GOP Megadonors Go on Strike, Say Speaker Ryan Must OK Amnesty Vote

A large group of NeverTrump investors and cheap-labor CEO donors are promising to go on strike until House Speaker Paul Ryan schedules passage of a cheap-labor amnesty for June 25.

The bipartisan group, which is titled the American Business Immigration Council, is led by Mike Fernandez, a healthcare executive in Florida. He wants Ryan to keep the House in session on June 25 so the alliance of 193 Democrats and 25-plus cheap-labor Republicans can pass a discharge-petition amnesty through the House — despite many polls showing any amnesty is very unpopular among GOP voters.

The pressure is on Ryan because the amnesty vote cannot happen if he simply declares the House will not be in session on June 25.

Fernandez told Politico:

No one should have the authority to prohibit a debate on the House floor … And that is exactly what Speaker Ryan has done in the House. I have been a supporter of Speaker Ryan, I think he’s playing chicken and needs to get a backbone.

“Over the last 10 years, the Republican Party has received $47 million from me, in state, gubernatorial and party contributions,” Fernandez told Politico. “I’m not writing one penny to any of them anymore.”

The demand comes six months after GOP voters and legislators provided a huge tax-cut to CEOs, investors, and donors.

Ryan has scheduled a meeting of the GOP House members on June 7, Thursday, to talk about the widening split in the party between the vast majority of the GOP’s blue-collar and white-collar voters, and the alliance of amnesty-discharge Republicans and bipartisan cheap-labor donors,

The amnesty-discharge Republicans include members from several districts which now have a large share of Democrat-voting Latinos who were imported by the agriculture industry and were made citizens by the establishment’s prior amnesties in 1986, 1990 and 1996. The group also includes several GOP members who represent agricultural districts which rely on cheap guest-workers to run low-technology dairy farms.

One of the group’s leaders, GOP Rep. Jeff Denham, admits the push for amnesty and citizenship is a risky vote before the November election. He told the New York Times:

There have been some critics who say that this [discharge-petition strategy] could cost us our majority. My concern is if we do nothing, it could cost us our majority. So yes, it’s risky.

Another leader, Florida Rep. Chris Curbelo, says he wants federal immigration policy to serve the interests of business, not of ordinary Americans. He told the Washington Post that “the party should stand for an immigration system that complements our economy.”

But voters strongly oppose another amnesty giveaway to employers and they made that view clear when they backed Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

North Carolina’s conservative Rep. Mark Meadows predicted the discharge-petition group will get enough signatures for a vote, but will not get a bill signed into law, Fox News reported Tuesday. “I fully anticipate the discharge petition will be hitting 218 … [but] if we allow [the amnesty vote] to happen, it will not become law,” said Meadows, who is chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.

Several GOP factions are debating a potential compromise but have “identified potential roadblocks,” he said. He told Fox that “if it was an easy issue, it would have been dealt with decades ago.”

President Trump says he wants Congress to pass his four-part immigration-law reform, not just a no-strings amnesty. “I think it’s time to get the whole package,” Trump told Fox News’ anchor Brian Kilmeade in May. “It’s time to get the whole package … We’re going to change the system — we have no choice for the good of our country.”

Moreover, Trump’s lower-immigration policies are forcing U.S. employers to compete for American workers in the high-pressure economy, mostly by raising voters’ wages before the November election. The rising wages are helping raise Trump’s political ratings and the GOP’s generic-ballot score before the November election.

On June 5, Trump’s economic advisor, Kevin Hassett, applauded the rising wages:

It’s very clear that the President’s economic policies are working.  But I think that the most important thing is that they’re working for America’s workers; that America’s workers are being laid off at the lowest pace that we’ve ever seen, and wage growth, which we didn’t include in the chart, is also taking off as well …

wage growth right now … is the highest it’s been going all the way back at least to 2006.

Trump’s policies have delivered higher wages to African-American bakers in Chicago, Latino restaurant workers in Monterey, Calif., disabled people in Missouri, high schoolers,  resort workers in Hilton Head, the construction industry, Superbowl workers, the garment industry, and workers at small businesses, and even Warren Buffett’s railroad workers.

