Immigration Reformers: We ‘Mobilized’ to ‘Defeat’ Past Amnesties, Will Do Same with White House Amnesty Plan

Pro-American immigration reformers are vowing to help “defeat” a plan by White House advisers to give U.S. citizenship to millions of illegal aliens.

Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA, which advocates for an immigration policy that benefits American workers, said in a statement that his powerful network of amnesty opponents is ready to fight, should White House advisers continue pushing the expansive amnesty plan.

Beck said:

NumbersUSA has no choice but to oppose what is being suggested as the White House “framework” for a mass amnesty.  The plan seems eerily similar to the blueprint used for the 2007 Bush-Kennedy amnesty, which appeared to end chain migration, but wouldn’t actually end it for 17 years. NumbersUSA mobilized our huge grassroots army to defeat the 2007 amnesty, and we will do the same if this plan is proposed next week. [Emphasis added]

Under the White House framework, young-adult illegal border crossers and visa overstayers would get immediate benefits, including, most importantly, the right to compete with Americans in the permanent job market.  But vulnerable American workers would get little or no relief from the competition of chain migration for 15 to 20 years.  Even if new applications for chain migration categories are stopped immediately, the framework would allow chain migration to continue for decades by allowing all of the four million foreigners in the waiting list to continue coming. [Emphasis added]

The plan, crafted by officials including former Koch Brothers executive Marc Short, Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kirstjen Nielsen, and senior adviser Stephen Miller, would begin by giving a pathway to U.S. citizenship to at least 1.8 million illegal aliens who are enrolled or eligible for the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The plan also includes:

• A nearly 10-year wait before extended-family chain migration is ended, providing no immediate relief to Americans
• A repurposing of the 50,000 visas that currently import foreign nationals through the Visa Lottery
• $25 billion to fund the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border
• No provisions to enact mandatory E-Verify, which would ban employers from hiring illegal aliens
• No provisions to deal with the issue of ending birthright citizenship

Like Beck’s NumbersUSA, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — one of the leading pro-American immigration reformers in the country — told Breitbart News that the expansive amnesty is “an extremely bad idea,” as it does not suggest how it would limit the amnesty.

As with the 1986 amnesty, the White House advisers’ amnesty plan has the potential to lead to massive amounts of fraud, allowing millions more ineligible illegal aliens to gain a pathway to U.S. citizenship. The plan, additionally, does not include provisions that would prevent future administrations from waving the pathway to citizenship requirements, opening the amnesty up to potentially the full 12 to 30 million illegal aliens living in the U.S.

Every year, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 foreign nationals, with the vast majority deriving from family-based chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. In 2016, the legal and illegal immigrant population reached a record high of 44 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.

Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.