselves down-the-line conservatives and cannot stomach a moment’s heresy from the 2016 field’s more accomplished Republican candidates seem perfectly comfortable embracing a figure who was once to the left of Hillary Clinton on virtually every weighty policy matter. That Trump remains impervious to this criticism suggests that his fluid policy preferences are of no interest to the 20 or 30 percent of the Republican primary voters that back him. What’s more, those who contend that Trump stands boldly athwart political correctness cannot support this contention: He has embraced PC rhetoric and emulated liberal scolds on issues related to race, gender, and identity as well as any of The New Republic’s scribes. All that matters is his enormous personality and the cult around it.
A recent dispatch from a New Hampshire campaign stop via Bloomberg’s Melinda Henneberger sheds light on this tendency. “[V]ery little of what the conservatives in the hall were going wild over could be characterized as conservative,” she noted while nevertheless adding that the rapt audience remained enthralled by the candidate’s whistle-stop ramblings. Henneberger, a keen observer of politics, seemed vexed by the fact that “many heads nod” when Trump floats proposals that were, until yesterday, traditionally liberal policy positions.
When Trump vowed to compel American automotive manufacturers to dismantle manufacturing operations in Mexico and return them to the United States, his argument was that he could make this policy manifest by sheer force of will. “This is too easy, too easy!” Trump averred. “This is a couple of phone calls.” In their hearts, Trump voters know that there are economic forces at work that would render this misguided project a bit harder than simply making a phone call, but they want to believe that the avatar of their rebellion can move mountains. They want to comfort themselves with the notion that ill-defined wreckers within the Republican firmament are working against them. They want to think that displays of resolve are sufficient to create positive “change,” however they as individuals define it. Indeed, victory for the Trump backer cannot be defined as the pursuit of traditionally conservative solutions to vexing policy problems. Conservatism is of secondary interest to the Trump supporter. All that matters now is sticking it to a variety of perceived enemies; liberals, establishment Republicans, globalization, economic integration, foreign workers, et cetera. Trump is an outlet that facilitates venting.
Deep down, the Trump backer cares little for about what comes out of the candidate’s mouth; his support is derived not from what he says but what he represents. The Republican media consultant and political professional Rick Wilson recently performed a compelling dissection of Trump’s stylistic approach to campaigning. He noted accurately that the reality television star’s methods are virtually indistinguishable from Barack Obama’s circa 2008.
“You hated Barack Obama’s cult-like followers, with their mindless stares of adoration, their impervious barrier between emotion and reason, and their instant fury when confronted with the facts about his record, his history, or his philosophy,” he wrote to Trump supporters. “You hated Obama’s shallow, facile rhetoric, with its hollow promises and loose, lowest-common-denominator word-vomit disconnected from any real policy.”
“But you love it from Trump,” Wilson added.
Wilson’s admonition was dismissed by those who needed to hear it most. As a member of the enemy class of Republican campaign consultants – a group partly responsible for electing more Republicans to state and federal office in the Obama era than at any point since the 1920s, mind you – he can be safely ignored until the revolution is complete, and its nemeses are purged for their deviationism. The salience of his observations is, however, confirmed by the hollow and emotional objections it yielded from Trump supporters.
Those on the right who have convinced themselves that there is some value in this void vessel into which they pour their discontent are sacrificing one of the most compelling arguments in opposition to Barack Obama’s administration: its self-evident incompetence. Trump’s backers have earned their anxieties — they are the product of the years of mismanagement over which this president has presided. Trump’s success, however, reveals that a significant number of conservatives do not merely seek remedy for their years of suffering; they want revenge. The right’s “hope and change” moment does differ from the one that Democrats are only just beginning to awaken from in one critical aspect: for those backing Trump, his appeal is as much aspirational as it is about score settling. And after almost seven years of “hope and change” there are a lot of scores to settle before we can “make America great again.”
Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson recently asserted that "divider-in-chief" U.S. President Barack Obama's controversial nuclear deal with Iran proves he is anti-Semitic and encouraged American citizens to demand a "better deal" from Congress.
On this week's broadcast of "Fox News Sunday," the retired neurosurgeon further elaborated on earlier comments he made criticizing Obama's decision to significantly limit Tehran's nuclear ability in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.
"Well, all you have to do, Chris, is, like I have, go to Israel, and talk to average people, on all ends of that spectrum. And I couldn't find a single person there who didn't feel that this administration had turned their back on Israel," Dr. Carson told host Chris Wallace. "And I think the position of president of [the] United States should be one where you begin to draw people together behind a vision, not one where you castigate those who believe differently from you. I think it's a possibility for great healing, if it is used in the correct way."
