With the recent revelation that Senator Marco Rubio has been receiving, and is actively soliciting, funds from billionaires with vastly different agendas from those voters who elected him in 2010, many are questioning how he would act if he were elected president.
With the departure of Scott Walker from the Republican cast of candidates seeking their party’s nomination, and with the virtual disappearance of a presence in the polls by establishment candidate Jeb Bush, it was no surprise that Rubio’s star began its ascendancy. As Paul Singer, one of Rubio’s wealthy donors, wrote, Rubio “is the best explainer of conservatism in public life today.… In a field full of promise … Senator Rubio is the strongest choice.”
Rubio responded in kind, saying that he was “grateful” for Singer’s financial support to his campaign because Singer “is someone who’s successful in raising money.”
Indeed he is. Singer, a Harvard Law School grad and hedge fund manager, has accumulated enough wealth to put him firmly on Forbes’ list of 400 richest Americans, with personal wealth estimated to be in excess of $2 billion. Having signed The Giving Pledge, Singer has committed to giving away half of his wealth in support of causes that address society’s “most difficult moral and economic challenges.” According to his moral worldview, part of his money supports the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, with another part helping to fund the American Opportunity Alliance, a group that supports, among other things, “immigration reform.”
“Immigration reform” is code for “amnesty,” according to critics of Rubio’s part in the Gang of Eight’s Senate push to open the doors to illegal immigrants already living in the United States. Others in that Gang include Colorado’s Michael Bennet, sporting a Freedom Index rating — the rating given by The New American for votes that are fiscally sound and constitutional — of 9, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois with an FI of 10, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez with an FI of 18, and the inevitable Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, with an FI of 13.
The very fact that Rubio was comfortable comporting with such enemies of the Constitution raises serious questions. His support of Senator Orrin Hatch’s Immigration Innovation Act of 2015 — known colloquially as I-Squared — further reveals an agenda that his wealthy donors support but which contravenes expectations of voters who considered Rubio a Tea Party favorite back in 2010.
A single example will suffice. I-Squared would double or triple the number of H-1B nonimmigrant (temporary) visas issued to foreign nationals possessing “high-level” skills that American industry could use. The only trouble is that certain members of American industry have used those visas to displace Americans from jobs, cutting wage costs and eliminating benefit packages in the process.
One of those taking advantage is the Walt Disney Company. In September Breitbart News Network published a letter from a former employee who worked as an Information Technology (IT) engineer for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. On his way to work in late October 2014, he received a “meeting invite” on his iPhone for later that morning. Upon arriving in the meeting room, he was surprised to see dozens of his team members and co-workers gathered there as well.
This is his story:
As I watched the grim faced Disney Executive, it was obvious that bad news was going to be delivered. The dead silence was broken when the Disney Executive made a harsh announcement: All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days. Your last day of employment for this company will be January 30, 2015. Your jobs have been given over to a foreign workforce. In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay.
The anonymous former Disney employee lost not only his job but his personal self-image as a faithful employee of Disney for the previous 10 years. And he began to question the American system that dashed his dreams in the first place:
The last 30 days were the most disgraceful and demoralizing of this entire period as I had to watch a foreign worker completely take over my job. I had no work to do during the last 30 days other than watch a foreign worker completely take over everything that I did in my job.
One ironic twist was that I actually received a significant pay raise during my last 30 days with the company because I had received the highest possible job rating in performance reviews….
The last day we turned in our mobile phones, laptops, ID badges along with our dignity and we were ushered out the door as temporary foreign workers took over our jobs.
He added:
I frequently question if the IT field holds much future for United States’ citizens or U.S. permanent residents. Should I continue to dodge bullets or move into an entirely new field after having been outsourced on multiple occasions by the same company and then finally physically replaced by a foreign worker?
I would never recommend the IT field to my own children or anybody else that I know for that matter, due to the lack of job opportunities even for someone passionate about the IT field.
We now have American IT workers being displaced by both H1-B visa holders, who are physically being flown in from foreign countries, as well as the continued use of foreign remote offshore workers. We are seeing a massive drain on job opportunities here on our own soil.
What does the future hold for United States’ workers?
That doesn’t seem to be a major question for Rubio. Goldman Sachs has been feeding at the H-1B trough, along with Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Larry Ellison of the Oracle Corporation. Each of those companies has actively recruited foreigners who have been issued H-1B visas and used them to replace American workers. Even Carnival Corporation, the cruise ship line, has stepped up to Rubio’s plate in exchange for a special backroom deal that Rubio cut with the Obama administration that, as reported by Breitbart, “creates a new nonimmigrant Z visa to admit individuals who possess “specialized knowledge” to perform maintenance on airlines and cruise ships” in place of American labor.
Together those individuals and corporations have given Rubio tens of thousands of dollars to support his candidacy for president.
After doing his own analysis of Rubio’s policies on immigration, Pastor Chuck Baldwin considers Rubio the insiders’ “water boy” and “the poster child for amnesty for illegal aliens.” Asked Baldwin:
So, tell me again just how a Rubio/Ryan-controlled House and White House are going to restore constitutional government?
They are working for the same multinational corporation.… They have the same warmongering, nation-building foreign policy. They will do nothing to curtail the burgeoning Police State taking place in our country.
They will turn America into a Third World socialist country for the benefit of their Big Money masters.
When Donald Trump learned about the Disney layoffs, he demanded that Disney hire them back and that Rubio apologize:
I am calling TODAY on Disney to hire back every one of the workers they replaced, and I am calling on Rubio to immediately rescind his sponsorship of the I-Squared bill and apologize to every Floridian for endorsing it.
I am further calling on Rubio to return the money he has received from Silicon Valley CEOs and to donate the money to a charity helping unemployed Americans whose jobs Rubio has helped to destroy.
The closer one looks at the policies of Rubio and who is supporting him, the more Rubio looks like Jeb Bush and Paul Ryan. As George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
