Politics of Out of Control Immigration - Foreign Affairs Oct 2000

The immigration debate has recently switched 175 degrees. Only 5 years ago the Jordon Commission proposed a cut to legal immigration....Yet only 5 years later immigration into the US is at its absolute highest levels in  history more then 1.1 million annually. Somehow the process has gotten out  of control... Congress has forgotten the Jordon Commission  recommendations...Few members in Congress support Richard Armey R-TX open  borders philosophy!... Alan Greenspan praised immigration (This is a form  of wage and price control!)...Evidence from Harvard University and the RAND Corp. suggest that skilled immigrants are driving down American's  skilled labor force and diverting resources from the education of  Americans.  During recent hearings Asst. Sec of Labor Ray Uhalde warned that  Immigration fixes undercut efforts to improve public education, create  better worker retraining and with getting unemployed back to work. Today's  policies foretell many dangers. What will happen when the economy slows  down? What will happen when 600,000 H1B young engineers to be admitted  over the next 3 years adding to the current 400,000 H1B population finish their indentures at the same time precisely the same time American  engineers retrained via government programs funded from fees start seeking  employment? We will have to create another economic miracle to utilize  everyone. But short of a new miracle wages will fall, unemployment, crime,  divorce, welfare will rise. Social conflict will increase. Nearly 2/3 of  Americans in poll after poll say the want illegal immigration stopped and  legal immigration slowed. Immigration willing to take below average wages drive down wages! ...Industry owners profit from the unnaturally low price of labor. Workers lose because immigration drags down wages. To avoid crisis Congress should make reform a high priority starting with the Jordon Commission proposals. Jordon Commission started in 1990 led by Barbra Jordon D-TX. They undertook the most exhaustive examination of immigration ever carried out in this country. The mandate was to examine both legal and illegal immigration. They proposed that legal immigration should be cut by 1/3 to 550K,  to bring skills immigration in line with historical levels. Along with  stopping illegal immigration and using computerized registration of  immigration... The Senate Immigration Subcommittee, headed by Alan Simpson R-Wyo  incorporated the Jordon Commission recommendations. When the bill hit the Judiciary Committee Orrin Hatch R-UT, Ted Kennedy D-MA insisted legal & illegal immigration be separated... everyone knew this would doom the bill on legal immigration. Legal Immigration was taken by Spencer Abraham R-MI a freshman who never hid his views that skills based immigration should continue at its highest levels. In a bitter fight Abraham won and Simpson lost! Some interesting players here were Sen McCain R-AZ Head of Senate Dept of Commerce supports unlimited skills immigration like Armey and Abraham. When Abraham lost in Detroit Bush appointed him head of Dept. of Energy! Newt Ginerich was influenced  due to his girlfriend scandal by Corporate interests in Silicon Valley.  The H1B Visa program is used by firms to  gain exclusive government and corporate IT Servicing and Outsourcing contracts by using H1B Visa labor locking out American high technology small business. Hopefully this shows the American labor force, that the H1B visa issue really a fallout of the corporate interests corrupting the American political system. "A society can not have  political freedom without economic freedom.. The American experiment will fail unless we have a population of educated, moral citizens!" - Thomas Jefferson.

 

SENATOR Orin Hatch's Position is with US India PAC again after the Jordon Commission Hatch sells out the American People.

Perhaps Sen Hatch needs to run for a position in India to Represent these people.. Using his US Senate Position to represent another country is abuse of power!!

