Exclusive: Marco Rubio Fails To Support Single GOP Immigration Enforcement Bill

The United States is being deluged with illegal immigrants, spurred on by the hope of amnesty. In response, conservative lawmakers have introduced a wide array of legislative proposals to clamp down on illegal immigration.

Breitbart News can now exclusively report that, despite Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign rhetoric, the presidential hopeful hasn’t cosponsored a single one of these immigration enforcement proposals, nor introduced any of his own in the two years since he was the very public face of the Gang of Eight in the Senate.

Instead, while the Senator has left his conservative colleagues’ enforcement proposals out to dry — helping give space to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to keep them from a vote — Rubio has introduced and sponsored measures designed to expand immigration into the United States.

Rubio was the only Republican to join Democrats in cosponsoring a resolution designed to encourage more refugee resettlement; Rubio was one of only three Republican cosponsors of a Bob Menendez resolution celebrating the cultural transformation of the nation helped on by Latin American immigration, and Rubio co-introduced legislation to boost Muslim immigration and make it easier for tech executives to replace their American employees with foreign labor.

According to NumbersUSA’s analysis of some two dozen Senate immigration enforcement plans offered since the Gang of Eight amnesty bill failed — information shared exclusively with Breitbart News — Rubio has failed to support any of his conservative colleagues myriad of bills designed to remove illegals, cut off tax benefits and shut down sanctuary cities.

“Despite his repeated claims in the aftermath of the Gang of Eight amnesty that he believes immigration enforcement has to come first, Sen. Rubio has not even cosponsored, let alone authored, an enforcement bill,” says Rosemary Jenks, the Director of Government Relations for NumbersUSA.

As the immigration crises have mounted since Rubio and Obama advertised amnesty to the world in 2013, a number of Republican senators have introduced legislation designed to close America’s borders to illegal aliens.

Yet the analysis shows that Rubio has not cosponsored any of these bills from his conservative colleagues – even while appearing on the same shows– such as Sean Hannity’s program– where he originally pledged his commitment to border security during the Gang of Eight push.

Jenks tells Breitbart News:

Other senators have introduced bills to mandate E-Verify, substantially increase interior enforcement, bar sanctuary jurisdictions from releasing criminal aliens, and encourage state and local law enforcement to cooperate in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, but Sen. Rubio has been nowhere to be found. In fact, the only immigration bill that Sen. Rubio has cosponsored since the Gang of Eight amnesty is one introduced by Sen. Hatch that would massively increase the number of skilled foreign workers coming to the United States to compete with U.S. workers for already scarce American jobs.

As Breitbart News has previously reported, Rubio continues to support all of the policies in Gang of Eight bill. However, Rubio seems to have taken a page from John McCain’s playbook— who after co-authoring the McCain-Kennedy 2007 amnesty bill, ran on a platform of border security to get reelected to the Senate where he promptly began working on the 2013 amnesty and mass immigration bill with  Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama.

Senator Rubio similarly has sought to signal to conservatives that he is serious about “border security.” As Rubio declared in the second Republican presidential debate:

We must – we must secure our border, the physical border, with – with a wall, absolutely. But we also need to have an entry/exit tracking system. 40 percent of the people who come here illegally come legally, and then they overstay the visa. We also need a mandatory e-verify system.

During the Gang of Eight push, however, Rubio voted against legislation to implement an entry-exit tracking system, he voted against an amendment to construct a double-layer border fence, and he voted for a final bill after Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s e-verify amendment was defeated.

Chairman Grassley has again introduced e-verify legislation this year (S. 1032), Senator Rubio has failed to support it. The following senators, however, have cosponsored Grassley’s bill: Jeff Sessions, Mike Lee, Tom Cotton, David Perdue, David Vitter, James Inhofe, John Boozman, Shelley Capito, Bob Corker, Mike Enzi, Deb Fischer, Roger Wicker, Thad Cochran, John Thune, Joni Ernst, Tim Scott, and Richard Shelby.

