Republican Speaker Mike Johnson on Migration: 'We're Going to Force the Issue'

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is promising to push the House’s H.R. 2 immigration stabilization bill to protect Americans’ right to a secure border, amid open-borders advocacy at the White House and the Senate.

The promise was made as the GOP and Democrats draft rival end-of-year spending bills for government migration agencies, for aid to embattled Israel, and for continued war against Russian forces along the Ukraine-Russian border.

Democrats “opened up the border under [border chief Alejandro] Mayorkas’s direction and President Biden himself,” Johnson told Fox Business, adding:

They allowed for this serious situation that we have, and now, the FBI has said — Director Ray said — just a few days ago that they suspect there might even be terrorist cells that are setting up and planning only God knows against American citizens. … Well, yeah, of course, when you keep the border open, you allow dangerous people to come in. You open yourself up for that kind of chaos.

We worked with everything we have for the last nearly three years to get that border closed and secured, and they’ve ignored us until now. We’re going to force the issue — and people want us to.

Johnson’s tweet cited the GOP’s immigration stabilization bill, H.R. 2:

Breitbart described the bill in May:

The bill, which House Republicans tout as the “strongest” border package Congress has ever considered, is a combination of legislation from the House Homeland Security, Judiciary, and Foreign Affairs Committees.

It requires construction on the incomplete border wall to resume immediately, allocates funding for retention bonuses for U.S. Border Patrol agents, and withholds federal funding from any nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that continue their well-documented practice of aiding illegal migrants with food, shelter, and travel.

It also makes reforms to the broken and abused asylum process and mandates E-Verify, which requires employers to check that they are hiring workers who are not living in the country illegally.

Only two House Republican members voted against the consensus bill, which was constrained by the GOP’s shrinking bloc of pro-migration, business-backed establishment, and libertarian legislators.

Since the bill passed, public opinion has moved decisively against Biden’s flood, partly because the Hamas attack in Israel has spotlighted the immigration-caused chaotic diversity in Americans’ universities and cities.

The polling shift has entangled establishment Democrats in the diverse goals pushed by their new diverse base.

On November 2, for example, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) called for a “ceasefire” in Israel’s no-holds-barred offensive against the Islamic murderers who killed more than 1,000 civilians on October 7. Durbin is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, but he has also championed the mass migration that now threatens Democrats’ electability.

However, the Democrats’ main problem is the reality that the party’s middle management of donors and progressives strongly oppose any useful curbs on labor migration into Americans’ workplaces and neighborhoods.

On Friday, Politico reported on the Democrats’ closed-door effort to draft concessions that would allow the GOP to approve more funding for their pro-migration border policy: “Top Biden officials are preparing Democratic lawmakers and immigration policy advocates for the likelihood the administration will have to swallow compromises on asylum law in order for the president’s national security funding request to pass.”

The Democrats’ offer would tweak one border regulation, the Politico report said:

The specific asylum reform that has come up in private conversations with administration officials, according to people familiar with them, is a change to the credible fear standard. Under current law, if a migrant is subject to expedited removal and put through the credible fear process, that person is required to show a “significant possibility” of credible fear of persecution, torture or fear returning to their country. A tweak to the law’s language could in theory mean fewer migrants hitting the credible fear threshold and, therefore, more being denied the opportunity to apply for asylum.

Shortly afterward, the White House denied it would make that deal amid complaints from business groups and migration organizers.

The White House offer likely would have changed nothing because Mayorkas has already ignored many regulations and laws that protect Americans from chaotic migration. His resulting flood has shrunk wages, boosted housing costs, spurred terrorism risks — and has left the Democrats in an uphill fight for 2024.

However, Biden and the Democrats may be rescued by the pro-business wing of the Senate, left by Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).

So far, GOP leaders are signaling they will seek a compromise on border security — but will not try to do anything similar to the House’s reform bill — H.R. 2 — or even trim any of Biden’s quasi-legal inflows of labor migrants.

Semafor.com reported on October 31:

“I think Democrats will have to accept a really serious US-Mexico border protection bill in order to get our people on board for a comprehensive approach” to Israel and Ukraine, McConnell told reporters at his weekly press conference.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D. echoed the GOP leader. Without a border security deal, “nothing else falls into place,” he told Semafor.

Those McConnell-ignored immigration pipelines include Mayorkas’s massive “humanitarian parole,” his “CHNV” labor pipeline for 360,000 people per year, expanded refugee programs from South America, his planned increases in white-collar migration, his continued refusal to deport illegal migrants, and his unsupervised, fast-track asylum approval process.

Business-backed establishment Republican politicians prefer to talk loudly about the border chaos so they can quietly ignore the vast pocketbook and economic damage caused by migration throughout the United States. Since 2021, Mayorkas has used his various catch-and-release loopholes to invite roughly six million southern illegals into the United States, alongside at least four million legal immigrants and legal visa workers.

Nonetheless, Lankford, who has a history of accepting illegal migration, used a November 2 speech in the Senate to call for significant reform of the “Withholding” migration pipeline for fraudulent asylum-seekers:

“Withholding” is a new thing that’s being exploited by the cartels. It’s another gap in our system like asylum is. It says basically, “Hey … I’m afraid there’s going to be violence in my country, I want to go to an immigration judge.” … Then their next step is once they’re in, they snap a picture of their new little document that they have, send it back to their family and say “I paid this cartel, I said these words, I’m in the country,” and everybody else keeps coming.

We should fix this [withholding] gap … It’s just being exploited in sheer numbers [and] because we don’t know who these folks are. Many of them are folks that are coming to work and coming to connect with family. I get that they should come through a legal route and we should encourage them to be able to do that.

Lankford’s “Withholding” is a more ambitious version of the Biden administration’s “credible fear” tweak to Mayorkas’s use of asylum law to release migrants into the United States.

“It’s a pretty sophisticated point,” according to Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works for a mainstream reform group, the Center for Immigration Studies.

The current “Withholding” regulations he said, are so broad that Mayorkas’s appointees could give work permits to almost anyone who claims they fear torture by their home government. “They’re so broad that if Osama bin Laden had been brought alive to the United States, he would have been granted [withholding] protection,” Arthur said.

“I don’t think Americans understand how broad this is,” he added.

Lankford also slammed the administration’s loose screening of roughly 70,000 migrants from countries that produce terrorists and the administration’s Venezuela policy, which seeks to reduce illegal migration by legalizing migrants.

But Lankford also ignored the vast majority of migrant pipelines and loopholes Mayorkas created, including parole, as he repeatedly declared his support for more migration: “We’ve got to be able … to encourage legal immigration, discourage illegal immigration.”

However, the small but growing mainstream faction within the Senate GOP caucus is pushing back against any McConnell border giveaway.

“I would like to actually see substantial policy changes that would lead to significant border security like reinstitution of Remain in Mexico, something that would actually fix the asylum process,” Sen. J.D Vance (R-OH) told reporters.

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