Senator Orrin Hatch Asks USINPAC to Identify Indian Americans for Federal Judgeships

	USINPAC - Washington, DC
	November 21, 2002.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee met with a group of Indian Americans in an event sponsored by the US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC). Describing the meeting as one of the "best organized breakfast meetings ever' Senator Hatch stated that 'USINPAC is performing a very important and much needed role in getting Indian Americans involved in the US political process". Senator Hatch said that he was deeply honored to kick off the USINPAC 'Breakfast on the Hill' series and was very grateful for the generous support from the Indian American community. Welcoming the Indian American community's growing involvement in shaping public policy through organizations such as USINPAC, Senator Hatch stated that Indian Americans should "continue to get involved in the process, continue to break down barriers and reach out to political leaders in both political parties." He emphasized that this involvement need not be on a partisan basis. Lauding USINPAC's role in educating lawmakers on the issues of concern to the Indian American community, Senator Hatch stated that lawmakers do not know enough about the Indian American community.

He asked USIPAC to let him know about suitable Indian American candidates for Federal judgeships to increase their representation in the Federal judiciary. He will strive to get Indian Americans appointed to positions in the judicial and executive branches of the government.

Describing Indo-US relations, Senator Hatch stated that, "If there are two countries for whom it is natural to work together, then they are the United States and India". Senator Hatch indicated that he would support a US-India free trade agreement and ask the United States Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, to investigate strengthening Indo-US bilateral business relations through such an agreement. Senator Hatch also supported giving greater access to Indian biotechnology firms to the US market.

The group of Indian Americans comprised of entrepreneurs and business leaders. One of the attendees, Mr. Natwar Gandhi, Chief Financial Officer for the District of Columbia commented that, " USINPAC is off to a fast start and is already winning friends and influencing people on Capitol Hill. The kickoff 'Breakfast on the Hill' with Senator Orrin Hatch confirms the interest and importance of this group. I very much look forward to working with USINPAC in future events including the upcoming Breakfast with Senator Grassley. USINPAC will help to ensure that Indian-Americans are properly represented in key political forums and have a seat at the table". Mr. Rakesh Gupta, Chairman and Co-Founder, TechBooks, said "USINPAC provides an excellent forum for Indian Americans to get engaged in the public policy development process. The breakfast meeting with Senator Hatch provided a wonderful opportunity to have a direct dialogue with a key decision maker about the issues that our important to the Indian American community."

The US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), a bipartisan political action committee promoting the interests of the Indian American community, today kicked off a series of breakfast meetings on Capitol Hill. The objective of these meetings, termed as "Breakfast on the Hill", is to acquaint leading senators and congressmen of both parties with issues relevant to the Indian American community.

Participants in the "Breakfast on the Hill" are Indian American businesses, professionals and activists who have demonstrated a strong desire and ability to raise the profile of the Indian American community. The goal is to create opportunities for Indian Americans to advance their political, business, economic and social agendas in partnership with the nation's elected officials and policymakers. USINPAC draws from a large pool of Indian American entrepreneurs, industry leaders, professionals, thinkers, activists and others who have volunteered to act on behalf of the community and the nation.

Building upon its successful meeting with Senator Hatch, USINPAC will honor Senator Chuck Grassley, the incoming Chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, at its next breakfast meeting on December 18. These breakfast meetings are structured to facilitate a better understanding of the Indian American community and its interests, as well as the interests of the nation.

Commenting on its latest initiative, Sanjay Puri, USINPAC Executive Director, said, "The Indian American community is ready to contribute in a meaningful way to the social and political process in the country, and USINPAC is ready and willing to advance that agenda." Mr. Puri also stated that USINPAC is proud to have supported, and contributed to, several election campaigns nationwide during the 2002 election cycle.

USINPAC intends to strengthen Indian American interests by implementing a model that leverages regional initiatives of Indian Americans nationwide on a bipartisan basis. It adds value by supporting and financially contributing to fund-raisers nationally, and sharpening the message on Capitol Hill through its various initiatives.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) at the inaugural Breakfast on the Hill event with USINPAC on November 21, 2002 on Capitol Hill

 