Sen. Ben Sasse has introduced the Amnesty Bonuses Elimination Act (S. 748) which would bar recipients of Obama’s unlawful executive amnesty from receiving Social Security Numbers. This bill has been cosponsored by presidential contender  Ted Cruz, as well as Jeff Sessions, David Vitter, Tom Cotton, Mike Lee and David Perdue. The bill not has not been cosponsored by Marco Rubio.

Sen. Sessions has offered the Davis-Oliver Act (S. 1640) to improve immigration enforcement. This bill has been cosponsored by Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, James Inhofe, David Perdue, David Vitter, John Boozman, and John Isakson. The bill has not been cosponsored by Marco Rubio.

Sessions has also offered the Protecting American Lives Act (S. 1842) which would cut off funding to sanctuary cities. The bill has been cosponsored by Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Tom Cotton, James Inhofe, John Boozman, Tim Scott, David Perdue, Roger Wicker and Mike Crapo. The bill has no been cosponsored by Marco Rubio.

These bills comprise the essence of conservative senators’ comprehensive enforcement strategy. McConnell has not brought these bills up for a vote, in part, because they lack support from pro-amnesty senators like Marco Rubio.

While Sen. Rubio has failed to sign his name to a single conservative enforcement bill, this past summer he became the only Republican to join 20 Democrats to cosponsor a resolution to recognize June 20, 2015 as “World Refugee Day.” The resolution “reaffirms the bipartisan commitment of the United States to promote the safety, health, and well-being of the millions of refugees and displaced persons.”

It also “calls upon the U.S. government to continue its international leadership role in response to those who have been displaced.” Rubio has expressed support for plans to take in even more Muslim refugees, and in a recent Boston Herald interview, expressed his openness to a refugee expansion forwarded by Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley. Democrat politicians benefit from Muslim immigration as only 11 percent of all Muslims in America (a figure that includes wealthy Muslims) identify as Republican or lean-Republican, according to Pew Research.

The discovery that Rubio has not cosponsored any conservative plans to enforce immigration law necessarily calls into question whether the recent months Rubio has spent delivering his new round of immigration talking points to conservative opinion-makers like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, is in any way substantively different from the multitudinous misrepresentations he made during the Gang of Eight sales pitch, during which he repeatedly declared the La Raza-backed bill to be, “The Toughest Border Security and Enforcement Plan in U.S. History.”

Rubio’s misrepresentations resulted in the bill’s Senate passage with 68 votes.

Democratic senators have explained that during the Gang of Eight push it was Rubio’s job— at the behest of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell— to say what was necessary to “neutralize” and “proselytize” conservative opposition to Obama’s amnesty plan.

Indeed, as the Tampa Bay Times reported, Rubio “brought the [President’s immigration] argument directly to prominent conservative media figures, from Sean Hannity to Bill O’Reilly.”

Rubio’s misrepresentations have been well documented by publications like the National Review, which ran a cover story in 2013 entitled “Rubio’s Folly,” outlining the ways in which Rubio used the trust conservatives had placed in him against them.

Rubio’s failure to support a single one of his colleagues’ significant enforcement bills further suggests that Rubio’s current rhetoric is no more accurate than his Gang of Eight rhetoric.

At the time of the Gang of Eight push, ICE Union president Chris Crane explained that Rubio had “no intention of seriously addressing enforcement issues” and border security. While Rubio made an effort to reach out to special interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce, for months he refused to meet with Crane. As Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker revealed, Rubio allowed the Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO to have a free hand in writing the guest worker portions of the bill. “We basically said to [the Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO], if you guys reach an agreement amongst yourselves, we won’t question it, but the Gang will just slide your version of it into the bill,” a Schumer aide told Lizza.

By contrast, this was not a courtesy Rubio paid to law enforcement. “[Senator Rubio] directly misled law enforcement officers,” and refused to fix “provisions that he himself admitted to us in private were detrimental, flawed and must be changed,” Crane declared.

