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Friday, March 29, 2024 - 09:56 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

Then Why Are Liberal PACs Spending Millions to Elect Him?

I am a North Carolinian, but I live 10 miles as the crow flies from the South Carolina border and 18 miles by road. My great grandfather and his father were born near Fountain Inn, South Carolina. I have family in South Carolina who vote. My wife and I frequently shop in South Carolina, and our favorite vacation spot is Charleston. Hence I have an interest in South Carolina politics.

For many weeks now I have heard radio advertisement after advertisement claiming that Lindsey Graham is a conservative. My brother in Myrtle Beach, who spent most of his working career as a marketing research consultant, counted Graham ads approximately every ten minutes on Fox Cable News and about one every 30 minutes on a radio talk station. Senator Graham’s advertising saturates the airways so thoroughly that it raises an important question: Who is pouring so much money into re-electing Graham to the U.S. Senate and why?

Is Lindsey Graham a conservative? Lindsey Graham is a key sponsor of a Senate immigration bill that if passed by the U.S. House would be far more devastating to American workers and taxpayers than Obamacare. Senate bill S.744, passed by the Senate in late 2013, is about 1,200 pages long and just as obscure to public knowledge and understanding as Obamacare. Two themes dominate its content and bode grave ill for American workers, taxpayers, and every issue that South Carolina conservatives and most South Carolina Republicans hold to be important and just.

The two main themes of S.744 are (1) amnesty for over 12 million illegal immigrants and  (2) an “immigration surge,” approximately tripling the number of legal immigrant workers coming into the U.S, somewhere between 30 and 35 million in the next decade. Most voters haven’t heard much about this second theme. With 20 million Americans seeking a full-time job and unable to find one, its political and powerful corporate sponsors would rather keep it quiet, and most of the media has complied. Senator Graham boldly claims there is a labor shortage, while millions of Americans cannot find full-time jobs, and two-thirds of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates cannot find employment in their fields. Meanwhile, the real wages of Americans workers from low-skilled construction trades to high-skilled computer programmers are stagnant to declining—a sure economic indictor that there is a labor surplus.

The Schumer-Rubio bill, S.744, also known as the Gang-of-Eight bill, is the third major amnesty bill that Senator Graham has sponsored in recent years. Fortunately, the first two failed when the American people discovered their treacherous purpose and content. Of course, amnesty supporters do not like to admit their bills are amnesty bills, but anyone with half a brain can see that making 12 million or more illegal immigrants legal subject to only a few minor fees, fines, and perhaps a small tax back-payment is amnesty. Our laws require that illegal immigrants leave the country and forbid their employment, but the political pressure from those who are profiting from cheap foreign labor at the expense of American workers and taxpayers has allowed the illegal immigration problem to get bigger and bigger and to spread from occupation to occupation and across the country.

Almost every illegal immigrant worker in the U.S., between 8.0 to 8.5 million of them, has committed one or more felonies besides illegal entry into the U.S. To get and hold a job they must commit social security number theft or fraud, identity theft, or tax evasion. Other document fraud and tax fraud are frequently involved.  The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 75 percent of illegal immigrant workers use fraudulent or stolen Social Security numbers. The others work “off the books” thereby involving themselves in tax evasion. These are felonies for which most Americans would suffer heavy fines and prison. Yet Lindsey Graham, prominent member of the “Gang-of-Eight” sponsors of S.744, would give them a path to citizenship.

One Graham political advertisement touts his conservative record with the American Conservative Union (ACU). Over his 18-year record, he has an average rating of 88. In 2013, however, it was only 64. However, ACU ratings might have been impressive evidence for conservatism at one time, but at least since pro-amnesty Miami immigration lawyer and lobbyist Al Cardenas became chairman in 2011, the ACU has dropped immigration issues from their 25-vote rating system, essentially providing cover for pro-amnesty Republicans like Graham. Cardenas resigned on May 20, but in three years, he turned the ACU and its GOPAC efforts into propaganda platforms for amnesty and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s big-business-big-government globalist economic model. The scary thing about the new ACU/GOPAC is that it wants to define conservatism on its new terms. Some are now facetiously referring to it as Conservatism, Inc., a form of conservatism indifferent to social, cultural, and patriotic values.

Senator Graham’s rating on the NumbersUSA immigration grading system was only 18 percent in 2013 and 2014 to date, trending down from his lifetime record of 41 percent. South Carolina’s junior senator, Tim Scott got a 95 percent rating, and South Carolina’s six Republican US. House members got respectable grades of 62 to 83 percent. Only South Carolina’s Democrat Congressman James Clyburn received a lower rating of 17 percent. At 18 percent Graham’s ( D-) grade was only a little higher than North Carolina’s Obamacrat Senator, Kay Hagan, with 15 percent.

Amnesty and the big foreign worker immigration surge are all about big profits for the corporate employers of illegal immigrants and other cheap foreign labor. Foreign labor whether illegal or legal is about 30 percent cheaper than American labor at every level from low-skilled illegal construction workers to computer programmers with legal work visas. Harvard Economist, George Borjas, has pointed out that at least since 1980, immigration has not made America more prosperous. It is essentially a $405 billion annual transfer of income from American labor to the employers of immigrant workers. Dividing this number by the 148.1 million workers on U.S. payrolls in April, employer hiring of cheap foreign labor is costing each American worker $2,735 per year. Can someone in the forefront of perpetuating such an injustice to American workers be a conservative? That’s not my father and grandfather’s brand of patriotism!

The Heritage Foundation estimates that the S.744 amnesty would cost $6.3 trillion over the long term. Senator Graham certainly cannot claim to be a fiscal conservative with this on his record.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO billionaire, liberal, and Obama supporter; has a phony conservative PAC called “Americans for a Conservative Direction.” According to Politico, the PAC started running ads in April to praise Lindsey Graham as a conservative and plans to spend over $1.0 million dollars to elect him. Zuckerberg stands to profit handsomely by hiring foreign rather than American workers at Facebook. He also wants younger workers rather than older workers.  Zuckerbierg’s $150,000 in ads probably saved North Carolina amnesty-backing Congresswoman Renee Ellmers by running ads saying she was against amnesty. Of course, the nation’s biggest spending amnesty supporter, the U.S. Chamber, is backing Graham with generous financial and advertising support. The crony capitalist Koch Brothers of Texas fit right in with Chamber of Commerce’s big business ideology and are pushing their pro-amnesty and pro-immigration-surge with $30 million to a wide field of pro-amnesty candidates, including Lindsey Graham.

South Carolina needs a senator that will serve South Carolina.

Nobody outside of a liberal madhouse believes Lindsey Graham is a conservative. He is more likely to help move the Republican Party from center-right to center-left with his amnesty and immigrant worker surges. The American Republic, the Republican Party, and the hopes and strength of every conservative cause are in the hands of South Carolina.

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Leonard M. (Mike) Scruggs is the author of Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You, 2009; and The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths, 2011.

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Mike ScruggsMike Scruggs is the author of two books: The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths; and Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You, and over 600 articles on military history, national security, intelligent design, genealogical genetics, immigration, current political affairs, Islam, and the Middle East.

He holds a BS degree from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Stanford University. A former USAF intelligence officer and Air Commando, he is a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, and holds the Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and Air Medal. He is a retired First Vice President for a major national financial services firm and former Chairman of the Board of a classical Christian school.

Click the website below to order books. http://www.universalmediainc.org/books.htm.