But those rising wages are also pushing the donors, CEO and investors to demand yet more millions of migrants to help flood the labor market and minimize wage growth.

The new arrivals would add to the existing population of 33 million legal immigrants and 11 million illegal immigrants, the annual inflow of 1 million-plus legal immigrants, and the resident workforce of roughly 3 million foreign temporary workers, such as H-1B white-collar workers.

Fernandez’s amnesty-demand complements the pro-amnesty demands by other GOP donors, including the Koch brothers’ network of GOP donors, hotel-investor Fred Malek’s Congressional Leadership Fund, and various NeverTrump activists.

In 2016, Fernandez backed pro-amnesty Gov. Jeb Bush, and then backed Sen. Hillary Clinton. In April, he helped block approval of a mandatory E-Verify amendment on the Florida ballot.

In May 2017, the Miami Herald reported Fernandez’s view that the United States exists for a pro-migration mission, not for the benefit of American citizens:

Fernandez, 64, cuts a colorful figure in local politics. A major backer of Republican Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, Fernandez vowed to support Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump. He paid for anti-Trump newspaper ads during the campaign — prompting a lawsuit threat from a Trump attorney — and endorsed and fundraised for Clinton …

“We are a great nation, and we should be able to overcome this issue with the facts, economic facts,” Fernandez said. “We’re a country that’s united by an idea … and the idea is, we were all coming from a different place. It was that idea that accidentally proved that diversity makes for great nations.”

That ideological view is largely shared by Speaker Ryan, who is slated to retire in January.

Another ABIC board member, Norman Braman, used his car-sales fortune to back amnesty-advocate Sen. Marco Rubio in 2016.

The group also includes Penny Pritzker, a real-estate owner who funded former President Barack Obama’s 2008 race and served as his Secretary of Commerce from June 2013 to January 2017, plus John Rowe, a former chairman of an Illinois energy company who has loudly announced in May his threat to cut off donations.

ABIC promotes sensible immigration reform that supports the economy of the United States, provides American companies with both the high-skilled and low-skilled talent they need, and allows the integration of immigrants into our economy as consumers, workers, entrepreneurs and citizens.

Immigrants are a huge federal subsidy for business because their consumer spending on autos, rent, food and much else is augmented by taxpayer-funded aid programs, such as food stamps, Section 8 rental vouchers, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and government education spending. In 2016, the National Academies of Science estimated an annual cost of almost $60 billion to state and local taxpayers.

The ABIC website says that 15 percent of the DACA illegals have bought a house and 65 percent have bought a vehicle.

The group wants an amnesty for the 700,000 DACA illegals, plus all 11 million illegals now in the United, and it also wants an unending and unlimited inflow of more wage-cutting blue-collar and white-collar workers. It demands:

opportunities for immigrants and foreign students to enter the U.S. and our workforce legally, attracting and keeping the best, the brightest, and the hard working …  a streamlined process to legal employment [for new migrants], ensuring we do not face the same challenges in the future … Establish a path to citizenship or legal status for the “DREAMers” and undocumented adult workers currently living in the United States, to leverage their talent and to facilitate their complete integration as consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs.

The inflow of immigrant workers shifts roughly $500 billion a year in reduced salaries from competing employees up to CEOs and investors, according to the National Academies’ 2016 report.

Politico noted the identities of several other CEOs in Fernandez’s group:

Dr. Zachariah Zachariah of the University of Miami Health System; Coastal Construction CEO Tom Murphy Jr.; Century Homebuilders Group CEO Sergio Pino; Carnival Cruise Lines former CEO Bob Dickinson; and Enrique Sosa, a retired senior vice president of Dow Chemical Company.

Wages in the construction and homebuilding industries are gently rising, partly because the sector lost hundreds of thousands of cheap migrant construction-workers in the 2008 crash. The migrants had been hired because they were cheaper than hiring and training millions of Americans from the Midwest states which were damaged by NAFTA and globalization.