The GOP establishment sent a stealth pro-amnesty message to Spanish-language communities while Gov. Nikki Haley was delivering the GOP’s official English-language response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech.
The amnesty offer for roughly 12 million foreign migrants was hidden inside the Spanish-language response speech delivered by Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, which was broadcast simultaneously with Haley’s English-language speech.
His stealth-message, however, was also obscured by the uproar over Haley’s speech, which dumped on GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, and which also contained a stealth-message to GOP donors promising companies the ability to hire an unlimited number of foreign workers instead of Americans.
Most of Diaz-Balart’s speech was a word-for-word match with Haley’s speech. But the immigration-related section was very different because it suggested the GOP would support amnesty for the estimated population of 12 million migrants living in the United States.
“Our immigration system needs to be reformed,” said Diaz-Balart. Congress must “offer a permanent and human solution to those who live in the shadows,” he said in Spanish, underneath the radar of most media and listeners.
That phrase “live in the shadows” is typically used by Obama and amnesty-advocates to portray the migrants as pitiful victims of Americans’ popular immigration laws, not as deliberate violators of the popular, democratically-passed and court-approved laws. The “reform” word is used to portray a massive change as only a modest improvement.
Diaz-Balart topped off his hidden pitch with another one of Obama’s poll-tested phrases — “it’s not who we are.”
That phrase is increasingly being used by pro-amnesty House Speaker Paul Ryan. That Obama phrase tells Americans that they have no right to exclude the 150 million foreigners who want to migrate into the United States.
In contrast, Haley’s immigration talk downplayed any amnesty talk. It didn’t reject amnesty — as GOP voters prefer — but focused on the nation’s on-again, off-again history of immigration (now roughly 1 million people per year since immigration restarted in 1965), and on the problem of illegal immigration.
We must fix our broken immigration system. That means stopping illegal immigration. And it means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.
I have no doubt that if we act with proper focus, we can protect our borders, our sovereignty and our citizens, all while remaining true to America’s noblest legacies.
But Haley’s speech also included a stealth message, a code-word promise to big donors that the GOP would allow them to hire endless supply of legal foreign migrants who could serve as cheap workers and welfare-funded consumers.
Her pitch included the apparently innocuous statement that “no one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.”
Business donors and lobbyists know exactly what that phrase means — it means House Speaker Paul Ryan was using Haley to signal his support for President George W. Bush’s “any willing worker” policy that would allow companies to legally hire foreign workers if capable and hard-working Americans dare to ask for higher wages.
The “any willing worker” message sneaks past the public’s natural expectation of responsible limits on annual immigration into the United States.
The inflow of foreign workers is already for high. In 2013, for example, Obama used the laws to bring in an additional 2 million foreign workers, even as 4 million young Americans began looking for jobs. Unsurprisingly, wages-flatlined, profits rose and the stock market boomed, generating an additional $5 billion in gains for stockholders.
Ryan is a strong supporter of the extremely unpopular any-willing-worker plan. In the $11 trillion 2016 omnibus bill, for example, Ryan inserted a stealth plan to let companies bring in roughly 90,000 blue-collar workers from overseas in 2016. He subsequently defended the wage-cutting plan as a “tiny provision.”
Diaz-Balart is a leading pro-amnesty advocate, and worked closely with Ryan as Ryan secretly developed a pro-amnesty, pro-cheap-labor plan in 2014. That plan was torpedoed when GOP primary-voters in Virginia dumped GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Diaz-Balart’s stealth pro-amnesty message was rebroadcast to most of the roughly 38 million U.S. residents who speak Spanish at home. In fact, the United States has the world’s second-largest population of Spanish-speakers, just below Mexico’s level. The United State’s population is 311 million, plus roughly 12 million migrants.
Nearly all of the 38 million Spanish-speakers have been imported since 1980, because of demands from GOP business-donors who recognize the migrants serve as cheaper workers and welfare-funded consumers — and also cut wages paid to American blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals.
Less than 20 percent of naturalized Hispanic immigrants vote GOP, largely because the Democrats offer them social validation, economic aid and legal security.
Diaz-Balart’s pro-amnesty message was likely intended to reassure Hispanic voters that the GOP’s establishment will amnesty — or not stop a Democrat amnesty — of their illegal-immigrant relatives, co-workers and neighbors.
The GOP’s stealth support for amnesty likely won’t win a noticeable numbers of Latino voters to the GOP, because only a small percentage of GOP-sympathetic Hispanics really want an amnesty.
But GOP officials hope a soft approach might slightly reduce Latino turnout in 2016, and give GOP politicians around the country a message they can use to win over a few swing-voting Hispanics, while deflecting Latino activists who demand amnesty.
That strategy is being blown-up by Donald Trump, who is trying to win the 2016 race by mobilizing more American votes — white, black and brown — in the midwest by campaigning against illegal immigration, painful free-trade treaties and Obama’s appeasement foreign-policy.
In 2012, the GOP’s presidential candidate won 27 percent of the Latino vote, which comprised 10 percent of the electorate. Even if a GOP candidate had increased his share to 37 percent of the vote, he would only have gained 1 extra percentage point in the final result.
In contrast, whites comprised roughly 70 percent of the 2012 electorate. A boost of 10 points in the white vote would have gotten Gov Mitt Romney an additional 7 percent of the national vote, and a seat in the Oval Office.
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