A Super PAC funded by retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan is spending more than $10 million to help the GOP representatives who are trying to pass a cheap-labor amnesty via the discharge-petition process.
The amnesty-boosting funds are being collected and shared via the Congressional Leadership Fund, which was described in a May 17 Politico article:
TUSTIN, Calif. — Republicans have amassed a sprawling shadow field organization to defend the House this fall, spending tens of millions of dollars in an unprecedented effort to protect dozens of battleground districts that will determine control of the chamber.
The initiative by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), now includes 34 offices running mini-campaigns for vulnerable Republicans throughout the country. It has built its own in-house research and data teams and recruited 4,000 student volunteers, who have knocked on more than 10 million doors since February 2017.
Ryan appears at fundraisers for the CLF but does not ask for the donations, nor direct the CLF’s day-to-day activities.
Politico reported that the formally independent CLF machine is aiding at least three of the Republicans who have signed the amnesty discharge-petition:
The field offices have become the envy of the House Republican Conference. While [the Congressional Leadership Fund] CLF is not allowed to discuss its efforts with members and candidates under campaign law, lawmakers have taken notice and tried to signal a desire for help.
This week, CLF will announce three new offices, one each for vulnerable Reps. John Faso of New York and Fred Upton of Michigan …
“I welcome any help I can get,” said Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.). Clinton carried his Central Valley district by 15 points, and CLF has set up a field office there.
Each office costs roughly $250,000 to set up and uses local teenagers to make phone calls to local voters. In each district, the staff pitch local issues to local voters — and shift attention away from the damage done to the GOP by blue-collar and white-collar cheap-labor migration. According to Politico:
That means each of its field offices emphasizes different policies. In Illinois, it’s Reps. Peter Roskam’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. In Florida, Rep. Brian Mast’s work on Lake Okeechobee gets top billing. And in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, volunteers talk up Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s effort to clean water contamination wells.
Nationwide, most Americans say they like immigrants and the idea of immigration. But most also say they prefer that Americans — and immigrants — be allowed to work in well-paid jobs before companies are allowed to import more workers.
Roll Call posted an April 17 article showing that CLF is funding TV ads for at least five of the GOP legislators who are now pushing for the amnesty:
The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership, is making $38 million worth of television reservations for ads in the fall, and an additional $10 million investment for digital ads …
More than $10 million in TV-ad funding for five of the 20 GOP legislators who signed the discharge-petition plan, said Roll Call:
- CA-10 (Rep. Jeff Denham): $2.35 million
- CA-25 (Rep. Steve Knight): $2.1 million
- CO-06 (Rep. Mike Coffman): $2.3 million
- FL-26 (Rep. Carlos Curbelo): $1.67 million
- TX-23 (Rep. Will Hurd): $2.1 million
The spending for these business-first Republicans bolsters the establishment wing of the GOP as President Donald Trump brings a larger share of populist Americans into the GOP base. That rising share is forcing more establishment-aligned GOP candidates to mimic populist policies on immigration, according to the Atlantic magazine, but has not yet caused a change in the Party’s business-first leadership.
Ryan also has begun praising Trump’s popular immigration policies, even as he allows his allies to push the discharge petition.
So far, Ryan has been able to sustain this two-faced strategy because establishment journalists have been unable or unwilling to follow the money through the immigration issue, unlike in every other issue facing Congress.
“There’s a pretty clear conflict if a guy managing Ryan’s PAC, in effect, is also running the lobbying push for the amnesty discharge petition,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
Wouldn’t it raise eyebrows if an oil industry lobbyist were running a leadership PAC and an energy issue was up before Congress? This is an indication of how Ryan’s opposition to the discharge petition seems to be half-hearted — he’s not bringing the hammer down. His critique is merely that ‘The president won’t sign [the amnesty] bill’ … rather than ‘Let’s not pass this bad bill whether or not the President signs it.’
The two-faced strategy is also risky because retiring Ryan is betting the party’s majority — and Trump’s presidency — on the leaders’ ability to hide their support for unpopular, wage-cutting, cheap-labor immigration, Krikorian said.
This dodge of talking tough and serving the money people is increasingly transparent. Ordinary voters just are less likely to buy this dodge …
The problem here is that you can get away with making compromises if your constituents and voters trust you to have the same perspective as them. If your voters trust that you really are a hawk in immigration they will be forgiving when you have to make a deal. The problem here is that nobody believes that Ryan shares the worldview of Republican voters, and so when he does things that voters don’t like, they don’t see it as a necessary compromise, they see it as a sellout.
In a mid-May poll of 545 likely votes in Rep. Denham’s district, for example, support for a ‘DACA’ amnesty dropped from 60 percent to 27 percent when respondents were asked:
Would you support a bill that legalized certain young-adult illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children, but continued Chain Migration, kept total immigration at one million a year and allowed employers to hire without checking legal status with E-Verify?
The poll was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research. Denham is a leading organizer of the discharge-petition amnesty.
Krikorian added:
If [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi is sworn in as Speaker in January, [Rep. Chris] Curbelo and Denham are going to carry a good deal of responsibility — and even more will be on Ryan and [Majority Leader Kevin] McCarthy because they could have stopped this but have chosen not to do the things to stop it.
Ryan has helped raise much of the CLF’s $71 million in revenue, mostly from wealthy donors, including casino operator Sheldon Adelson, says Politico.
A partial list of CLF donors is provided by OpenSecrets.org. The list includes investment firms and hedge funds which gain from the GOP’s low-tax policies and also from the cheap wages and high real-estate values ensured by mass immigration.
The biggest donor is the American Action Network, a cheap-labor, pro-amnesty, pro-migration group of investors and CEOs headed by a hotel investor, Fred Malek. In 2015, Malek’s group helped raise funds to run advertising against GOP members who oppose amnesty policies pushed by former President Barack Obama. So far, the group has contributed at least $12 million to Ryan’s CLF.
Campaign expert Corry Bliss serves as executive director of Ryan’s CLF and as executive director of Malek’s AAN.
Malek and his business allies stand to gain from any Ryan-delivered amnesty, partly because many of the likely amnesty beneficiaries already work in hotels and similar service jobs. For example, the majority of the 690,000 illegal immigrants with ‘DACA’ work-permits hold service-class jobs. Their cheap labor drags down wages for blue-collar Americans who hold similar jobs as they also deliver cheap services to urban white-collar professionals and higher profits to their employer-investors.
A September 2017 report by the billionaire-backed New American Economy advocacy group showed the top 10 jobs held by the DACA migrants:
The chart shows that almost 80,000 DACA people wait tables or cooks for customers, indicating their important role in reducing the cost of hiring Americans for restaurant jobs in New York City, Oakland, Calif., and many other places.
A very small percentage of the DACA recipients hold college-grad credentials or jobs, so the business groups also want to import more foreign college-grads to help reduce salaries for Americans professionals.
Ryan has a long history of supporting “any willing worker” policies which allow companies to hire cheap foreign employees instead of middle-class Americans.
Read the Politico article here.
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 roughly 1.1 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 economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it 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.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.