The Senate GOP leader for the 2022 mid-term elections, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), is trying to narrow the national immigration debate to just a border crisis amid pressure from donors eager for more imported workers and consumers.
“This is clearly a border crisis, and no one knows it better than the people that live along the border and actually all over the state of Texas,” Scott told a conservative gathering in Texas on July 11.
Scott’s description of a “border crisis” buries all mention of the nationwide damage that immigration does to Americans’ jobs, wages, productivity, and housing. In numerous polls, the questions about pocketbook issues spike poll responses from the voters — including the non-ideological women who will largely decide the winner of the 2022 mid-term elections.
But that pocketbook message about national migration is anathema to the GOP donors whose cash is needed to help fund the 2022 campaigns.
So Scott’s “border crisis” pitch dodges the national economics.
Instead, he is pushing a visceral, emotional argument for voters to oppose the loose borders created by President Joe Biden and homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas. Scott told the CPAC audience:
I think we all should find it disgusting that Biden and Harris can sit idly by when you see a little 14-year-old Nicaraguan boy frightened because he was left in the desert by himself to die.
Think about that. Biden and Harris act like there’s no problem here, but there’s a 14-year-old little boy afraid he’s gonna die. Did you see that picture of those two little Ecuadorian girls — the three- and five-year-old girls dropped over a 14-foot wall, just abandoned in the middle of the night. Doesn’t it disgust you?
Think about it. We can all think of a three- and a five-year-old little girl. What are they doing? They’re playing out in the park; they’re playing with their toys. But these girls were left alone and scared. They had to be terrified. They probably had just traveled hundreds of miles. They probably had just one set of clothes. Their whole family was worried about what was going to happen, just dropped in a foreign place.
That’s what Biden and Harris are doing. I’ve talked to Border Patrol agents who said the women, they’re so worried about being raped that they cover themselves with feces so they’ll be disgusting to men. This is what Biden-Harris are doing. It’s disgusting. And Harris has a cavalier attitude to this whole human toll that has happened along the border. And this is their crisis. It’s the Biden-Harris crisis.
Scott then outlined his 2022 plan to GOP voters:
So what we have to do is we have to talk about this, and we have to fight every day to make sure we have a secure border, and we’ve got to call the Democrats out for exactly what they are doing.
Now that’s my job. I’m the new chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. We are going to win in ’22, and as a U.S. Senator, I will do it every day, and I know your senators from Texas are doing it every day. We’re going to fight for secure borders.
Scott is betting that his negative “disgusting treatment of kids” message will overcome the Democrats’ investor-drafted and hopeful-sounding “humane, orderly, and safe” pitch.
So far, the Democrats’ uplifting message is winning — partly because it disguises the massive inflow of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and taxpayer-aided consumers into Americans’ communities.
The media-backed “humane, orderly, and safe” strategy seems to be helping to boost support for Biden’s loose border policies, especially among suburban women. For example, a Harvard Harris poll of 2,006 registered voters, conducted June 15-17, showed that voters split 50 percent to 50 percent when they were asked, “Is the Biden administration creating an open border or is it just trying to enforce immigration laws more humanely?”
The House GOP leaders appear to be following the same don’t-mention-the-economics policy amid constant pressure from the investors, including Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us and its orchestra of pro-migration groups.
Scott’s office did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
A one-sided July 11 report in Politico spotlighted the donor pressure on Scott, who must also raise many millions of dollars to help the GOP win the 202 midterms:
…figures speaking out include board members of the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC), who have spoken to 41 Republican senators about the bills. Some who describe themselves as lifelong Republicans say they may start voting across party lines if they don’t see the party bend on immigration. Two Republicans who spoke to us threatened to withhold financial support: Cuban-American billionaire Mike Fernandez, a former Republican turned independent who’s previously donated millions to GOP candidates, and Bob Worsley, a former GOP State Senator in Arizona.
“The people who have been there on the issue for a long time, like Lindsey Graham, are nowhere to be found at the moment,” said John Rowe, Exelon Chairman emeritus and national GOP bundler. “He doesn’t particularly want to talk to me at the moment. And that of course is frustrating because I’ve supported him for a very long time.”
In prior years, Fernandez and Rowe have bitterly denounced the GOP’s voter-enforced opposition to labor migration.
The corporate pressure is hitting many GOP leaders because investors gain whenever the federal government extracts more consumers, renters, and workers from foreign countries for use in the U.S. economy. For example, the Dallas Morning News posted a July 10 op-ed by Dennis Nixon, chief of the IBC Bank in Laredo, calling for an expansion of legal immigration:
We must thoroughly modernize U.S. immigration and asylum laws to adequately address the workforce needs of our economy. The truth is, we have a demographic problem, and without immigrants, we don’t have enough workers to meet our needs across virtually every job sector …
Finally, along the Texas-Mexico border many cities bridge the Rio Grande, like Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and our border communities are really one city in two countries. We live, work and play as one community, and it’s time for Texas and the U.S. to listen to the solutions offered by those of us who call the border home.
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce and are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants, and the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
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, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity 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 leftists — 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 legal immigration, visa workers, and illegal migration undermine democratic self-government, fracture Americans’ society, move money away from Americans’ pocketbooks, and worsen living costs for American families.
Migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.