‘Gang of Eight’ Advocates Sought Amnesty for 35 Million Illegals

Amnesty advocates hoped to legalize 35 million illegal migrants when they pushed the Senate’s 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill, according to one of the campaign organizers.

The advocates’ amnesty goal was far larger than the media-magnified claims that the so-called “Gang of Eight” amnesty would benefit roughly 11 million illegals.

The revelation was buried in a July 16 Politico article, titled “How Trump and Republicans ‘won the war’ on immigration.”

“Before [in 2013] we were talking about a pathway to citizenship for 35 million people,” said Felipe Benitez, a Latino political strategist and immigration advocate. “Now we’re barely figuring out if we can get 500,000 spouses of U.S. citizens protected status.”

In 2013, Benitez was working for the Alliance for Citizenship, a defunct group funded by a left-wing non-profit dubbed The Advocacy Fund. The Alliance members were left-wing, union-linked groups, not by the networks of investor-funded groups such as FWD.us.

Benitez’s website boasts that he:

Designed and implemented a strategic communications plan to launch a coalition of 38 community, minority, civil rights, labor, and environmental organizations fighting for immigration reform in the United States. Members of the coalition included: National Council of La Raza, Voto Latino, SEIU, AFL-CIO, America’s Voice, Center for Community Change, Casa de Maryland, Mi Familia Vota, National Immigration Law Center, among others.

He has worked for a group that tries to turn out the Latino vote, Mi Familia Vota:

Provided strategic communications, digital and fundraising support for a national organization devoted to the construction of political power for the Latino community in the United States through the expansion of the electorate through direct, sustainable citizenship, voter registration, GOTV, and issue organizing in key states.

The 35 million number described by Benitez is far larger than any public assessment of the illegal-migrant population.

WATCH — Fmr. Obama ICE Director on Migrant Crime: Problem Is “Sheer Volume” at Border, “Hard” to Determine Who’s Dangerous:

“That’s ludicrously inflated, but he said it,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Breitbart News reported in 2018:

The population of illegal migrants is roughly 22 million, or twice the establishment estimate of 11 million, say three professors from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

…

The population estimate also raises the political and economic stakes of any amnesty legislation. In 2014, public opposition blocked the bipartisan, establishment, media-boosted Gang of Eight bill, which claimed to offer an amnesty to just 11 million migrants. Currently, advocates for a ‘Dream Act’ amnesty claim it will provide green cards to roughly 3 million sons and daughters of illegal immigrants.

The population of illegal migrants rises because of new migration, but it also drops as illegals go home, die, or use the “Adjustment of Status” process to get green cards.

Whatever the illegal population was in 2020, it has dramatically increased under President Joe Biden, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

President Joe Biden’s deputies have let 6.2 million illegal migrants into the United States, according to the CBO. Another 1.2 million migrants were admitted via Biden’s “parole” loophole.

WATCH — Rep. Monica De La Cruz on Biden’s Open Border Disaster:

M. Perdie, J. Knudsen / Breitbart News

Benitez’s lobbying coalition consisted of left-wing groups. But if successful, the lobbying obviously would have shifted earnings from employees to investors, and from young people to old people.

The vast amnesty would also have shifted wealth and political power to big government because impoverished voters would demand policies that tax the investors and employers who gain from immigration.

Unsurprisingly, the investor-backed Gang of Eight amnesty galvanized public opposition to the government’s wealth-shifting economic strategy of Extraction Migration. The amnesty was defeated by a primary vote in 2014, and in 2016, the voters picked a New York real-estate developer for the presidency.

Many Republicans, including the most prominent member of the Gang of Eight, Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fl) learned from the amnesty push. In his 2023 book, he wrote:

Across this country today, the immigration system has been corrupted and exploited. And it began, as many of America’s problems do, with the fundamental shift toward a globalized economy.

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But not every business could be exported, which meant Wall Street simply figured out how to import cheap labor, much of it [clarification, not all] coming from illegal immigrants. This was a slower, more subtle process. Sure, some politicians made a big deal about “jobs Americans wouldn’t do,” but otherwise the only outcry came from workers who found their wages stalled, benefits cut, and hours slashed until they could be replaced by someone willing to work more hours for less.

More often than not, it is about jobs Wall Street doesn’t want Americans to do because hiring Americans would require higher wages and better working conditions. To them, it is better to import cheap labor and buy off Americans with cash welfare programs provided by the government.

Biden’s current government0-directed inflow is further reducing Americans’ ability to earn decent wages, according to a July 15 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:

Overall, my estimates suggest that around one-fifth of the easing of labor market tightness in 2023 can be attributed to the spike in immigration. Given the delays in migrants transitioning to the labor force, further declines in the V–U [vacancy-to-unemployment] ratio are likely this year.

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The dashed line in Figure 4 demonstrates that states that experienced higher per capita volumes of undocumented immigrants in 2023 broadly had a lower V–U [vacancy-to-unemployment] ratio in the first few months of 2024.

“According to the data, Florida, New York, Texas, and California received the highest volume of new cases in both 2022 and 2023. In per capita terms, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Utah, and Colorado were also among the highest for new immigration court filings,” the report said.