Ryan Pulls Amnesty, Promises Changes and Vote Next Week

House Speaker Paul Ryan cancelled the planned Friday vote on his amnesty bill, and will add some business-first and populist concessions to help win votes prior to a debate and vote next week, leaders announced just before 7:00 pm.

The Ryan bill  — which includes a medium-sized amnesty for roughly 1.8 million ‘DACA’ illegals and roughly 300,000 Indian tech-workers and spouses — will add a section requiring companies to use E-Verify to gauge the work eligibility of would-be employees, said reports. The addition of the very popular E-Verify mandate would be a huge gain for mainstream conservatives.

But the bill reportedly will also get a new guest-worker program, which is likely the giant H-2C program for farmers. The program has already won approval by Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s judiciary committee, and it would legalize roughly 1 million illegals in the agriculture sector. But it would also create a myriad civic issues, including whether the low-wage workers would be eligible for federal aid, how their illegal-immigrant families should be treated, and how much it would drag down wages for Americans working in the agriculture sector.

The H-2C program would likely be supported by many of the GOP legislators — such as California Rep. Jeff Denham — who created and backed the discharge-petition process. Those agriculture-district Republicans are dubbed “moderates” by establishment reporters even though their main priorities is raising the supply of cheap migrant workers to low-tech, low-revenue farms in their districts.

Democrats are expected to unite against the guest-worker program and E-Verify, in part, because they want the 11 million resident illegals to become citizens and vote Democratic.

If the modified bill is passed by the House, the bipartisan cheap-labor caucus in the Senate is expected to strip out Ryan’s modest reductions in immigration numbers because companies want to maximize the inflow of foreign consumers, workers and renters.

Any amendment adding the E-Verify system also will be opposed by Senate Democrats and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because it would penalize roughly 8 million working illegal-migrants.

A major reason for the defeat has been partisan opposition from Democrats. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer, for example, opposed Ryan’s compromise bill:

Business groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — also slammed Ryan’s bill because it trims the annual legal supply of immigrant consumers, workers and renters.

The proposed changes came after leaders used the afternoon to pressure, cajole and persuade GOP legislators to back the combined amnesty and reform. That effort failed, in large part, because President Donald Trump kept his distance from the amnesty proposal.