The Democrats’ leader in the Senate says House Speaker Paul Ryan’s amnesty bill is “doomed to fail” because it cuts future legal immigration into the United States.
Sen. Chuck Schumer’s opposition is critical because Ryan’s amnesty bill needs support from roughly one-third of the 49 Democratic Senators — and also needs support from nearly all GOP votes in the House.
Many GOP members in the House do not want to put a pro-amnesty vote in their permanent record just to help the retiring Speaker win a House vote — especially if their pro-amnesty vote also fails to produce legal changes they can tout on the campaign trail.
Schumer is not arguing that Ryan’s amnesty for 1.8 million illegals is too small or constricted. Instead, his main complaint about the Ryan bill is that it “drastically cuts immigration in ways unacceptable to the Senate & American ppl.”
The focus on legal immigration spotlights the growing opposition among business groups to any cuts to the annual immigrant inflow of 1 million additional workers, consumers, and renters. That inflow raises national economic growth by adding consumers but it also shifts wealth from young employees’ pay packets to older investors’ stock portfolios.
Schumer’s New York constituents include many of the investors who stand to gain when legal immigration lowers payroll costs and boosts revenues.
Democrats also know that business-backed immigration gradually boosts their political power in districts and states, such as California and Virginia, and increasingly in Florida and Texas.
Schumer argues that Republicans should embrace the Democrats’ no-strings amnesty push, and offers to support a few token security upgrades to the border.
In a brief interview on Monday, Ryan told a Milwaukee radio station that he thinks his amnesty can get through the Senate.
No immigration bill can get through the Senate without support from 60 Senators. That high number means a bill has to be backed by roughly 15 Democratic Senators plus nearly all of the GOP’s cheap-labor caucus, which includes at least 20 Senators out of the 51 GOP members in the Senate. In February, for example, Sen. Susan Collins and eight other GOP Senators pushed a surprise bill that would have provided a priority-amnesty for all 8 million illegal immigrants who are holding jobs. On June 17, Collins told CBS:
I think we should try again. We should not give up. It is important that we enact immigration reform.
Ryan can get his amnesty through the Senate if he amends his bill to remove the popular immigration cuts demanded by President Donald Trump and the voters, and likely also if he drops funding for the border wall and removes border-wall legal changes. But those changes would be opposed by Trump because they would wreck his ‘Four Pillars’ populist immigration-reform.
Personally, Ryan is unlikely to oppose Schumer’s demand for additional immigration.
He has long favored a large-scale inflow of foreign workers and an “open door” into U.S. labor markets, such as California. Those policies cut Americans’ wages and shift Wall Street’s job-creating investments away from middle-American population centers towards the coastal cities where immigrant workers arrive and settle. California is a test case of Ryan’s cheap-labor vision which he described in 2013.
The GOP’s talking-points in support of the bill reflect this pro-business, anti-employee perspective. They spotlight gains for business donors but do not suggest that Ryan’s amnesty bill will raise wages or produce jobs for Americans.
Migration Economics
Currently, four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market — but the government provides green cards to roughly 1 million legal immigrants and temporary work-permits to roughly 3 million foreign workers.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy 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.
Polls
Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants” push-polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.
But “choice” polls reveal most voters’ often-ignored preference that CEOs should hire Americans at decent wages before hiring migrants. Those Americans include many blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and people who hide their opinions from pollsters. Similarly, the 2018 polls show that GOP voters are far more concerned about migration — more properly, the economics of migration — than they are concerned about illegal migration and MS-13, taxes, or the return of Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
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