Consequences of Large Guestworker Programs

Testimony before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims

of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives

by Roy Beck, executive director

NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation

March 24, 2004

Perhaps the first and most important question to ask about any proposed large-scale foreign guestworker program is what will be its effect on the nearly 15 million American workers who would like a full-time job but cannot find one.1 Just how much of a worker shortage can there be when so many Americans cannot find a full-time job? And the available pool of American workers is actually much larger than that 15 million figure which includes people who are actively looking or just recently gave up reporting to the unemployment office. Millions of other Americans who once were part of the workforce and who once were interested in remaining in it have dropped out of the labor force entirely. As is often the case, the worst damage can be seen among African-American men. The Washington Post recently reported the astounding statistic that 40 percent of black men throughout America do not have a job.2 In New York City where the importation of foreign workers is at one of the highest rates in the nation, 50 percent of black men are no longer employed.3 The competition from the expanded guestworker force would be fiercest with the lower-skilled and lower-educated jobless American workers. But let it be noted that most of the expanded guestworker proposals now before Congress would open every American occupation up and down the economic ladder to competition from the global labor force. Americans too qualified to do “essential” jobs? One of the arguments for importing more foreign workers even with such high numbers of Americans out of the job market is that the labor shortages are in very low-skilled and low-paid occupations and that most of the jobless Americans are simply overqualified for those jobs. But Alan Greenspan last month said America has an oversupply of low-skilled, low-educated workers.4 In fact the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rolls of millions of unemployed Americans include a disproportionate number of workers who do not have a high school diploma.5 Official unemployment rates for Americans without a diploma are nearly twice as high as for other Americans. In other words, this country is awash in lower-educated American workers and no jobs. Yet, the primary purpose of these expanded guestworker proposals is to import low-educated, low-skilled foreign workers for jobs that require no more than low education and low skills.

