The House GOP leadership has released a brief and vague two-page policy platform on border security for the 2022 election, after more than a year of inaction.
Titled “House Republicans: We Must Secure the Southern Border,” the low-drama paper ignores the voter-mobilizing, economic impact of legal and illegal migration, and was released on a Friday before the weekend.
But the platform does include significant promises of 2023 legislation to reform current laws on asylum, parole, and other high-profile issues outside the narrow issue of border control.
“It is 1,000 percent better than it was going to be,” said Rosemary Jenks, the government relations director for NumbersUSA. She told Breitbart News:
Republican leadership [recently] realized that they needed to combine the judiciary and homeland security [committee] jurisdictions and to include meaningful reforms that will close the loopholes in the law that the Biden administration is exploiting to drive the mass illegal migration.
“It is worth noting that the framework contains most of the demands from our broad coalition effort,” said a statement from RJ Hauman, government relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform:
When the 118th Congress opens with a new House majority, it will be in large part because Americans rejected the Biden administration’s purposeful dismantling of our nation’s borders, as well as Speaker Pelosi’s amnesty-first legislative agenda. House Republicans will have a mandate to immediately legislate unflinchingly, and this framework from the American Security Task Force is a great first step …
We thank Republican leaders for listening to our expertise and insight, and stand ready to work with them on turning this into legislative text.
The coalition effort cited by Hauman refers to the Consensus Document presented in May to 150 GOP legislators. The legislators included Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).
However, the GOP’s promised legislation will likely be vetoed by President Joe Biden, even if gets through the Senate, said Jenks.
But the battle will help educate the GOP legislators, their staffers, and the voters, so setting the issue up for the 2024 presidential election, she said.
The likely presidential veto also means that the GOP legislators must include useful language in the 2024 appropriations bill when it is drafted in 2023, she added:
It’s going to be absolutely critical for the appropriations committee to be good on this issue next year because obviously this [package of legislative changes] is not going to be signed into law. So we’re going to be relying on appropriators to use the power of the purse to force the Biden administration to take actions that he clearly does not want to take, like detaining illegal aliens, removing illegal aliens, and removing criminal aliens.
I am somewhat optimistic because there will be a lot of pressure from Republicans on the [GOP members who are] appropriators to address some of these issues and to do it in in creative ways.
You can’t just throw money at the Biden administration and expect them to do what they’re told — they’re not going to do it. So you have to have creative ways with carrots and sticks to essentially force them to do what they don’t want to do.
For many years, GOP leaders have been reluctant to talk about how both legal and illegal immigration skew the national economy in favor of coastal investors. They instead hide from that huge problem by diverting voters’ attention to the problems of border chaos, illegal migration, drugs, crime, and even the claim of terrorists.
That reluctance to talk about immigration in large part is driven by the closed-door clout of the GOP’s corporate donors, chiefly at the Congressional Leadership Fund. For example, the fund provided $262,000 to GOP candidate Mayra Flores in Texas. She was quickly bundled into backing a green-card giveaway during one of her first votes.
The GOP’s donors oppose effective border controls because they profit from any legal or illegal inflow of workers, consumers, and renters. That inflow tilts the economy away from ordinary Americans, toward coastal investors.
The corporate donors’ clout is amplified because the GOP has not created a way for small-dollar donors to fully fund populist candidates.
The new “Southern Border” campaign document includes a toothless agenda for the Homeland security committee. That short, passive-voice, and ineffective section was drafted over the last year by outgoing Rep. John Katko (R-NY), who was a business-backed, pro-migration establishment legislator.
Katko gave up his congressional job because New York Democrats used their extra political power from immigrant voters to add more Democrats to his home district.
The Katko section includes a promise to fund the border wall, even though Biden’s deputies refuse the spending the funding that they already have.
The Katko section also promises to:
Clear the Carrizo Cane and Salt Cedar. These invasive species along the Rio Grande River impede CBP’s activities along the border. The non-native plant is also an obstacle for first responders and should be eradicated.
The donor-backed, leadership-picked GOP members who drafted the “Carrizo Cane” section included Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL), Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), Rep. Greg Pence (R-IN), Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), and Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA).
The second section part of the election platform is the responsibility of the House judiciary committee, whose leading Republican is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
The judiciary section promises useful legislation that would:
Expand Authorities Like Title 42 to Address the Fentanyl Crisis and the Unprecedented Increase of Illegal Border Crossings. Under current law, Title 42 Public Health Authorities can only be exercised to limit the spread of a communicable disease, such as COVID-19. However, as the country faces a mounting public health crisis from illicit narcotics coming across the Southern border, we must ensure DHS has the authority to immediately expel illegal aliens to gain operational control of the border, and for Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to suspend the entry of people or property in order to mitigate the flow of fentanyl and other lethal drugs into American communities.
Regain Operational Control of the Southern Border. Over the past 18 months, the Biden administration has lost operational control of the Southern border by refusing to enforce common sense laws and practices to maintain order and protect the wellbeing of Americans and legal immigrants. This has only empowered and enriched criminal drug cartels, who must be confronted and defeated with the full force of the U.S. Government.
House Republicans propose the following steps that should be taken to regain control:
Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). Require implementation of an MPP that ends the Biden administration’s lax border enforcement and restores order at the Southern border.
End Catch and Release. Fix the Flores settlement to enable DHS to keep children and their parents together while their immigration cases are pending.Strengthen the Asylum Process. Change asylum laws to protect legitimate claims and prevent fraudulent claims, strengthen the asylum process, and ensure that those seeking asylum apply in a safe country through which they traveled instead of waiting to apply in the U.S.
End the Disparate Treatment of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs). Reform the removal process for non-trafficked, UACs from noncontiguous countries, to ensure consistency and eliminate a dangerous pull factor while deterring trafficking and smuggling of UACs.
Fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Reject the Democrats’ “abolish ICE” policies by fully funding ICE enforcement and removal operations, including detention bedspace, criminal investigations, and drug trafficking mitigation efforts
Ensure Employers Use E-Verify. Protect U.S. jobs for Americans and legal immigrants, by ensuring U.S. employers use the E-Verify system to confirm that their employees are eligible to work in the United States.
End Abuse of Parole Authority. Ensure that Secretary Mayorkas can no longer abuse Congressionallyprovided parole authority to create mass avenues for immigration that do not exist in law.Prevent Benefits Abuse. Ensure that illegal aliens are not enrolled in taxpayer-funded welfare programs like Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security.
Increase Penalties for Visa Overstays.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants —plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers.
The inflationary policy makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.
Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.
Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
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-directed empire of competitive, resentful 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 in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
Business-backed migration advocates hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration is good for migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
The polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration — but they also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary 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 American citizens owe to one another.