When asked what specifically is anti-Semitic "in what the president is saying," Carson, who is currently a top contender for the GOP nomination, responded, "I think anything is anti-Semitic that is against the survival of a state that is surrounded by enemies, and by people who want to destroy them. And to sort of ignore that, and to act like everything is normal there, and that these people are paranoid, I think that's anti-Semitic."
In an August op-ed for the Jerusalem Post titled "White House Employing Ugly Tactics to Sell a Rotten Iran Deal," Dr. Carson warned that the deal will enable $150 billion to "flow into the coffers of a rogue regime that systematically abuses the human rights of its own citizens, foments violence in the Middle East, funds terrorist proxies who have killed hundreds of American soldiers and whose leaders decry the United States as the 'Great Satan' and lead mass rallies featuring chants of 'Death to America.'"
He also criticized the Obama administration for failing to secure the release of four American hostages, including U.S. pastor Saeed Abedini, while negotiating with Iran, writing, "And let's not forget the American hostages who continue to suffer in captivity just as they did while talks proceeded apace and concluded with handshakes and smiles."
As Congress will vote next month on whether to approve or reject the deal, Dr. Carson encouraged the American people to "continue to demand a better deal with Iran that will dismantle Tehran's nuclear program and strengthen, rather than threaten, our nation's long-term security."
Dr. Carson is not the only Republican presidential hopeful to condemn the Iran deal: in a recent interview on CNN's "State of the Union," Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called such negotiations "insane."
"I think it is one of the most dangerous situations that we face, not just for the Middle East but for the rest of the world in a long time," the 2016 candidate said on Sunday.
"This is essentially arming and equipping a terrorist state," added Huckabee, who will travel to Israel this week to talk about the deal with leaders there, according to the New York Daily News. "The Iranian government is not to be trusted and we're being pushed to get into a deal that gives us nothing but gives the Iranians the capacity to ultimately end up with a nuclear weapon."
Social Security’s retirement system is like a speeding train full of happy passengers. It’s a comfy ride for the current leg of the journey. But the passengers may be clueless — or maybe don’t care — that a bridge is out just over the next rise.
Absent changes to the system, Social Security is headed into a chasm for the next generation. Baby boomers who’ve paid into the system for decades have begun drawing money out in big numbers, but there will be too few working Americans to keep the retirement fund in the black beyond 20 more years. The math just doesn’t work.
That’s the not-so-happy birthday message as Social Security celebrates its 80 anniversary this month.
The good news is that there is enough time to avert major pain if Washington takes steps early enough. It would take the kind of bipartisan bargain that the Obama White House and GOP leaders in Congress could only yak and fantasize about.
The time is now — during the 2016 presidential campaign — to lay the groundwork for that politically dicey bargain.
Some in the Republican presidential field would bring common-sense reforms to the table. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for example, say they’d gradually boost the retirement age for younger people. Christie gets specific, saying full retirement eligibility should be delayed two years. He’s specific, too, on whether wealthy people should draw from the system. Christie says no, multimillionaires with retirement income over $200,000 don’t need monthly government checks to sustain them.
It’s hard to see how Social Security solves its math problems without these kinds of bold strokes. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Ross Perot don’t need government to keep them out of poverty, which was the original intent of the Social Security system.
Meanwhile, the presidential field contains many defenders of the status quo on Social Security, both Democrat and Republican. On the GOP side, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee would build a wall around Social Security as part of sweeping tax reform. That stance is not far from the recent statement from Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton: “We don’t mess with it.”
Even less realistic was a position outlined by 71 congressional Democrats in a letter to President Barack Obama last month; they asked his support to “expand Social Security benefits for millions of Americans.” The signees were joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who’s challenging Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Nowhere did the letter say how proponents would fund more generous benefits. It’s delusional and irresponsible to ignore the math like that. The facts are these: In 1960, five workers supported every Social Security recipient. Today, it’s fewer than three. In 20 years, it’ll be about two.
The financial stress will be enormous on people in the next generation, and it’s up to today’s leaders to make sure they don’t get crushed.
The administration’s current approach to dealing with detained illegal immigrants has been characterized as “catch and release.” It is an apt term. In fishing, “catch and release” is designed to preserve a population, and that is precisely what the Obama Administration’s border policies are doing in the American pond—preserving a population of dangerous, deported individuals with a criminal history who re-enter the United States illegally.
The “catch and release” approach undercuts the rule of law, and it ensures taxpayers’ money and safety will be sacrificed for a border immigration.
