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Endless effort to describe illegal aliens as “immigrants” 

The  leftist AJC put out a story this week on the retirement of Karen Bremer, president and CEO of the Georgia Restaurant Association and managed to omit an important component of Bremer’s agenda while misleading (yet again) readers on “immigrants” and immigration law. So..not much new here.

You can read it for yourself on the bottom but the part I refer to is midway through the piece in which the reporter, Yvonne Zusel and/or her editors describes Bremmer’s “restaurant advocacy” and “a federal worker visa program and a path to citizenship for immigrants who had been in the country for a long time.”

Here I need to interject my own knowledge of that advocacy. Karen Bremer led the business lobby’s anti-enforcement charge in 2011 against passage of HB 87 because of the obvious effects it would have on blackmarket labor that her industry uses.

I’ll stop here for any doubters and offer up a quote from the 2010 version of the New York Times with a quote from “a Manhattan chef and restaurateur who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he does not want to draw attention to his TriBeCa restaurant.

“Out of a total of about 12.7 million workers in the restaurant industry, an estimated 1.4 million — both legal and illegal immigrants — are foreign born, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to 2008 estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, about 20 percent of the nearly 2.6 million chefs, head cooks and cooks are illegal immigrants. Among the 360,000 dishwashers, 28 percent are undocumented, according to the estimates.

Those numbers sounded low to a Manhattan chef and restaurateur who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he does not want to draw attention to his TriBeCa restaurant.

“We always, always hire the undocumented workers,” he said. “It’s not just me, it’s everybody in the industry. First, they are willing to do the work. Second, they are willing to learn. Third, they are not paid as well. It’s an economic decision. It’s less expensive to hire an undocumented person.”

You can read that entire NY Times report at “Immigration Crackdown Steps Into the Kitchen.”

Back to Bremer and the the subtle but constant misdirection in the AJC agenda. Bremmer was determined to stop HB 87, the”Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011” largely because of the E-Verify requirement for private employers component. Our goal was to make Georgia as inhospitable to illegal employenmtj as possible. The bill eventually passed with a mandate that private employers with more than ten employees must swear they are using E-Verify. That would be the no cost, online, federal database that verifies work eligibility of newly hired employees.

Bremer and her accomplices at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce concocted and distributed objections to the bill that included the goop that it would somehow cost E-Verify users $128.00 per employee to use.They sent out a letter to GRA members begging for action aimed at killing the bill – or at least removal of the E-Verify component. They failed. We archived that letter here.

But that is not what the AJC reported. According to the AJC editors, Bremer had “…dabbled in restaurant advocacy years earlier as part of the Georgia Hospitality and Travel Association, and also had worked in the early 2000s on pushing for a federal worker visa program and a path to citizenship for immigrants who had been in the country for a long time.”

 

 

 

 

On the “pushing for a federal visa program” point, the fact is that the U.S. has multiple guest worker visa programs in place.

On the latter reference the AJC makes it appear that “immigrants” don’t already have a path to citizenship. They do. The truth is that legal immigrants (green card holders -aka – LPRs) can become U.S. citizens after they have lived in the U.S. for five years. General eligibility points here from the feds. We suspect Bremer was pushing for one of the many failed congressional amnesty schemes ( my own absolute favorite here) that would have put millions of illegal aliens in a legalized condition that allowed them to have the same privilege.

• Related: See here and here for just two examples of the countless times the AJC editors have pulled the shameless “illegal aliens are immigrants” switcheroo on readers.

Read it yourself:

The Atlanta Journal Constitution, September, 24, 2023

Retiring Georgia Restaurant Association chief optimistic about industry’s future – here.

 

The pro-amnesty LIBRE Initiative – a project of Americans for Prosperity (AFP)

Former Republican state Rep David Casas is Director of Grassroots Operations LIBRE Initiative – Georgia. See Casas bio on Ballotpedia. 

* UPDATE: Sign up here to attend the LIBRE Initiative Georgia “yes to amnesty” event. Don’t miss the terms and conditions for attendance. 

**UPDATE AGAIN: It seems that a group in Washington D.C. (since 1995) calling itself “America’s Future” is proud to be cohost (?) of the LIBRE-Georgia event.

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David Casas Lobbies for the LIBRE Initiative Corporation. Below is a short version of what Casas pushed during the last state legislative session.

HB 120 – 2021/2022 attempt to change GA law so that illegal aliens could access much lower instate tuition rates in taxpayer-funded colleges than Americans and legal immigrants from other states. HB 120 was a hustle in that the first two versions (of three) did not actually contain the “DACA” language the sponsor, Rep Kasey Carpenter (R), told the House was in it. BTW: DACA recipients are illegal aliens. See written testimony from a retired senior INS/Border Patrol agent. The management at Libre GA knew all of this. So did the legislators who voted the bill out of committee. HB 120 was stopped before it could see a floor vote.

See the House video of David Casas lobbying for HB 120.

• Related (with video): David Casas, Director of Grassroots Operations for The LIBRE Initiative Georgia on Univision: “Immigration reform (amnesty) will come from an effort of the people.”

 HB 60 (see also HB 999) – 2021/2022 Legislation labeled “school choice!” from Rep Wes Cantrell (R) that would have provided a small fraction of Georgia K-12 students with a taxpayer-funded “Promise Scholarship” to attend private schools. The bills would have created accounts for parents to pay schools with state funds and put parents on an oversight committee to decide eligible expenses. The original language did not exclude or mention the 400K-ish illegal aliens in Georgia. The amended versions contained language that was sold as excluding illegal aliens. It didn’t. See here for more info. The bills would have created a scenario in which private school tuition was funded for some illegal aliens while some American students were left out.

Video of LIBRE Georgia’s David Casas lobbying for HB 60 here.

SB 601 – 2022 – From the same people who designed HB 60/HB 999. Senator Butch Miller (R). sponsor. The bill did not contain a real tool to exclude illegal alien students or parents/families. The bill made it all the way from the hopper to the Senate floor in twelve days. The Senate Higher Education Committee Chairman, Sen Chuck Payne (R), did not allow any public comment. The bill would have created a scenario in which private school tuition was funded for some illegal aliens while some American students were left out. See the statement of support from Libre GA spokesman David Casas here.

After we made it clear that we had spread the word on the contents regarding illegal immigration, the bill was voted down on the floor 29-20.

• Related: (with video) LIBRE Initiative Georgia’s David Casas on Univision for the 10-year anniversary of Obama’s illegal DACA scam.

 * More video: David Casas on Univision peddles a repeat of the failed 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens while Biden administration operates an open border to the world. Follow the money. Like the Chamber of Commerce, Casas is pushing additional foreign labor in the U.S.

• A March, 2022 post with more on David Casas, the LIBRE Initiative – Georgia, HB 932, the liberal AJC and the push for amnesty… here.