Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s October 22 claim that Americans “owe” an amnesty to the Deferred Amnesty for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) illegal migrants.
“We do not owe anything to these illegal aliens,” Cotton told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “They should be grateful that they’ve been tolerated in this country for all these years,” he said.
Cotton’s comments came the day after Biden insisted he will deliver an amnesty to at least 11 million illegal immigrants. The beneficiaries would include the roughly 700,000 migrants who are part of President Barack Obama’s 2012 DACA mini-amnesty.
Biden said:
I am going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people and all of those so-called ‘dreamers,’ those DACA kids, they are going to be immediately certified again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship … They [DACA migrants] have been here — many of them are model citizens. Over 20,000 of them are first responders out there taking care of people during this crisis. We owe them. We owe them.
Biden’s claim that the DACA illegals are ‘first responders’ is likely based on a 2020 study that claimed 29,000 DACA illegals play a critical role in countering China’s coronavirus.
Cotton responded to Biden’s comments:
He didn’t just say that we’re gonna give them an amnesty in the first hundred days — encouraging a rush to our border over the next six months — he said that we have to do it because we owe it to these illegal aliens.
…
We owe nothing to illegal aliens. We owe a duty to American citizens to help them get back on their feet and get back to work. And that’s true whether you know whether your parents came over on the Mayflower or it’s true whether you came here the right way, the legal way, and just took the oath of citizenship last week. That’s who we owe something to — to American citizens, not to the foreigners.
Biden’s declaration that Americans owe a moral debt to illegals came just a week after he insisted that all Americans are merely immigrants instead of native-born citizens in their own country:
We are a country that is a country of slaves who came here 400 years ago, indigenous people, and everyone else is an immigrant. And we’re a diverse country. Unless we are able to treat people equally, we’re just never going to meet our potential.
Biden delivered his dismissal of Americans’ unique status during the October 16 NBC town hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the claim that Americans owe an amnesty to illegals “is an appalling way of looking at this issue and one that’s likely to turn people off.”
“If the illegal immigrants have an entitlement to amnesty, then the consequences for Americans are irrelevant … it doesn’t matter what the consequences are for American citizens,” Krikorian said.
“The logical conclusion of Biden’s approach to immigration is that illegal immigrants have as much right to be here as citizens, that borders have no moral implications — as long as you can get across the border, you have the same rights in every respect as an American citizen or a legal immigrant who follows the rules — and that’s appalling,” Krikorian continued.
Cotton pointed out that Biden promises an amnesty uncoupled to any migration reforms that would help Americans.
“Biden is saying ‘I’m gonna send an amnesty bill to the Congress in my first hundred days without asking anything in return, without trying to secure our border, without enforcing immigration at workplaces against unscrupulous employers, without cracking down on visa fraud,'” Cotton said.
The Democrats, Cotton added, are “now the party of open borders, mass migration, and blanket amnesty … that’s a big shift and from where the Democrats were just eight years ago.”
In contrast, Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. For example, in many speeches, Trump ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.
Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants, to end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.
Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and to get many left-wing reporters to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.
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