Perhaps most striking is the fact that after the death of multiple Americans including Kate Steinle, whose father told Congress in July that the last words he heard from his daughter were, “Help me, Dad” after she was shot down by the illegal criminal alien, Rubio failed to sign his name to a single bill that would put an end to sanctuary cities, according to NumbersUSA’s findings.

On television, however, Rubio claimed to be concerned about the issue— describing sanctuary cities as “unacceptable” and “completely out of control.”

Rubio’s failure to cosponsor the Immigration Subcommittee’s Sanctuary city bill helped reduce pressure on Mitch McConnell from bringing up such legislation for a vote at the height of the controversy.

Rubio’s decision not to cosponsor legislation that would put an end to the deadly practice is consistent with his record. During his time in Florida state politics, Rubio allowed legislation to die, which would have clamped down on the state’s sanctuary cities— a move that has allowed Miami to flourish into one of the nation’s most steadfast protectors of illegal immigrant criminals.

Rubio has, however, put his name on – and, in fact, introduced – one immigration bill since the Gang of Eight: a bill to triple the number of H-1Bs and to make it easier for companies to hire foreigners.

The Immigration Innovation Act of 2015, or I-Squared, is backed by one of Rubio’s biggest donors: Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and is also endorsed by FOX’s Rupert Murdoch and Disney’s Bog Iger – via their immigration lobbying group the Partnership for a New American Economy. The Murdoch-Iger group also endorsed Rubio’s Gang of Eight bill, as did Oracle. Disney’s support for Rubio’s H-1b plan is noteworthy because has recently terminated 250 of its American workers and required them to perform a ‘knowledge transfer’ to those hired to replace them. ‘Knowledge transfer’ is an industry euphemism for training your less-costly foreign replacement.

What’s also noteworthy about Rubio’s decision to sponsor a visa-tripling bill is that Rubio has long since adopted the talking point that we need to do a better job at tracking visa-holders. As Rubio said in July during a Fox News interview:

 Forty-percent of illegal immigrants in this country are coming legally. They are overstaying visas and we are not tracking them. We have no idea who they are or where they are. I’ve said repeatedly that until we deal with that issue, we can’t do anything else on immigration.

However, despite saying that “we can’t do anything else on immigration” until we can track foreigners on visas, Rubio has offered legislation to triple a foreign visa program instead of legislation to track these foreigners. Rubio’s bill does not contain the security he says is vital, even as it substantially boosts Muslim immigration into the United States— both through the temporary visa and also through lifting of the university green card cap.

The need to track foreigners better was also one of his favorite talking points during the Gang of Eight debate, even as he was voting against Sen. Vitter’s amendment to implement that very tracking system.

In effect, Rubio is pushing to increase visa issuances to some of the most terror-prone regions of the world while ignoring his own stated concern of tracking foreigners brought into the country on temporary visas.

Rubio has also stated on the campaign trail he wants to admit more Muslim refugees, make citizenship available to illegal immigrants, and make it easier for foreign labor to get into the United States on American visas.

Rubio’s push to expand the immigration levels beyond the existing annual flows comes on the heels of a new Pew Research study which demonstrates that “nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the United States,” since Ted Kennedy 1965 immigration law. This influx has transformed the demographic, economic, and political landscape of the country.

“Between 1965 and 2015, new immigrants, their children and their grandchildren accounted for 55% of U.S. population growth. They added 72 million people to the nation’s population,” exclusively as a result of immigration. Pew projects that by 2065— if Congress does not enact legislation to curb immigration levels— more than 1 in 3 U.S. residents will be foreign-born or the child of a foreign-born parent. By contrast, in 1970 less than 5 percent of the population was foreign-born.

Pew’s polling data showed that Americans want to see immigration levels lowered, not boosted, by a ratio of more than 3-to-1.  Coolidge enacted immigration cuts after the high levels in the early 20th century in order to facilitate Americanization and wage growth.

Yet Marco Rubio has made clear that he believes the historic number of foreign-born residents to still be too low, and wishes to increase immigration rates markedly.

Rubio’s immigration bill would have imported 7 times more green cards in the first decade of its implementation than did Ted Kennedy’s immigration bill in its first decade.