Now, those jobs are not unimportant. These are jobs essential to Americans’ every day life. A group of businesses and others fighting for more foreign workers calls itself the “Essential Workers Coalition.” These ARE essential jobs. And it makes no sense to move our own essential American workers to the sideline while giving the jobs to foreign workers. While we may lament that so many American workers are poorly educated, it hardly seems fitting for Congress to punish those workers by giving away their jobs. Who would be most hurt by expanded guestworker programs for “essential” jobs? We got a stark view late last month from a new report by the Urban Institute and the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Entitled “Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis,” the study concludes that barely half of the black, Hispanic and Native American youth who enter high school in this country earn a diploma.6 The rates for the three groups are nearly identical. That report lets us know of the colossal failure throughout our society in engaging and properly educating these youth. Much needs to be done. Much has been attempted. But while the education establishment tries to figure out how to deal with these incredible drop-out rates, millions of young adults who did drop out of high school in the past need an opportunity to earn a living. Unfortunately, jobs for which a high-school drop-out are suited are being earmarked by leaders of both political parties for foreign guestworkers eager to underbid the price of labor. Adding further to the incongruity of all this talk about the need for lower-educated guestworkers is the President’s State of the Union call for assuring better job possibilities for inmates as they finish their prison sentences. The President said that some 600,000 inmates a year leave prison desperately needing a job to start a new kind of life. Most of them are qualified for the same kinds of “essential” jobs that all these pieces of guestworker legislation are designed to fill with foreign laborers. But will Americans do jobs that are this hard and pay this little? For 13 years as an author on these issues, I have done scores of radio shows and have consistently been told by callers identifying themselves as business owners that these jobless, lower-educated American workers are too lazy, too soft and too demanding to take these “essential” jobs. On NPR the other morning, I even heard a business owner say that his jobs were just too hard for Americans to do and paid too little. Of course, we all know that is the secret ingredient in why we have so many Americans unemployed and yet so much talk of job shortages. As long as the federal government allows the importation and the illegal migration of almost two million foreign workers a year from countries that pay less than a tenth of our wages, “essential” jobs that don’t require much education will be priced at levels at which American workers cannot live in an American lifestyle and will be offered with benefits and working conditions also unacceptable to Americans.3 Greatly expanding our present guestworker programs will ensure that those “essential” jobs never pay an American wage or offer American working conditions. That’s the way the free market operates. Alan Greenspan in his speech to the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce last month decried the inability of our lower-educated American workers to earn a dignified income. His solution was for great new investments to further educate them for better jobs. Members of this Congress responded in the news media by wondering where all that money was coming from. But a better question is this: If we supposedly have large numbers of “essential” jobs desperately needing workers to fill them and not requiring high education, why don’t we fill  those jobs with our own lower-educated workers? And if these jobs are so “essential” and so tough to do, shouldn’t the market be forced to raise wages to a level that can attract American workers to fill them? Why shouldn’t workers going jobs that are “essential” to our economy and to our comfort be paid wages that allow them to raise their families in dignity? One answer is that many in this government do not want “essential” workers to earn middle-class wages. They are addicted to an economy that depends on poorly paid workers who must be subsidized by taxpayers. For 40 years, this government has systematically gutted lower-middle-class occupations of their dignity, of their decent wages, of their safe working conditions and of their American benefits by flooding those occupations with foreign workers. We don’t have to wonder what expanded guestworker programs would do to American workers; we have a lot of recent history to show us quite explicitly. Expanded foreign guestworkers programs would just add to the already long list of “Occupation Collapses” created by 40 years of radically increased mass immigration, illegal migration and guestworker programs. “Occupation Collapse” has long U.S. history tied to high immigration “Occupation Collapse” has been one of the gravest blows and continuing threats to America’s working class households over the last couple of decades. By “Occupation Collapse,” I mean the process of wages plummeting, benefits disappearing and working conditions deteriorating in whole occupations. The evidence