Democrats are re-staging a Senate vote Thursday on their failed February border bill as they try to blame Republicans for their unpopular economic policy of mass illegal migration.
Democrats are also using the debate to bury the nation’s immigration debate about the damage of President Joe Biden’s cheap-labor migration policy and towards the smaller issue of border management.
“This [Democratic] bill, if it passes, would be effective in bringing order to the southwest border,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) said on Tuesday.
The “orderly” goal is shared by many progressive advocates and Democratic donors. The bill would have helped “more migrants come here successfully and efficiently,” said progressive columnist Greg Sargent.
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On Thursday, Democrats will try to pass the border bill through the Senate. The bill is reportedly unchanged from the February version which would have accelerated the inflow of low-wage economic migrants by expanding various asylum and parole gateways. It would not offer any significant curbs or legal authorities to deport illegals or penalize employers who hire illegals.
The bill is expected to fail, but it distracts the media from publicizing the massive economic and pocketbook damage caused by Biden’s mass migration. That goal is increasingly important as President Donald Trump spotlights the damage during the campaign. Biden’s unpopular policy is “flooding America’s labor pool with millions of low-wage illegal migrants who are directly attacking the wages and opportunities of hard-working Americans,” said a May statement from the Trump campaign.
On Wednesday, the third-ranked Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), blamed Trump for the bill’s defeat, saying:
They decided to ask one man whether they should go forward [and vote for the bill]. Want to guess who it was? Donald Trump. Donald Trump said no, I’m sorry, I don’t want to see this issue go away. I want to be able to work on this issue as part of my presidential campaign in the year 2024 … That’s what happened and so that bill died.
“Do you care more about the security of your country or do you care more about the political prospects of your party and your presidential candidate?” Murphy declared.
Some Republicans, however, are spotlighting the Democrats’ migration bait-and-switch.
On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told reporters at a Senate press conference.
When you hear Democrats say they want to secure the border, what they really mean is they want to make it more efficient [for the government] to encounter, process, and disperse illegal immigrants — who do not have a valid asylum claim — throughout America. That’s what this bill does … [and] it spends $20 billion to not secure the border but to more efficiently, encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants.
Republicans are also throwing the political blame back at the Democrats.
The Democrats’ staged debate is a political bailout, said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), adding:
It is six months out now from an election and Democrats are in crisis mode. They’ve seen the polling. They’re going to have to answer for the 11 million illegal aliens that have crossed this border … This is a crisis that the Democrats have spent three years making.
“What they’re doing right now is a political stunt,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), told reporters.
Johnson also spotlighted the Democrats’ prior statements on their border bill.
“The border never closes,” Murphy gloated in a tweet as the border bill was being unveiled.
“We were playing chess, they were playing checkers,” Democratic Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told Politico.com after Democrats loudly blamed Trump for the bill’s defeat. “We also end up in much better [political] shape on the border than we were three months ago,” Schumer gloated.
Since 2021, Biden’s unpopular migration has delivered more than 10 million legal, quasi-legal, and illegal migrants into Americans’ housing, workplaces, and schools, despite popular immigration laws that were intended to protect Americans from cheap-labor migration.
The result has been lower wages, higher housing costs, higher interest rates, lower productivity, and greater civic chaos for 330 million Americans. But Biden’s migration-fuelled economic policy also provides huge windfall gains for Democratic donors, including investors, federal and state government agencies, as well as urban retailers, landlords, and employers.
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The GOP-run House has passed an alternative bill, HR-2, that protects Americans from illegal migration.
Despite much media chatter, Biden and the Democrats are refusing any significant curbs on migration, or any political compromise to their migration economic policy, during the run-up to the November election. Instead, they rely on Mexico’s promises to reduce the migrant inflow and get the issue of the nation’s TV screens.
“We have seen the focus of the government shift under [President Joe] Biden, from controlling immigration to focusing primarily on whether the [border] flow is orderly,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “The Biden people want to manage mass illegal migration, they don’t want to stop it, and that is something that’s new,” he added.
However, the economic damage of Biden’s migration has smashed Biden’s poll ratings — and now Democrats are trying to persuade swing voters that Trump is responsible for the stalemate.
“In Democrat circles, Trump is the boogey man,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) declared on Tuesday.
The Democrats’ migration economic policy was defended by Sen. Richard Durbin (-IL) during a Tuesday confrontation on the Senate floor when Durbin blocked an effort by Cruz to bring up the GOP’s HR-2 immigration update for a Senate vote.
Durbin said:
When [Biden] decided to help the refugees from the Ukrainian war … we estimate that 36,000 Ukrainians came to Chicago [and] we basically said to them, “If you can find a family to sponsor you, we’ll give you your work permit, and you can stay here while the conflict continues in your country.” They were absorbed into Chicago and Illinois and Midwest economy without a ripple. They’re hardworking people, good people … and they really contributed to the Chicago scene … The authority of a president like Biden to make that decision for Ukrainian refugees is removed by the [GOP] bill.
…This [GOP] bill would also impose mandatory electronic employment verification, known as E-Verify, on every sector of the American economyv … So this [GOP] bill would impose mandatory E-Verify, and would include the agriculture industry and these undocumented [illegal migrant] workers. Fifty percent of agriculture workers would be unable to work! What would that do to our food supply chain? … it woould raise food prices.
But the Democrats’ border bill provides more cheap migrant workers to U.S. employers, said Durbin: “[It] addresses the needs of the economy, provides a path to citizenship for [illegal migrants who entered while children] and [illegal] immigrant farmworkers, and lives up to our nation’s legacy of providing safe harbor to refugees fleeing for their lives.”
Durbin’s description is polls showing that a majority of Americans say migration is an invasion, and pluralities saying it is a burden on Americans, not a “nation’s legacy.”
This public shift helps to explain why GOP politicians are increasingly talking about the pocketbook damage caused by the Democrats’ Extraction Migration policy. For example, Cruz responded to Durbin by saying:
I found it striking that when he was saying how much Chicago loves illegal immigrants, that he somehow admitted that the mayor of Chicago has declared an emergency because of the crisis of illegal immigrants flooding into the city of Chicago, [and] illegal immigrants taking resources from the residents of Chicago [for exampler,] being housed in Chicago O’Hare Airport.
We’re seeing illegal immigrants in places like New York City being put in public schools and throwing Americans out of their facilities …. [Durbin] said “Farmworkers: We can’t get anyone to work on the farm unless we have those open borders!” Apparently, in the Democrats’ view, Americans are lazy and don’t want to work and the only way to grow our food is to open our borders to full-on invasion. And listen, if some people have to die, if people have to get murdered by criminals and gang bangers released by Democrats day after day after day, that’s an acceptable price to the Democrats.
If you listen to his criticism of HR-2, you know what he said, “Well, the people who are here illegally, they wouldn’t be able to work. My God it would stop illegal immigration!”
“That is the Democrats’ objection: They object to this [GOP HR-2] bill because it would do what they say they want to do,” Cruz said.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.
The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.
The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced. Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.
The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.
The colonialism-like policy has damaged small nations and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.