About 150 GOP legislators, including GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), met Wednesday to hear the mainstream advocates’ consensus plan for border reforms, said Tom Homan, the former director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“I saw more support for taking some actions than I’ve ever seen,” Homan told Alex Marlow on Thursday’s edition of Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily:
The room was almost full and there was a lot of listening, a lot of learning, a lot of great questions, and a lot of great comments on what we proposed. And so I’m very confident that this plan we put together — it may not go 100 percent — [but] even if they go 50 percent …. That’s a major win.
“We went through the plan with them and talked to them why it’s so important, how this would change the issues on the borders,” he said. “This should be [the GOP’s] HR-1 [top priority bill] once you take back Congress,” he said.
The consensus plan was released Wednesday and is backed by a wide range of populist and business-backed advocacy groups.
The consensus group includes populist groups, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, The Remembrance Project, Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, Eagle Forum, and Conservative Partnership Institute,
The consensus plan was also signed by various business-backed groups, such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, The Heritage Foundation, and Heritage Action for America.
The consensus group also includes the National Border Patrol Council, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America, Center for the American Way of Life, Claremont Institute, Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research, and Education, and Judicial Watch.
The consensus group includes populist groups, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, The Remembrance Project, Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, Eagle Forum, and Conservative Partnership Institute.
The document lists straightforward laws and rules that would block nearly all of the economic migration across the southern border:
End the disparate treatment of contiguous vs. non-contiguous unaccompanied alien children (UAC) under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) and terminate the Flores settlement agreement that limits detention of family units to 20-days; and raise the credible fear standard
Restrict prosecutorial discretion to remove it as the catch-all excuse for limiting immigration enforcement
Mandate full implementation of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), otherwise known as Remain in Mexico, and appropriate funds for permanent court facilities along the border at every POE
The plan also calls for funding to hire border agents, build the wall, expand detention and end the catch and release of economic migrants, exclude victims of commercial crime from asylum benefits, bar the easy award of work permits to migrants, narrow lawsuit-imposed curbs on the immigration courts, and allow states to help implement federal immigration law.
The plan minimizes conflict with the GOP coaliti0n by minimizing any mention of migration’s pocketbook impact on Americans, such as reduced wages and inflated housing prices.
For example, the plan does not mention the visa workers — such as H-1B white-collar and H-2B blue-collar workers — that impose much economic damage on Americans. Nor does the plan set targets for deportations of the more than one million illegal migrants who have been imported via the migration pipelines created by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
But the flip side of the consensus is that the plan also does not support the calls by GOP-aligned Wall Street investors, Fortune 500 executives, and local businesses for more visa workers, more refugees, and more legal immigrants. The normal inflow of legal workers, consumers, and renters helps companies cut the wages paid to voters and raise the rents charged to voters.
Many donor-funded GOP legislators hide their support for legal immigration behind loud denunciations of illegal migration. The “legal good/illegal bad” perspective was pushed by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) who told Mayorkas on May 4:
My state is desperate for more [imported] workers. More truck drivers. More healthcare workers. We need more nurses. Our agriculture community needs more workers to harvest the crops. Our dairy farmers need people to work on the dairy farms. [Employers] want to get visas, more visas, to bring people in who are available to work in our country …
But we can’t make these kinds of [political] reforms to our legal immigration system … until you secure our border.
The GOP’s internal divide, however, was side aside by the groups as they agreed on the consensus document.
“This is more than an immigration crisis right now,” said Homan, adding: “This is a public safety crisis … It’s a public health crisis because the fentanyl has come across to kill over 100,000 Americans [in 2021], but it’s a national security crisis.”
Four advocates presented their consensus plan to the legislators, he said:
I said [the] Border Patrol is so overwhelmed [that] 50 to 70 percent are processing [migrant] family units. The border is empty [of agents]. I said there’s 70 percent in some sectors — 70 percent — of border agents are no longer on the line. I said they arrested 42 people on the terrorist watchlist. They’ve arrested people from 161 countries. over two and a half million since Joe Biden become president. Add to that the 700,000 got aways, known getaways based on camera traffic.
“You can’t have national security if we don’t have border security,” he said, adding, “I think a lot of groups who sat on the fence now see this is way beyond an immigration crisis at that point.”
GOP legislators have long been divided by the immigration issue.
Donor-friendly legislators tend to quietly favor more refugees, legal immigrants, and visa workers, even as they loudly decry illegal migrants. Populist legislators emphasize the costly damage of migration — crime, drugs, and national-security risks, for example — but rarely spotlight the pocketbook impact of cheap immigrant labor on Americans.
Some GOP legislators are also realizing that legal and illegal immigration strips heartland states of jobs, investment, real-estate value, and wealth. The loss happens because the migrants prefer to live in the Democratic-dominated coastal states, where coastal investors prefer to create new jobs with the government-supplied migrant labor.
However, polls show that GOP voters are becoming increasingly skeptical about immigration, so pushing GOP legislators to take a strong position against illegal and legal migration.
For example, an October 2021 poll of 1,500 adults by YouGov.com showed, that 56 percent of Republicans say that immigration makes the U.S. “worse off.” That skeptical view is shared by 35 percent of independents. Only 16 percent of Republicans, and 31 percent of independents, say it makes America “better off.”
Second-generation immigrants split 32 percent “worse off,” and 40 percent “better off.”
Similarly, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll of 4,173 adults showed that 32 percent of all respondents say immigrants create a “major risk” that the number of jobs available to American workers will be reduced.
The poll did not provide a partisan breakdown of the data. But it did show that only 33 percent of the respondents trust the GOP to do a better job than the Democrats. Twenty-three percent of respondents said they did not trust either party.
The AP poll also showed growing concern that “native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants.”Fifty-eight percent said they are “extremely/very concerned” (29 percent) or “somewhat concerned (29 percent). Only 20 percent said they were “not at all concerned.”
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland and southern states.
An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The policy is hidden behind a wide variety of excuses and explanations, such as the claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants” or that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees. But the colonialism-like economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, splits foreign families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.
The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-led empire of competing identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he insisted.
Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of foreign contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.