of recent history and of 150 years of U.S. economic history suggests that the initiation of a large-scale foreign guestworker program would expand Occupation Collapse into as yet untouched localities and occupations – both unskilled and skilled – in our country. Many of the pressing social problems Congress is tackling recently are directly related to the collapse of whole occupations from middle-class and lower-middle-class incomes, benefits and working conditions into near-poverty and below-poverty wages. Look at some of the issues the federal government is trying to resolve for large numbers of Americans: lack of health insurance, inadequate health care, over-crowded and substandard housing, poor education, neighborhoods torn by crime, overloaded jails and prisons. In every one of those problems, you will find a disproportionate population of households who are connected to collapsed occupations. These Americans simply can’t earn enough money to afford the goods and services that make for a life of dignity. Why have these occupations collapsed? There have been many reasons. In some cases, the 4 collapse has happened only regionally; in others, nationally. But one of the most common ingredients is the large-scale entry of foreign workers into those occupations – through the million legal immigrants a year, through nearly that many illegal aliens settling each year and through a few hundred thousand guest workers each year. These add up to numbers that are six to eight times higher traditional levels in this country. Americans are not nearly so much in need of more federal programs and assistance as they are in need of higher wages. Current high levels of legal and illegal immigration are a serious barrier to those higher wages. Adopting a program for hundreds of thousands or more guestworkers a year would almost guarantee falling wages, even with stringent safeguards attached. To imagine what would happen to American jobs and workers under a new, greatly enlarged guestworker program, we can start by looking at what the great increase in foreign workers over the last couple of decades has already done. The primary effect of all forms of adding foreign workers to the domestic labor market has been to distort the way the free market sets the value of labor by legislatively increasing supply. Examples of Occupational Collapse under the weight of heavy foreign-worker influx By the 1970s, menial jobs such as janitorial work had become middle-class occupations in many cities. The overwhelming majority of American workers of all kinds were able to live at least modest middle-class lives. That was before the advent of our new governmental ethic that some jobs are just too low-class to deserve decent wages. Cleaning office buildings was an essential task in this economy, and the economy rewarded many of those who did the task with livable wages and dignified working conditions. But a GAO study found that as federal policies allowed tens of thousands of foreign workers to enter those cities, their presence in the janitorial occupations led to a collapse of wages, benefits and working conditions.7 An especially dramatic example can be found in Miami where occupations began to collapse earlier due to earlier mass flows of foreign workers into the job market. Sociologists Guillermo Grenier and Alex Stepick found that before the 1970s, construction workers earned middle-class wages with middle-class benefits and lived middle-class lives. But the influx of foreign workers led to a series of changes that collapsed a large number of the construction jobs into little more than minimum-wage labor with few employee protections that had previously existed.8 By now, we can find construction occupational collapse in parts of nearly every state as foreign labor has swelled in local job markets. Perhaps nowhere is the role of foreign labor importation in collapsing an occupation more vivid than the meatpacking industry. Numerous studies have detailed how jobs in this industry by the 1970s were high-middle-class industrial jobs with great safety protections and benefits that allowed the employees to raise families on one income, take vacations and send children to college (many of whom came back to work in the plants because of the high income).9 Today, after 25 years of pouring foreign workers into the occupation, nearly every journalist and politician commenting on these jobs calls them “jobs that Americans won’t do” because the pay is so low that taxpayers have to provide public assistance to many of them, and the accident rate is among the worst in the nation. And in occupations that always were fairly poorly paid – such as poultry processing, farm 5 labor, hotel and restaurant work – the influx of large numbers of foreign workers has  generally driven real wages downward even further. One does not have to focus entirely on lower-skilled jobs to find Occupational Collapse. Under the combination of the dot.com bubble burst, overseas outsourcing and the presence of hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, the information-technology occupation is indeed in the middle of a collapse. Besides having an extraordinarily high unemployment rate, America’s information-technology workers have seen their wages plummet, with large portions now working at two-thirds, one-half and even one-third their incomes a few years ago.  