- Nelson Balido
Late last year, a leaked Department of Homeland Security documentrevealed that there are 176,000 illegal immigrants in the United States who were convicted in a court of law, lawfully deported from the United States and then returned. In addition to those proven criminals are those who go on to commit crimes after their premature release. As reported in April this year, Jonny Alberto Enamorado-Vasquez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, was released from detention for “lack of space” and is now in a Houston jail on homicide charges. Jalmar Mejia-Lopez, initially booked as a 17-year-old when he crossed into the United States illegally, has been charged with aggravated rape for impregnating his 12-year-old girlfriend.
The Obama Administration is pushing for faster clearing of detention centers, ignoring rule of law in lieu of more expedient dictatorial direction. In some cases, the Administration’s approach ensures dangerous criminals never even reach federal custody. Take the Obama Administration’s Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), for example, which replaced the Bush-era Secure Communities program. PEP ties Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents’ hands, limiting collaboration with state and local law enforcement while severely restricting when they can take custody of an illegal immigrant with a criminal conviction.
Such a blunt, limiting approach to a complex situation is not only illegal but may also reignite the massive influx of people streaming across the border who believe (perhaps correctly) that weak U.S. immigration enforcement will allow them to dodge U.S. law and find residency. In 2014, more than 60,000 families poured into the United States from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and elsewhere. That tsunami of illegal immigration has subsided to a raging river, but it could surge again at any point.
Meanwhile, unilateral direction from the White House sends the wrong message to the dedicated Americans risking their lives on the border. Giving credit where due, the Border Patrol is working hard to better monitor the border and stop people who sneak into the United States. But there are laws on the books they are sworn to follow. If detention facilities are forcibly emptied before investigative and immigration workers have completed their processing protocols, what does that tell the Border Patrol or ICE agent who signed up to enforce the law, not circumvent it?
Most concerning about the Administration’s “catch and release” approach is that it puts millions of Americans in danger, particularly those in the Hispanic community. Many criminal immigrants flock to sanctuary cities, which, by local law or tradition, shelter illegal immigrants. Yet, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 75% of former prisoners in 30 states are arrested within 5 years of their release. It takes little deduction to recognize that creating a safe-haven for criminals jeopardizes the community in which they live, which in a sanctuary city may well be largely Hispanic.
Recently, Sen. Cruz (R-TX) held a hearing examining the number of illegal immigrants who are convicted of crimes and then return to our streets. Sen. Cruz explained that in 2013, 104,000 convicted criminals were released, since the Obama administration has refused to deport 68K criminals, required by federal law, and has also released 36,000 with criminal records who were in deportation hearings in 2013.
The hearing also included testimony from families of recent victims of illegal criminal violence:
In January, Grant Ronnebeck was shot while clerking at a convenience store.
In the fall, Michael Davis, Jr. and Danny Oliver, Sacramento law enforcement officers, were killed as they tried to protect residents.
In July, Kate Steinle was shot on Pier 14 in San Francisco.
Kate’s father, Jim Steinle, summed up the injustice many now endure: "Unfortunately due to disjointed laws, and basic incompetence on many levels, the U.S. has suffered a self-inflicted wound in the murder of our daughter by the hand of a person that should have never been on the streets of this country.”
Sens. Cruz and Session have each introduced measures to curb this crime. Sen. Cruz’s legislation, named “Kate’s Law” in her honor, establishes a five-year minimum sentence for anyone who illegally reenters the country.
Flinging open the detention doors for illegal immigrants to waltz freely into America without precisely following laws for detention, processing and deportation presents enormous threats. Many of our immigration woes lead right back to an Administration that views its authority as superseding legislation. But laws are not laws if they can be ignored because their implementation is too hard or sometimes unpalatable. The “catch and release” approach undercuts the rule of law, and it ensures taxpayers’ money and safety will be sacrificed for a border immigration
Nelson Balido is the managing principal at Balido and Associates, chairman of the Border Commerce and Security Council, and former member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Follow him on Twitter: @nelsonbalido
State Department officials have uncovered thousands of emails between Philippe Reines, a top Hillary Clinton aide, and members of the media, they previously said did not exist.
In a court filing last Thursday, the State Department estimated that a recent search turned up more than 81,000 emails from Reines’s official account while at the State Department. And 17,855 potentially fall within a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Gawker earlier this year.
That is a reversal from 2013, when the State Department said a thorough search turned up no responsive records for Gawker’s request. In 2012, Gawker requested all emails between Reines and reporters from 34 media outlets.
The State Department did not explain the reversal in the court document, nor did it return a request for comment.
It will begin releasing a tranche of Reines's emails by the end of September.
After it was revealed earlier this year that Clinton, and potentially some of her aides, used personal email accounts for official business, Gawker sued the State Department over its initial request for communications between Reines and reporters.
Gawker asserted the search must not have been exhaustive if it turned up no emails between the press and a State Department spokesman, who regularly communicated with the media.
