President Donald Trump’s Domestic Policy Council has drafted a pro-American immigration-reform strategy, but it is already being shivved by opponents, including an anonymous business-first Republican in the White House.
The New York Times reports:
The outline … should be seen as an administration wish list rather than a set of demands, according to an official involved directly in the drafting.
The official said congressional approval of the new proposals is not required as part of Mr. Trump’s pledge to extend the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which protects undocumented migrants brought into the country as children. But, the official said, they represent an overdue statement of immigration principles, as requested by conservative legislators as they wade into the difficult issue of an overhaul of the immigration system.
The official’s demotion of the strategy to a mere “wish list” echoes an early September statement by Marc Short, Trump’s congressional liaison chief. In a breakfast with reporters, he trashed Trump’s border-wall demand as merely optional. “Whether or not that is part of a DACA [amnesty] equation or whether or not that’s another legislative vehicle, I don’t want to bind ourselves into a construct that makes reaching a conclusion on DACA impossible,” he said.
Business-first Republicans oppose immigration reform because they want to continue the national economic strategy of inflating the economy with additional immigrant consumers and low-wage workers. Their allies in the Democratic Party support the wage-cutting inflow because they expect the immigrants will eventually allow them to dominate national politics, just as they now dominate California politics.
The two groups are now pushing President Donald Trump to flip-flop on his campaign promises by approving a no-strings, no-border wall amnesty for roughly 3.3 million younger illegal immigrants. They are pushing for the record-breaking ‘Dream Act’ amnesty because that surrender would also block Trump’s fundamental RAISE Act reform, which would raise Americans’ wages by reducing the inflow of future Democratic voters.
The New York Times article cites a September 26 report by McClatchy news service which says:
The White House document includes several proposals already introduced in standalone bills — eliminating protections for unaccompanied children who are in the country illegally; restricting eligibility for asylum, humanitarian parole and abused or abandoned foreign children; raising fees for visas; reducing legal immigration by placing people with certain skills at the front of the line; hiring thousands more immigration officers, prosecutors and judges; and implementing E-verify, an online system that allows businesses to check immigration status. In some cases, the talking points cited the specific bill numbers.
The document was written after a months-long internal battle at the White House in which some of Trump’s top aides have been pushing him to protect Dreamers and use the issue as a bargaining chip for a larger immigration deal.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Monday that the administration plans to release a list of immigration proposals in “the coming days.”
White House officials began writing up the immigration strategy after Trump met in the White House on September 13 with Democratic Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi. After the meeting, the two Democrats announced that Trump had agreed to give up funding for the wall and to accept a hugely expensive, record-sized amnesty for 3.3 million younger ‘dreamer’ illegals. The meeting proved to be a fiasco, because Trump’s 2016 base rejected the no-strings, no-walls amnesty, forcing Trump and his deputies to deny the Democrats’ claims of a deal.
The McClatchy article echoes and highlights the establishment’s bipartisan opposition to any popular, wage-boosting package of immigration reforms, and even describes illegal aliens as “dreamers.” It quotes a Democratic staffer saying “there is bipartisan opposition to many of them,” and quotes a business lobbyist saying the “agenda to try to attach 50 percent cuts to legal immigration and other provisions completely undermines the president’s desire and chances for any deal.”
The reference to “50 percent cuts” likely refers to the popular, wage-boosting RAISE Act, which was drafted by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Georgia Sen. David Perdue, and is backed by President Donald Trump. The act boosts wages by excluding lower-skilled “chain migration” arrivals while allocating valuable green cards to the migrants who are best able to raise the productivity and wealth of Americans.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. But business groups favor mass-immigration because the inflow stimulates the economy by adding 1 million consumers and workers each year. That economic policy inflates company revenues and profits, but it deflates Americans’ wages and salaries.
The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals.
That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with illegals.
Amid the huge inflow of new workers, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades.
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