Although their wages surely would have fallen some even without the various existing foreign guestworker programs, adding around a million foreign workers over the last four years severely worsened the supply-demand ratio in the occupation. Historical precedence for foreign workers collapsing wages In his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1955, Simon Kuznets laid out a theory about rising and falling income inequality in capitalist societies. Many economists since then have sought to quantify the factors that, in different countries and different decades, have depressed earnings for the lower working class while increasing the wealth of the affluent and skilled. One renowned economist who has spent a career exploring these issues is  Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Delivering the Kuznets Memorial Lecture at Harvard, Prof. Willison showed how economic inequality in America was greatest from 1820 to 1860 and from the 1890s until World War I. Those periods coincided with the two greatest waves of immigration prior to the present unprecedented wave. According to Williamson, the occurrence of high immigration and high levels of economic inequality at the same time was not happenstance: immigration fosters income inequality. Despite having democratic institutions, abundant land, and a reputation as a workingman’s country, America during those periods of nineteenth-century immigration surges was a land of jarring inequality. The economist Peter H. Lindert has noted in his writing that American inequality has lessened when immigration was curtailed. When World War I abruptly cut off most immigration to the United States, the huge gap between rich and poor closed incredibly fast: “Within three years’ time, pay gaps dropped from historic heights to their lowest level since before the Civil War.”10 But just as quickly, inequality grew as soon as mass immigration resumed after World War I, so that later in the 1920s, “income looked as unequal as ever,” Lindert said. Once Congress curtailed immigration in 1924, the middle class grew again and inequities preceded to historic low levels by the early 1950s. America finally had become a paradise for the common workingman and woman. Lindert found it peculiar that America would have such a robust march toward middle-class equality during a period that included widely varying external events, such as the nation’s deepest depression, a sudden wartime recovery and moderate postwar growth: “This timing suggests that the explanation of this drop in inequality must go beyond any simple models that try to relate inequality to either the upswing or the downswing of the business cycle.”11 In the egalitarianism of the era after the 1924 curtailment of mass immigration, the economic bottom of society gained on the middle, and the middle gained on the top. The closing of the gap in wages had as much of an effect in enlarging the middle class as did all the transfer taxes 6 and programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s governmental activism combined, according to Lindert and Williamson. Several factors caused the fluctuations in inequality during U.S. history. But the “central role” has been played by the change in labor supply, claims Lindert. The rise of powerful unions during that period also played an important role in moving larger and larger numbers of laborers into the middle class. But Lindert concluded that the unions were able to gain their power because low immigration and low population growth kept the size of the labor force smaller while the demand for labor remained high. Not surprisingly, unions have withered in workforce participation during the wave of mass immigration since 1965. Contrary to superficial thinking, a tightened labor pool that forces employers to pay more for scarce labor does not necessarily hurt business nor the economy. It can be a great stimulator of a country’s creativity. The economist Harry T. Oshima has helpfully described the “virtuous circle” that occurs in an economy that is far different from our own very loose labor market with  surpluses of workers.12 He has particularly studied the mid-1910s and the mid-1920s when immigration was seriously restricted. He notes that during that time, employers were forced to raise wages. That induced the employers to press for major advances in mechanization. The resulting new technological applications of gasoline and electric machines made it possible to mechanize enough unskilled operations and hand work to release many workers into more skilled jobs. Growth in output per worker hour was phenomenal. That made it possible to raise wages still further. Because of the increasing demand for skilled workers, American parents realized they would need to spend more money to help each child gain a better education. This contributed to lower birth rates, and thus to slower labor-force growth, and thus to tighter labor markets, and thus to higher wages, which pushed manufacturers to push the skill levels of their workers up even further. In this cycle of productivity and wage gains – each feeding on the other – the United States became a middle-class nation! What we have had for three decades in this nation is the opposite of that economic “virtuous circle;” we have had the “vicious cycle.” The availability of larger and larger numbers of foreign workers has led employers to substitute labor for capital development and innovation. A key example is the atrophy in our agricultural industry which relies on incredibly low-wage labor instead of continuing its once global leadership in innovation and technology. And, of course, the rising incomes of American workers during a “virtuous circle” economy drives consumer purchasing and business success. Fundamentally changing the economic and social structure of our society At stake is whether the United States manages to remain a middle-class culture or becomes what I would call a “servant culture” more on the line of Europe or even third world nations – a path we are currently traversing. Europe is a continent that long has had a servant class. When it began to find it difficult to keep its nationals in those poorly paid servile roles, it imported foreign workers to “do the dirty work.” In the United States, however, we long have been a culture in which most people live middle-class lives. People may have servants but they are expected to pay them wages that allow for at least lower middle-class conditions. If there was dirty work to do that the genteel didn’t care to do, the folks who did the dirty work tended to get paid a decent wage for their trouble. Witness the meatpacking industry jobs in all their disgusting sights, sounds, smells and squishiness before our immigration policy collapsed the occupation. The people who did that work got some of the best semi-skilled manufacturing wages in the country. 7 But most of these expanded guestworker proposals would guarantee that whole occupations would be considered “foreigner work,” always paid below American standards with below American benefits and below American working conditions. Those Americans whose wages are not pulled below middle-class by the presence of the guestworkers would be able to revel in status found in so many countries in the world of having their own peasant class. These massive guestworker programs are about assigning a certain portion of our economy to a new foreign peasant class. And inadvertently, they are about creating a much larger permanent underclass of American natives largely dependent upon taxpayers and ever-increasing government programs.

