Elections 2016

Primary challengers were lining up against North Carolina incumbent Renee Ellmers and her history of supporting amnesties and increases in foreign workers. But after a federal court ordered the last minute redrawing of the Congressional district boundaries, Ellmers was pitted against Congressman George Holding. Still, it wasn't enough to save her seat after a 4-year history of voting against her constituents' wishes on immigration.

In January of 2013 before the nation knew Marco Rubio primarily as the face of the Gang of Eight comprehensive amnesty bill, he was at the top of Republican voters' preferences for the 2016 presidential nomination. Once his betrayal became widely known, he fell to 6th in the popularity polls.

One of the top headlines on the front page of this morning's New York Times reads "Foreign Labor Fills Vacancies at Trump Club." The story details the Mar-a-Lago resort's preference for hiring foreign workers through the H-2B visa program over hundreds of American workers who were referred to the club for jobs. It's interesting to see the story in the Times' after it ignored the fact that the massive omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December quadrupled the H-2B visa program for FY2016.

CNN’s self-proclaimed Reality Check Team took several statements made by candidates in the Republican Presidential Primary debate on February 13 and declared them either “true” or “false,” with varying degrees of in-between. Tami Luhby, CNNMoney correspondent took up Ted Cruz’s claim that the United States has “the lowest percentage of Americans working today in any year since 1977” and declared it to be unambiguously false.

Today Republican voters again expressed their feelings of betrayal by the Republican Party establishment. Trump was elevated with his promises to defy the party leaders on immigration expansionism in which the concerns of workers are a low priority. The Iowa and New Hampshire contests have been won by the two candidates -- Cruz and Trump -- who have most clearly championed immigration policies that support American workers."

The debate over Marco Rubio's and Ted Cruz's immigration positions continued this week when Cruz accused Rubio of granting legal status to criminal illegal aliens through his Gang of 8 amnesty bill. Fact Check's Robert Farley looked into Cruz's claim, and his analysis has been picked up by several national media outlets.

No one was quite sure how the absence of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump would affect Thursday night's Fox News debate stage, but his absence allowed the debate moderators to focus most of the immigration segment on Sen. Marco Rubio's role in the Gang of 8 -- the mass amnesty bill that ultimately died in the House after passing through the Senate at Rubio's urging.

This past week's debates among candidates of both parties offered little economic hope for the descendants of America's slavery and apartheid eras.

The candidates almost universally revealed a lack of interest in the dismal jobs picture for Black Americans.

Here is the statement I issued to the media after last night's Democratic debate:

The presidential primaries will become more interesting in the new year as voters will decide which candidate they prefer for their party’s nomination. The Iowa Caucus is February 1 and the New Hampshire primary is the following week. By the end of February, when Nevadans and South Carolinians have also weighed in, we will see whether Bernie Sanders can pose a challenge to Hillary Clinton, and whether Donald Trump’s dominance of media coverage translates to support in the voting booth.

The dust-up over the similarities between Rubio's and Cruz's immigration records and stances can be easily clarified by consulting NumbersUSA's Worker-Protection Immigration Grade Card ratings on presidential candidates and NumbersUSA's Congressional Immigration Grade Cards.

Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, who is polling under 3 percent nationally and is only at 4 percent in his home state, responded to a question about border security in Saturday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate.

My goodness, there has been a flurry of immigration posturing and positioning since we last revised our Ratings of the Presidential candidates in 10 categories and calculated overall Worker-Protection Immigration Grades!

We've just finished our regular Grading Committee meeting (early Friday afternoon) here at NumbersUSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. We've sifted through the charges and counter-charges and focused on what the candidates are saying that really address what they specifically are promising to do about immigration policies.

If you visited NumbersUSA.com on Tuesday night, you probably noticed that our front page was much different from normal as we promoted the television ad that we ran during the GOP debate. You can read more about that ad in Roy's new blog. But the page also included a real-time account of our Tweets as we watched the debates live. I've pulled out some of the top Tweets from the night from both our NumbersUSA account and Roy's. We do this for every debate, so we encourage you to follow us on Twitter to see our analysis.

The blatant contradiction between Donald Trump's answer to a question about H-1B visas and his own policy paper was one of the most talked about moments of the CNBC Republican debate Wednesday night. Senator Rubio was also flagged by fact checkers for a statement that ran contrary to his record. Of the two, only Trump has attempted to clarify his position.

While the first two Republican debates showed that the large field of GOP Hopefuls are mostly split on the issue of immigration, the Democratic Hopefuls stood mostly together during the Party’s first debate on Tuesday evening. There was agreement among the five Hopefuls on the issues of amnesty, in-state tuition, and eligibility for taxpayer funded health care, and no mention of protecting American workers from a massive wave of foreign workers.

The second Republican debate for the 2016 Presidential Nomination is happening tonight.  We hope that all of the candidates will have a chance to address immigration and clarify their positions on some of the most crucial immigration problems our nation is facing. Whether it’s in person, over the phone, email or otherwise, it’s important to let the candidates know how you are judging their immigration platforms.  NumbersUSA’s activism team has built this page to do just that.

Before Congress let out for recess in August, top Republicans drafted a memo to their rank and file members.  The memo, which was obtained by Breitbart, suggested to members what they should be discussing during August. Surprisingly, immigration was not included anywhere in this memo.  

The dust is kind of settling after a week-long wind-storm of news media pressing Presidential candidates to express a position on various aspects of immigration policy.

We know a lot more now than we did a week ago. And we'll tell you what we know right here. This overview is the result of two long NumbersUSA Grade Committee meetings yesterday.

The first day of media coverage of Donald Trump's new stand against birthright citizenship has mostly included misinformation and faulty analysis. Here are the big facts that need to emerge to clear up the confusion that many in the media (especially on TV) are sowing.

So much for the RNC's command after the 2012 election that the next round of GOP candidates had to embrace comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). None of the 17 candidates tonight dared speak for CIR and its doubling of legal immigration along with an amnesty.

Nobody repeated the CIR mantra that America needs lots of immigrants to do the jobs that Americans won't do -- or aren't smart enough to do. No talk of stapling green cards to the college degrees of foreign students.

Fox TV chose the 10 participants in its main GOP candidate debate Thursday night based on their ranking in popularity polls.

If instead, they had chosen the 10 with the highest overall grades on NumbersUSA's Presidential Hopefuls Worker-Protection Immigration Grade Cards, here are the 10 who would have been on stage in prime time. I list them here in the order of their scoring in the 10 categories of immigration that NumbersUSA calculates as to how they would affect American wage earners (their overall grade is in parentheses).