Dick Durbin Praises George W. Bush: ‘Bless You’ for Amnesty Op-Ed

The Senate Democrats’ leading advocate for amnesty and immigration, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), is endorsing the pro-amnesty push underway by former President George W. Bush.

“Bless you, George W. Bush, for saying what you did,” said Durbin, who has a long history of supporting migration into the United States, regardless of the damage done to Americans’ wages, housing costs, and civic stability.

In an April 22 interview with Punchbowl News, Durbin said the GOP should adopt Bush’s pro-migration policies:

Will it have an impact on Republicans? I think it must. I believe that many of them want to move beyond the Trump era into a new rebirth of this Republican Party, and I hope that they’ll look back to George W. Bush and some of his values that were expressed in this article is an indication of a good path for both of us.

Durbin’s mention of an article by Bush refers to the former president’s April 16 op-ed published by the Washington Post. The op-ed is titled, “Immigration is a defining asset of the United States. Here’s how to restore confidence in our system.”

“Increased legal immigration, focused on employment and skills, is also a choice that both parties should be able to get behind,” Bush wrote in an article that endorsed amnesty for the many millions of illegal immigrants who are now being used by employers even as 20 million Americans are unemployed:

Increased legal immigration, focused on employment and skills, is also a choice that both parties should be able to get behind … We could also improve our temporary entry program, so that seasonal and other short-term jobs can more readily be filled by guest workers who help our economy, support their families and then return home.

…

The reward [gained from immigration] has been generations of grateful, hard-working, self-reliant, patriotic Americans.

Durbin’s praise for Bush comes as he tries to rebuild the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty coalition. Three of the four GOP members of the Gang of Four are gone, so Durbin is trying to recruit GOP replacements, including Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

Durbin’s strategy is to first get their approval for smaller amnesty proposals, said a Hill staffer. Once they sign on, Durbin will expand the proposal into a monstrosity that delivers more immigrant workers and consumers to Democrat-run states, including New York, California, and Illinois, the staffer said. That flood of new immigrants means that job-creating investors will shift their attention and cash away from the unemployed Americans and unused land in smaller, GOP-run states, the staffer added.

Bush justifies immigration as a way to expand the power of the United States, grow the economy, and aid employers with grateful, compliant workers. Bush does not argue that immigration raises average Americans’ wages, which would help Americans buy homes and raise families.

Unsurprisingly, Bush’s migration record has been a political disaster for himself and the GOP.

For example, Bush pushed Congress to create an “Any Willing Worker” program in 2004.

The program would have given shares of Americans’ citizenship to foreigners if they agreed to undercut Americans in the job market by taking jobs where employers offered extremely low wages.

“New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country,” Bush announced on January 7, 2004. “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job,” he said.

The New York Times reported January 7, 2004:

The president’s proposals were designed to appeal to Hispanic groups, a constituency that the White House is focusing on as Mr. Bush seeks re-election this year. The proposals are expected to be embraced by President Vicente Fox of Mexico, who has been lobbying for them for the past three years.

Bush has long favored laws that allow employers to replace Americans with migrants. “Hell, if they’ll walk across Big Bend [of Texas], we want ‘em,” he told advisors while serving as governor of Texas, according to author Jan Reid.

Bush’s poll ratings fell to roughly 33 percent in 2008, after he pushed his plans for amnesty, more immigration, and more visa workers in 2006 and 2007. In January 2021, all 50 GOP Senators lost their jobs as members of the Senate majority when immigration helped Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia.

Those elections allowed Durbin to become the deputy majority leader in the Senate.

“On Immigration, George W. Bush Is a Portrait of Failure,” said the headline over an April 20 op-ed post by a pro-migration author at the pro-migration Bloomberg news site.

In 2016, Donald Trump pulverized Bush’s expected successor, Jeb Bush, and helped the party adopt the pro-American immigration policies favored by American voters. Jeb Bush’s 2016 economic plan was based on a greater inflow of foreign graduates into Americans’ jobs.

Over the next four years, Trump helped push up Americans’ wages and forced companies to invest in wealth-producing, labor-saving machinery — amid furious denunciations by pro-migration employers, investors, and their progressive allies.

“Any Republican still taking their cues from George W. Bush or the neocons is laughably out of touch,” a Senate GOP aide told Breitbart News on April 19:

Calling for mass amnesty while lockdowns have forced millions of Americans out of work is unhinged. This kind of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and pro-corporate globalism decimated the working class … people have had enough.

Bush’s pro-migration policies are cheered by many anti-GOP activists, including pro-migration op-ed author Jennifer Rubin at Jeff Bezos’ pro-migration Washington Post:

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, rational, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly university-credentialed progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It 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, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.