 Notes

1 David Streitfeld, “Jobless Counts Skip Millions,” Los Angeles Times, 29 December 2003, A1. 2 David Finkel, “The Hard Road to A Paycheck,” Washington Post, 4 November 2003, A01.

3 Michael Powell, “In New York City, Fewer Find They Can Make It,” Washington Post, 14 March 2004, A01.

4 Nell Henderson, “Greenspan Calls for Better-Educated Workforce,” Washington Post, 21 February 2004,E01.

5 Ibid.

6 Linda Perlstein, “Report Disputes U.S. High School Graduation Rates,” Washington Post, 26 February 2004, A03.

7 Government Accounting Office, Illegal Aliens: Influence of Illegal Workers on Wages and Working Conditions of Legal Workers (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Accounting Office, March 1988).

8 Alex Stepick and Guillermo Grenier, “Brothers in Wood,” in Newcomers in the Workplace: Immigrants and the Restructuring of the U.S. Economy, Louise Lamphere, Alex Stepick, and Guillermo Grenier, eds.(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 148-9, 161.

9 Roy Beck, “Jobs Americans Will Do” in The Case Against Immigration (New York/London: W. W. Norton& Co., 1996) 100-135.

10 Peter H. Lindert, Fertility and Scarcity in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 233.

11 Ibid., p. 234. 12 Harry To. Oshima, “The Growth of U.S. Factor Productivity: The Significance of New Technologies in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 44 (March 1984).

 

Federal Agencies Federal Grants Flag Requests Letters & Certificates Visiting Washington Service Academies Document Request Information Hotlines     18th District Mickey Leland Barbara Jordan     CHILDREN'S CORNER

Barbara Jordan, the first black representative from Texas was born in Houston on February 21, 1936. She was educated in the public schools of Houston and graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School in 1952. After receiving a B.A. in political science and history from Texas Southern University in 1956 she went to attend law school. In 1959, she was admitted to the Massachusetts and Texas bars and commenced practice in Houston in 1960. She was an unsuccessful candidate for nomination as state representative in 1962 and 1964. During 1964 and 1965 she served as administrative assistant to Harris County Judge Bill Elliott and as project coordinator of a non-profit corporation to help the unemployed. In 1966 she became the first black person since 1883 to serve in the Texas Senate and was elected in 1968. In 1972 Jordan defeated Republican Paul Merritt to represent Texas' Eighteenth District in the House of Representatives. She was a member of the Judiciary committee in the Ninety-third Congress and also joined the Committee on Government Operations during the Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth Congress. Shortly after the Ninety-third Congress convened in 1973, it entered a struggle with the Nixon administration over budgetary reform, the troubled economy, Indochina and other issues. Jordan and other freshman representatives met with Speaker Carl Albert and arranged a meeting on the House floor in April to provide newly elected Democrats an opportunity to express their frustration with the difficult relations between Congress and the Executive Branch. Jordan herself praised the House's capacity for self-reform. During the same Congress she attached civil rights amendments to legislation authorizing cities to receive direct Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grants, rather than apply to state governments for the money. Jordan questioned the civil rights record of House Republican leader Gerald Ford when he was nominated for vice president, and joined seven other Judiciary Committee members in voting against his confirmation. During the Judiciary Committee's hearings on the possible impeachment of President Nixon in the summer of 1974, Jordan won national acclaim for her eloquent reaffirmation of faith in the Constitution while voting for all five articles of impeachment. In June 1975 the House voted to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for ten years. Jordan sponsored legislation extending the Act to include Spanish-heritage, American Indian, Alaskan Natives and Asian American language minorities, while opposing amendments that would have permitted states and localities covered or partially covered by the Act to apply for exemption. She secured passage of the Consumer Goods Pricing Act of 1975, her bill repealing anti-trust exemptions that kept consumer prices artificially high. Jordan also favored a $25 billion extension of the general federal revenue sharing program and worked to toughen its anti-discrimination provisions. In July 1976, she became the first black and the first woman to deliver a key note address to the Democratic National Convention. The following year she co-sponsored legislation to extend the state ratification deadline for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment from 1979 to 1986. In December 1977, Jordan announced that she would not be a candidate for reelection the following year. In 1979 she became a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. In August 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded Ms. Jordan the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Sadly, On January 17, 1996, in Austin, Texas, Ms. Jordan gently passed away.