A business-backed group wants to add a migration-boosting amendment to the Democrats’ draft “global warming” tax-and-spending package.
The demand for the Senate to expand migration comes from the business-backed Niskanen Center. “These are pro-family reforms that will reunite millions of families separated by immigration restrictions and generate significant economic benefits and revenue — potentially over $4 trillion to GDP in 10 years,” Kristie De Peña, a policy advocate at the center, said Monday.
A tweet from the Niskanen group suggested five million people could get green cards from the climate bill.
That flood would be roughly equivalent to four years worth of legal migration, and it would spike Wall Street by reducing wages, raising rents, and boosting consumer sales. Niskanen gets funding from Silicon Valley foundations, George Soros, and other progressive gr0ups.
But Democratic legislators are wary about the push because they fear immigration amendments may crash the huge climate and taxation bill in the evenly divided Senate.
“This is not the [legislative] vehicle” for immigration, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told a pro-immigration website. “We want to get this through this week and stay til it gets done –. opening up the amendment process [to include immigration] makes it very difficult,” said Durbin, who is the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate.
The so-called “vehicle” is the climate change bill that is being pushed through the Senate via the fast-track reconciliation process.
That process includes so-called “vote-a-rama” in which Senators are expected to offer many amendments to the spending package. The amendments are each decided by a majority vote, so if even a few Democrats support a GOP-backed amendment, it gets added to the Democrats’ climate bill.
The GOP is likely to oppose such Democratic migration expansions because the flood of new immigrants would quickly boost the Democrats’ voting scores by 2030.
But the business-backed demands for more migration may also be intended to deter GOP amendments.
For example, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told Bloomberg on Tuesday that he has amendments “in the queue” for debate. The amendment may extend the Title 42 legal barrier on the border.
“Republicans appear likely to try to force votes on thorny issues such as immigration and border security that could divide Democrats and possibly put the overall bill in jeopardy,” RollCall.com reported on August 2. “You can expect a lot of challenging votes,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the magazine.
The proposed Title 42 extension is loudly denounced by Democrats, even though Joe Biden’s border chief is allowing most of the migrants to either be exempted from the Title 42 barrier or else sneak across the border with the help of coyotes.
Both parties are using the reconciliation debate to posture as opponents of illegal immigration prior to the November election, said Jon Feere, a former border agency official who is now working with the Center for Immigration Studies.
For example, the leading bipartisan bill to extend the Title 42 amendment does not force Biden’s border chief to close any of the loopholes he has created, told Breitbart News.
“Unfortunately, there are a lot of weak Republicans who are also okay with political messaging that is ineffective [in stopping migration],” said Feere.
“If Republicans were fighting harder, they would be adding amendments that require the hiring of thousands of new ICE officers and eliminating all of [President Joe Biden’s] illegal-migration encouragement policies,” he added.
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, or 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.