Establishment advocates are insisting that January 19 is the drop-dead deadline for a DACA or Dreamer amnesty, just two weeks after the advocates insisted that December 22 was the drop-dead deadline.
The January deadline claim is based on the advocates’ claim that agency officials need a few weeks planning time to prepare and launch the amnesty by March 5 when the two-year work-permits invented by President Barack Obama will start expiring at a more rapid pace.
GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, have described March as a deadline, even though hundreds of thousand of work-permits will remain valid after that date. For example, only half of the roughly 650,000 work permits will expire by November 2018, says a business group.
The last of the DACA work-permits granted by Obama to illegals will expire in in 2019, but the expirations will open up to 300,000 jobs — perhaps at decent wages — before November to some of the nine million working-age American men who have been sidelined by post-1990s wage-freeze.
Here are nine reasons why President Donald Trump should ignore the claimed January deadline — and the alternative March deadline — to ensure that American voters get what they want from the establishment:
1. Delays help Trump pressure Democrats to accept his popular pro-American policies. Many Democrats don’t believe Trump will allow the DACA work-permits to continue expiring in March, so feel little pressure to trade their policy priorities for continuing work-permits. So if Trump declines to negotiate a deal until after the expirations accelerate in March, Democrats will recognize that Trump is playing hardball. “They [now] think they have the upper hand, they don’t really believe he will pull the trigger and let [DACA] expire,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “It is important to not just wait until March but to wait until [more illegals] lose their work permits to ensure the Democrats come back to the table and stop saying ‘My way or the high way.’
2. Delays help Democrats make mistakes. In December, Trump called the Democrats’ bluff when they suggested they would shut down the government spending unless the GOP gave them an amnesty. That was a bluff in December, and it will be a bluff in January or March or November 2018 because polls show that Americans strongly oppose any government shutdown to help illegals. But Democratic leaders are under pressure from angry illegals — many of whom believed the Democrats’ shutdown-or-amnesty threats — and that grassroots pressure may cause the Democrats leaders to make concessions or make further mistakes, such as blocking the next budget deal which is due by January 19. The Washington Post reported January 4: “Government funding may depend on a deal with Democrats on” dreamers, said Stan Collender, a nonpartisan budget expert and Forbes columnist.
3. Delay helps the economy improve, not merely expand. The government has a duty to help create a labor market where Americans’ ability to fairly earn higher wages is balanced with pressure on investors to buy American-made, labor-saving machinery instead of just relying on government-imported cheap labor. But any DACA or a bigger ‘Dreamer’ amnesty would subsidize investors by giving them more welfare-funded immigrant-customers, so enlarging the consumer economy while damaging the nation’s productivity-based economic growth. Any focus on the core economic issue of productivity means that a delay is the high-minded, good-government policy favored by statesmen, in contrast to the crony-capitalist deals favored by billionaires and donation-seeking politicians.
4. Delay is good for the public fisc. The proposed amnesty is far larger and more expensive than its supporters now admit. For example, the bipartisan DREAM Act amnesty would reach 3.25 million initially, while chain-migration would add millions more. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the 10-year cost to be $26 billion, but that estimate ignored DREAM Act loopholes which would sharply boost the numbers and costs. So a delay would allow officials to better grasp the cost and scale of the proposed amnesty.
5. Delay makes for honest government. Obama’s DACA policy offered temporary work-permits — not permanent work-permits — pending a solution by Congress. In fact, Obama claimed in June 2012 that “this is a temporary stopgap measure.” By allowing Obama’s temporary work permit to remain temporary, Trump is simply implementing the claimed spirit of Obama’s promise — even if Obama intended to make his temporary deal into a permanent fixture.
6. Delay keeps Trump’s political opponents fixated on their unpoular pro-illegal-immigrant rhetoric throughout 2018, while an amnesty deal instead would give Democrats a morale-boost before the 2018 election — plus the time to shift towards more popular rhetoric, such as stoking fears about government medical care. By refusing an amnesty, Trump helps makes the 2018 election all about the Democrats’ noisy and unpopular demands for limitless amnesty.
7. Delay helps Trump’s 2018 election turnout. Under Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” policies, wages are now rising in some cities, perhaps marking the arrival of a wage-boom in the run-up to the 2018 election. The scheduled expiration of DACA will nudge many illegals out of the labor market before November, likely boosting wages for American voters and encouraging the roughly nine million sidelined working-age American men to take jobs. But Trump’s support for an amnesty would show that the establishment’s cheap-labor policies are King, so deflating pressure on employers to pay higher wages to workers in the run-up to the 2018 election.
8. Delay gives time to Democrats to gradually accept the nation’s desire to shift from a high immigration/low-wage economy to a low-immigration/high-wage economy. This huge economic change will impose a huge psychological shift among Democrats, plus their billionaire and media allies, who have persuaded themselves that voters really want business groups to get an unending stream of cheap-labor in the hope that the cheap-labor will also vote Democratic. Many Democrats have already started their journey with shock on November 8, 2016, but it just takes time for people to work their way through denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, and eventually, acceptance and renewed hope. A DACA delay will help Democrats get through the bargaining stage, prior to guilt in summer, anger in November, then depression in Christmas and acceptance in the Spring of 2019.
9. Delays are not a primary problem because the 3.25 million ‘dreamers,’ including the 700,000 ‘DACA’ illegals are foreigners and their interests are simply less important than Americans’ interests, regardless of any deadline. Few of the illegals will be deported in 2018, partly because enforcement officers are chasing the many criminals protected under Obama’s deputies. But if Trump’s American First policy is to make any progress, he must first start by helping Americans get higher wages before offering the huge benefit of citizenship to foreigners who have jumped the line at the nation’s large and generous immigration offices.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.
Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a large percentage of the nation’s annual income has shifted to investors and away from employees.