SEN. JEFF SESSIONS

Guest Columnist

This election may be the last chance you have to retake control of your country.

Record legal and illegal immigration levels are jeopardizing our national security, flooding our labor market and bringing criminal gangs, drugs and other large costs to our communities.

Years of failed trade policies have eroded our manufacturing base and eliminated millions of jobs.

The American people know perfectly well what is wrong. But Washington politicians are not listening. Instead, they listen too often to powerful international financial interests that have long since elevated themselves above the concerns of working Americans.

But, as we have seen in Iowa and New Hampshire, the long-silenced American people are rightly beginning to push back and to insist their government defend them.

On top of catastrophic illegal immigration – which must end – the government further crowds schools and job markets by issuing over 1 million green cards and 700,000 guest worker visas annually — far more than any other nation. These individuals directly compete with Americans for steadily declining jobs.

To illustrate, the U.S. annually admits over 20 immigrants on green cards for every one new public high school graduate in South Carolina. This will continue until Congress passes a law reducing them.

Reuters’ polling shows Americans want to reduce – not increase – immigration by a margin of nearly 3-to-1. The Polling Co. shows that by nearly 10-to-1, people want U.S. companies to raise wages for those already here rather than import cheaper foreign labor.

Yet the President’s "Gang of Eight" bill the Senate passed in 2013 would have gone much further, tripling green cards over the next 10 years and doubling annual guest workers. Had the American people not risen up in opposition, it would have become law.

It is time candidates and elected officials reflect the people’s wishes and call for lower immigration levels that protect American workers.

It is also time candidates and elected officials reflect the people’s wishes by opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and by advancing pro-America trade policies.

Last year, Congress voted to ‘fast-track’ the colossal, 5,544-page TPP. Negotiated in secret by President Barack Obama and global elites, this deal utterly fails to prevent damaging foreign currency manipulation, which Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, said could wipe out years of negotiated trade protections in just ‘minutes.’

A 2015 IPSOS poll, for example, found that 88 percent of the public believes it’s important trade deals prevent currency manipulation.

Yet again, with "fast-track" and TPP, the international agenda won out over the people who know America as their home — not just another spot on a global map.

Ominously, the TPP also creates a new Trans-Pacific Union with a governing commission composed of the 12 Pacific nations that would be free at any time to change the deal, and even the rules of the commission — with the U.S. having only the same one vote as the Sultan of Brunei.

A Tufts University study finds TPP would cost nearly 450,000 American jobs by 2025. With opposition surging, its advocates have become silent. But know they are biding their time and will seek to ram it through after the election.

Fortunately, the American people can change our country’s course. The nation’s eyes now move to South Carolina and the SEC primaries. This is the people’s opportunity to exert their will on these defining issues — immigration and trade. This means demanding the politicians make clear commitments on these issues.

This election will decide, perhaps once and for all, whether we continue the slide into open borders globalism, or begin to emerge again as a nation-state that defends its people’s interests.

Jeff Sessions, a Republican, represents Alabama in the United States Senate. For more information sessions.senate.gov/