‘We Will Be Prepared to Fight:’ Pro-American Immigration Reformers Gear Up for 2018 DACA Amnesty Battle

Despite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s assertion that the Senate will not seek to attach an amnesty for illegal aliens onto a year-end spending bill, the Republican establishment and Democrats are already looking to slip the amnesty into a 2018 spending bill.

A POLITICO report revealed that a group of the Republican establishment’s most ardent supporters of mass immigration and amnesty – including Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), along with Democrat Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) and pro-American immigration reformers Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) – met with President Trump’s Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly to discuss negotiating an amnesty deal for the nearly 800,000 to 3.5 million enrolled and eligible illegal aliens under the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program:

At a Tuesday afternoon meeting with nearly a dozen senators deeply involved in immigration policy, White House chief of staff John Kelly pledged that the administration will soon present a list of border security and other policy changes it wants as part of a broader deal on so-called Dreamers, according to people who attended the meeting. The plan could come in a matter of days, senators said.

Pro-American immigration reformers like NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks say she and other amnesty opponents are prepping for a battle in the first month of the new year. “We will be prepared to fight on January 3,” Jenks told Breitbart News.

The reformers’ biggest concern remains the Republican establishment’s will power to push an amnesty into the January 2018 spending bill.

“I am very, very worried that this gets wrapped into the omnibus spending bill,” Jenks said. “The omnibus spending bill is where the fight is going to be.”

Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which like NumbersUSA advocates for lower levels of legal immigration to relieve the burden on U.S. workers, told Breitbart News that the fight against amnesty “is not going away” in 2018.

“The advocates for the DREAM Act are going to keep trying… they’ve been trying for 18 years,” Melhman said. “They are persistent.”

Mehlman said that Trump has indicated a willingness to work with the Republican establishment and Democrats on the DACA issue, but that the negotiations are contingent on ending the process known as”chain migration,” mandatory E-Verify to prevent businesses from hiring illegal aliens over Americans, and an end to the Diversity Visa Lottery.

“The deal has to be conditioned on a number of things,” Mehlman said.

Under chain migration, which makes up more than 70 percent of all legal immigration to the U.S., newly naturalized immigrants are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country with them. In the last decade, chain migration has imported more than nine million foreign nationals to the U.S.

Every year, the Visa Lottery — championed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — gives out 50,000 visas to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries, including those with known terrorist problems – such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Yemen, and Uzbekistan.

As Breitbart News reported, the Visa Lottery has imported 30,000 foreign nationals to the U.S. from terrorist-funding countries since 2007.

Trump has demanded an end to both chain migration and the Visa Lottery.

Like the failed plan to slip a DACA amnesty into a year-end spending bill, Jenks says the Republican establishment and Democrats will try to do the same in 2018.

“They believe they can just hide this in a spending bill,” Jenks said.