In March, Reines said reporters would have to ask the State Department about the apparent discrepancy.
In last week’s court filing, the State Department estimated it would begin releasing some of those emails that do not fall within an exemption on Sept. 30. It will release more every 30 days as they are reviewed.
The agency said it does not know how many of the 17,855 are exempt from disclosure and will have to be redacted or handed over to other agencies for redaction. It said it is willing to negotiate with Gawker to narrow the scope of the request.
The emails at issue from Reines’s official State Department account are separate from the 20 boxes of emails from his personal account that he handed over to the State Department last month, related to the controversy about Clinton’s use of a private email account and server.
argued that GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s position paper on immigration is “bold,” “strong,” and “positive,” although he added, “I’d like to plug a couple more things in there” on Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day.”
King said, “Well, when I read through that document, in the end, I thought it’s a very, very positive document. It’s bold. It’s strong. It’s broad. It covers most of the things that you’d want to cover. I’d like to plug a couple more things in there.”
He continued, “But with regard to birthright citizenship, for example, it is — has constitutional underpinnings, yes, but the way you start that is, as you pass the legislation that puts an end to birthright citizenship, I happen to be the author of that legislation. And then it will be litigated, there isn’t any doubt about it, but there’s a clause in there thatsays, ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ ‘All persons born [or naturalized] in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ are American citizens, and — or are United States citizens, to be more technically correct. So, we have to start the legislation, I think it’s constitutionally sound to pass the legislation, and end birthright citizenship. There aren’t very many countries in the world that have that policy. But I was curious, for some time, about how Donald Trump would get Mexico to pay for the wall. As you know, I’ve advocated for a long time for a fence — a wall and a fence on the southern border. I’m optimistic about this. I think the tactics that he uses are legitimate, and he’ll use more leverage in that. … I think that he can get to that place, but whether they do or whether they don’t pay for the wall, as he says in his document, the cost of that wall pales in comparison to the cost of not building it.”
King was then asked why he isn’t pushing for criminal sanctions for employers who hire illegal immigrants. He answered, “I’m supportive of doing those things. The reason we haven’t pushed this harder in the last six and a half years is because, there’s no way that one can imagine that this administration is going to enforce any of that. I mean, they’ve gone to court to block local jurisdictions from even mirroring federal immigration law, let alone…how they’re accepting sanctuary cities, which I’m grateful that Donald Trump has in his document, he’s going to end that.” And “if you’re going to punish and fine employers, you have to have a Justice Department and an Obama [administration] — a presidential administration that’ll follow through. I would do that. But I think I have a better idea, and I was hopeful that it would be in this document. There’s room for it within the language that’s there, it’s not specified, it’s called the New IDEA Act. And that’s a piece of legislation that I offered, several cycles ago, that does this. It brings the IRS into play, and it tell — and it says this, ‘If you’re an employer, and you use E-Verify, you get safe harbor for those that you hire. But, you cannot be left the wages and benefits paid to illegals under this legislation.’ And so, the IRS would go through, under a normal audit of a business, and they would run the Social Security numbers of the employees through. If E-Verify kicks them out, and says, ‘Sorry, they can’t work in the United States,’ then the employer would lose his business deduction. So, your $10 an hour illegal, after there’s interest, penalty, and taxes charged on that, becomes a $16 an hour illegal. And we would — and there’s a six year statute of limitations on it. So, we would clean up this workforce, and we’d do so with the IRS. And we require the IRS to cooperate with the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security. I know that’s within the — I’ll say within the list of things that Donald Trump would be looking at to support, but I don’t — but it’s not in the document. So, that’s what I would do. I think it’s actually — it enhances our revenue stream. It’s a — it would score out a plus by billions of dollars, and clean up our workforce.”
King concluded, “There’s something he’s tapped into here, and we — nobody knows how long this’ll last. We’ve never seen anything like this before, but he has tapped into the discontent in America, the malaise within America, the people who are fed up. They’re fed up with political correctness, they’re fed up with the disrespect for the rule of law, they’re fed up with the dilution of Americanism, and they want cultural continuity, they want English as the official language, they want free enterprise to be something we can proud of again, and they want to be done with an administration that’s been punishing big business. It’s important for all business to be profitable. That’s the engine that drives the freedom that we have. And there’s a robust America there, that needs to be tapped into. And that’s why I think he’s got the support he has, and why that helicopter landed a little ways away from me the other day.”
revealed that there are 176,000 illegal immigrants in the United States who were convicted in a court of law, lawfully deported from the United States and then returned. In addition to those proven criminals are those who go on to commit crimes after their premature release. As reported in April this year, Jonny Alberto Enamorado-Vasquez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, 
