Texas Senator John Cornyn’s office is denying a CNN report that he is drafting an immigration bill, and instead drafting a bill on “border security and interior enforcement.”
The Senator is “working with the Administration on legislation that addresses border security and interior enforcement only,” according to a statement from the Cornyn’s office. That border focus excludes the basics of immigration law, such as rules for the annual number immigrants and guest-workers, for required skill levels, and rules for integrating into Americans’ civic society.
Cornyn’s denial was aimed at a CNN report which declared Cornyn is “quietly working on an immigration and border security bill, sources say, in what could be the first credible effort to deliver a legislative win on immigration policy under President Donald Trump.”
But Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is also downplaying Cornyn’s own claim that he is working with the agency to draft a new border-security policy.
“We’re working with many members of Congress to fulfill the President’s direction in his EO [Executive Order] to ‘plan, design and construct a physical wall along the southern border, using appropriate materials and technology to most effectively achieve operational control of the southern border,” said a statement from agency spokesman David Lapan, who added:
The EO mentions technology as well as the physical wall and Secretary [John] Kelly has frequently said the plan also must include people – the men and women of CBP and Border Patrol who patrol and protect the border, every day. That is DHS’s plan.
The agency’s emphasis on a wall is very different from Cornyn’s record of opposing any wall that might reduce the supply of cheap workers and consumers to Texas businesses.
Cornyn’s staff declined to offer any details about his secret bill.
During his time in the Senate, Cornyn has downplayed support for a wall and has instead emphasized the use of border patrols and surveillance technology, both of which can be quickly removed by a future president.
“I think people would say, if you are talking about a physical wall, it would rate very low” in importance, he said in a February radio interview.
Cornyn told Texas reporters in February that “I don’t think we’re just going to be able to solve border security with a physical barrier because people can come under, around it and through it.” He added:
I believe that successful border security is composed of three components. One is infrastructure, which you could call that a physical barrier, wall, or fencing. Secondly, technology, and third, personnel.
Because if you don’t have the people there to detain people trying to illegally enter the country when they come over the wall or around the wall or under the wall or through the wall, it doesn’t make much sense. So I really believe that successful border security entails a combination of all three, and each of those will vary a little bit depending on where you are along the border.”
Cornyn is working on his secret proposal with Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, who chairs the House’s Committee on Homeland Security Committee.
McCaul’s office did not respond to emails from Breitbart.
However, McCaul’s prior legislation on border security has also downplayed the wall. In 2013, for example, he tried to jump-start the “Gang of Eight” amnesty-and-cheap-labor bill with a bill that reduced border security rules and was embraced by Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other progressives.
In November, McCaul was praised by Jeh Johnson, the former for DHS secretary for former President Barack Obama. “I don’t know anybody who is stronger on border security in Congress that I have dealt with,” Johnson said.
Other Senate legislators are drafting new bills that may be combined later this year into another proposed “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill.
That is a risky strategy for the GOP, if only because Democrats lost nine Senate seats the year after they pushed their “Gang of Eight” bill in 2013.
One possible element of any new comprehensive bill is GOP Sen. Ron Johnson’s unpopular proposal to invite additional 500,000 guest workers, plus their families, to take jobs from U.S. workers every year. The federal government already allows companies to import almost 1 million temporary “contract workers” each year, even though four million Americans turn 18 and begin looking for jobs each year.
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin is also pushing a “BRIDGE Act” that would provide amnesty to several hundred thousand illegals who were brought to the United States as children by their parents. Once the beneficiaries receive the amnesty and then citizenship, they can also put their illegal-immigrant parents on track to get residency, citizenship, Medicare and Social Security payments.
Under current policies, federal immigration policy adds roughly 1 million legal immigrants per year, who help business groups by serving as lower-wage workers, welfare-aided consumers, and as downtown renters.
This legal inflow includes some very skilled workers and some people who become very successful entrepreneurs, but it also dumps a lot of unskilled workers into the country just as a new generation of technology is expected to eliminate many types of jobs. It also lowers salaries so it annually shifts $500 billion from employees to their employers and to Wall Street, and it forces state and local government to provide $60 billion in taxes to businesses via routine aid for immigrants, it drives up housing costs, and it pushes millions of marginal U.S. workers out of the labor force and into poverty, crime and opioid addiction.
High immigration also reduces employers’ need to recruit disengaged Americans, to build new facilities in high-unemployment areas, or to buy productivity-boosting machinery or to demand that local schools rebuild high school vocational training departments for the millions of youth who don’t gain much from four-year colleges.
The resulting poverty and civic conflicts increase ballot-box support for Democrats, ensuring that more states — especially high-immigration California — are dominated by the Democratic Party’s big-government policies.
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com
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