Lankford Plan Helps Biden Migration, Hinders Trump Crackdown

Sen. James Lankford’s (R-OK) border proposal helps President Joe Biden import more migrants — and hinders President Donald Trump from reducing the inflow, says Rosemary Jenks, at the Immigration Accountability Project.

The key problem is the so-called “trigger” authorization that automatically curbs immigration once 8,500 illegals arrive at the border in one day, or 5,000 people arrive for seven days in a row, Jenks told Breitbart News.

This new trigger covertly would override an existing emergency law that allows the president to shut down the border at much lower levels of illegal migration, she said:

So this is Congress establishing that an [border] emergency is either 4,000 or 5,000 encounters per day, or 5,000 [migrants] over a seven-day average … [and] 8,500 [migrants in a day] is when you really, really shut down the border. So one of those three numbers is what establishes in the law is an emergency.

So let’s say Trump got elected. He comes in and he says “There’s 2,000 migrants being encountered every single day. I’m declaring an emergency and shutting down the border!” And then a court says “No, no, no. Congress passed a law that says it’s 4,500 to 8,500.”

Yet advocates, including Lankford and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) — who strongly supports more labor migration — describe the trigger as a key feature of the proposal.

“So if [Trump] were to be president, this would be new authorities that he had actually asked for when he was president before,” Lankford told CBS News on January 28.

Biden makes the same claim. “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed … if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law,” Biden said on January 26.

Lankford’s plan was drafted under the direction of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the leader of the GOP caucus in the Senate. Many GOP Senators oppose the giveaway to Biden.

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Trump also opposes the plan. “There is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America,” he said on January 27.  “I’ll tell you what … I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” he said.

The Lankford proposal — and the “trigger” authority — also protects Biden’s parole programs which are being used to import roughly 80,000 job-seeking migrants per month or roughly 1.1 million in 2023.

Biden’s parole inflow is facing four court cases — including one where a federal judge in Texas is soon expected to block a program that extracts 700,000 workers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Biden’s deputies are appealing one case after it shut down his award of parole to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants.

Barring some unlikely feature in the so-far unreleased plan, “the latest law supersedes preceding law, so it absolutely overrides [current law] — this makes our laws weaker,” Jenks said.

The Lankford proposal reportedly allows some of Biden’s parole programs to continue even if the trigger is activated to restrict border crossings.

Moreover, the “trigger” reportedly will still allow the border processing of 1,400 additional migrants per day. So even if the “trigger” was active all year, it would not stop the entry of 500,000 economic migrants.

But the trigger authorization would not be active all year, according to CBS, which reports: “There would also be a limit on the number of days each year the president could invoke the authority.” The report does not mention how many days it would operate a year.

So the best case would be a minimum of 500,000 migrants welcomed during 364 days of trigger crackdown.

That huge inflow would be in addition to perhaps 500,000 new paroled migrants, plus one million legal immigrants, plus an additional yearly inflow of refugees, overstays, and visa workers.

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Rolando Salinas Jr via Storyful

The combined inflows would allow the government to deliver roughly one migrant for every American newborn — or for every American who turns 18.

That law would empower the government to enforce rapid demographic change in the United States.

Two polls show a majority of Americans view Biden’s mass migration as an “invasion.” Also, several polls show a plurality of Americans view legal and illegal migration as a burden, not a benefit.

Already, from 2021 until September 2023, Biden’s deputies admitted — or failed to stop — roughly 6.2 million illegal migrants across the southern border.

Since October, his deputies have counted another 1 million migrants — which is greater than the number of Americans born during those three months.

The Lankford proposal makes a great show of tightening rules that qualify people for political asylum. But it reportedly sets no limits on migrants who claim they face torture if they are sent home. The “Convention Against Torture” rules are easier to meet than the asylum rules, and they allow migrants to live and work in the United States.

But those migrants would not be allowed to become citizens and vote.

Current law says all migrants must be detained until they are sent home or until their asylum pleas are decided. Biden has refused to enforce that law, party by pointing out that Congress has refused to fund the needed detention centers.

Still, Biden has used his other legal authorities and funding to spend tens of billions of dollars to import, transport, house, and feed millions of migrants as they compete for Americans’ wages and homes.

But Lankford’s proposal reportedly narrows the “shall detain” law to just single men and does not curb the labor-trafficking smuggling of teenagers and young men via the 2008 law allowing “Unaccompanied Alien Children” into the United States.

Moreover, media reports say that migrants arriving at the border will get fast-track work permits. “That’s a fraction of the people that go through the process,” Lankford told CBS. “The vast majority of people that actually go through this process will be turned around and were deported.”

But millions of migrants are expected to appear at the U.S. border — often with manufactured asylum claims — because even a “fraction” outcome is the lottery to a modern life in the United States.

The bill is also a giveaway to Democratic city governments, she said.  The migrants will be allowed to work for grateful companies, their wages will reduce the cost to local taxpayers, and there will be less need to house them in city shelters where they are visible to local TV stations.

“There’s no question that this plan will do more harm than good,” said Jenks. By setting the emergency number far above the current legal market of zero, “it is normalizing record-breaking illegal immigration,” she said, adding:

There’s no end to catch and release, there’s no real fix for parole abuse, there’s no real asylum fix…  I haven’t seen anyone mention “Safe Third Country” [legal barriers] … They’re trying to ensure basically that there is a continual flow of illegal immigrant immigration … [because] it’s a Democrat wish-list.

Lankford is normalizing “record-breaking illegal immigration and Republicans now own the border crisis,” she said, adding “Yay!”

Lankford defends his plan by showcasing subsidiary issues. For example, he told Fox News on January 28:

There’s no amnesty. It increases the number of border patrol agents, increases asylum officers. It increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals. It ends catch and release. It focuses on additional deportation flights out. It changes our asylum process so that people get a fast asylum screening at a higher standard, and then get returned back to their home country. This is not about letting 5,000 people in a day.

But he also admitted to CBS that he has made little progress on fixing Biden’s parole pipelines:

Parole is still an issue for us. … Instead of deterring immigration, [Biden’s deputies] are literally incentivizing illegal immigration. They’re handing people a parole and a work permit Day One. That has to stop, we can’t just have a system where we have that.

That parole failure — and the trigger problems — do not seem important to Lankford and his donor-funded GOP allies because they do not admit that more migration is an economic threat to the vast majority of Americans.

Legal and illegal migration reduces wages, spikes housing costs, and discourages establishment investment in recruiting sidelined Americans, in productivity gains, or in Heartland jobs. The pocketbook damage of migration is why so many voters now oppose both legal and illegal immigration, why it is the nation’s top issue, and why Trump is leading in the 2024 race.

But, Lankford told CBS, “This is a national security issue for us.”