President Joe Biden’s refusal to control the border has wrecked hopes by establishment Republicans for an immigration deal this year, according to pro-amnesty Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“We find ourselves in a situation where there is no way forward until you control the border,” Graham told a Wednesday press conference on Capitol Hill. He continued:
The Biden administration has created chaos where there was order [under former President Donald Trump]. And the only way we’ll ever be able to sit down with our Democratic colleagues is for us to regain control of the border, and I want to say without any hesitation, Biden has lost control of the U.S. Mexican border. Until he regains control by implementing policies that work, it’s going to be very hard to do the [DACA young illegals] “dreamers” or anybody else. Why? Because … legalizing anybody under these circumstances will lead to even more illegal immigration.
Republican voters will compromise, Graham claimed, but then added, “You’ve lost us as a party because none of us can go back home and say, ‘It’s now time to embrace legalization of illegal immigrants’ while the border is completely in chaos.”
He continued:
Here’s what’s happened that makes a solution impossible under these circumstances: We withdrew from the [Northern] Triangle [asylum] agreement. We withdrew from the Remain in Mexico policy, we stopped construction on the wall. Democrats introduced a bill that’s large on legalization and soft on border security. And here we are with no place to go. If you are really serious about solving the immigration problem, you wouldn’t have put us all in this box.
To Democrats, he said:
So if you’re serious about solving the immigration problem, you will be serious about changing our laws on asylum, you will finish building the wall where it makes sense. You will restore the Remain in Mexico policy, you will go back into the treaties with the [Northern] Triangle countries because that will lead to the calmness at the border we need to find a solution here in Washington.
However, Biden’s border deputies do not view the border rush as a chaos crisis but merely a fast-changing management problem. Overall, top officials have repeatedly said they are trying to expand existing legal opportunities for Central Americans to move into America, regardless of deep public opposition. There is no evidence, yet, that they would offer to control the border in exchange for GOP support of an amnesty.
Graham’s statement showed his normal zig-zagging between the GOP donors who fund much of the party and the GOP voters who elect Graham and his colleagues into power.
The donors want to boost profits with more imported workers, consumers, and renters, but Americans want higher wages and cheaper housing in their own national labor market.
Despite Graham’s claim that GOP voters could support an amnesty, there is little evidence that the Democrats’ far-left leadership could support the pro-American policies demanded by the GOP’s populist wing.
But the statement also indicates that Graham will not cooperate with backroom efforts by Democratic leaders — such as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) — to recruit a bloc of roughly 10 GOP Senators for some amnesty bill.
Graham’s statement also suggests that other GOP Senators will avoid Durbin’s outreach. Those Senators include Susan Collins (R-ME), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
Meanwhile, Sen Rick Scott (R-FL) has drafted an amnesty for at least 1 million illegals, which his staffers are quietly trying to sell it to staffers of other GOP Senators. Scott is in charge of fundraising for the Senate GOP’s 2022 campaigns, so he’s under intense pressure to import for business donors a new round of cheap labor, taxpayer-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters.
But a wave of public protest against the draft amnesty will allow Scott to cash the checks — and then tell business owners he cannot deliver an amnesty.
Still, GOP politicians have little or no room to make donations-for-amnesty deals with their business allies. On January 5, 2022, for example, all 52 GOP Senators lost their jobs as members of the Senate majority when a wave of immigrants in Georgia helped flip two GOP Senate seats into Democratic seats. Many of those immigrants were delivered to Georgia’s voting booths by the 1990 immigration deal, which was crafted by then-President George H. W. Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA).
The next amnesty could help Democrats win Texas, Georgia, and other states, locking GOP Senators out of the majority for many years.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
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