White House aide Jared Kushner is reviving a proposal already rejected by President Donald Trump to offer an amnesty to at least 800,000 unidentified illegal migrants, according to a report by the McClatchy news bureau.
McClatchy reported the claim, which was made by the head of a pro-migration Latino advocacy group:
Top White House adviser Jared Kushner told members of Latino advocacy organizations on Thursday that President Donald Trump was willing to give 1.8 million Dreamers permanent protections from deportation and to reopen the government in exchange for $25 billion in border security, including some wall funding, LULAC President Domingo Garcia said.
The 1.8 million number is 800,000 people more the offer of Trump’s January 19 offer of a three-year work-permit amnesty for the 1 million people who are identified and enrolled in the DACA amnesty and the TPS program.
McClatchy continued:
Officials from the League of United Latin American Citizens, Libre Initiative and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce met with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law —and briefly, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — on Thursday to discuss ways to find a compromise in order to reopen the government.
“He basically wanted to find out what the Latino community would agree to, what were our red lines that we would not cross and which ones were negotiable,” Garcia told McClatchy.
LULAC is a business-backed advocacy group, not the Latino community. Unlike many Latino voters who fear mass migration will damage their workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools, the LULAC group wants Latino workers, consumers, and voters.
The group tweeted out the McClatchy article:
The meeting was also attended by the Libre Initiative. That group is funded by the Koch network, which wants the federal government to annually import a large number of workers and customers sought by American businesses.
Neither LULAC not Libre have much clout with the Democrats in Congress, who prefer to deal with more radical Latino-run groups, such as trade unions and UnidosUS, which used to call itself La Raza.
The proposal for a 1.8 million amnesty is likely based on the BRIDGE Act, which was developed by pro-migration legislators. It is marketed as a modest extension of President Barack Obama’s DACA amnesty which provided worker permits to roughly 800,000 younger illegals. In leaks to several reporters, White House officials incorrectly predicted Trump would endorse the amnesty in his January 19 speech.
But the BRIDGE Act offers three-year residencies and work permits to an unlimited number of people who look younger than 40 and claim to have lived in the United States between 2007 and 2012. The BRIDGE amnesty would be provided to everyone who seems to fit the criteria — including many of the one million resident illegals who have been ordered home by a judge — and can only be withheld from an applicant if an agency proves to a judge that the applicant is lying.
“If the Congress had ended up passing something like the BRIDGE Act, the amnesty process would be in full force right during the presidential campaign, which means that enforcement would be largely suspended as well,” Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News January 21.
“The president would be running for reelection at precisely the time his administration would be running one of the biggest amnesties we’ve ever seen,” he said. “It would clearly be contrary to the message he’d be trying to send.”
However, the amnesty for 1.8 million was already rejected by the President during an internal debate before the January 19 speech. Breitbart News reported January 21:
President Donald Trump quietly blocked a stealthy “BRIDGE” amnesty that would have crippled immigration enforcement and triggered a migrant wave during his 2020 election, according to a report in the New York Times.
Trump’s decision to block the BRIDGE plan came after hearing advice from White House aide Steve Miller, the former Senate aide who played a key role in blocking the 2013 “Gang of Eight” cheap labor amnesty.
Miller helped the President and his aides decide to drop the BRIDGE expansion, according to the New York Times’ report:
In recent days, as White House officials had been working out the details of the compromise, Mr. Miller intervened to narrow the universe of immigrants who would receive protection, according to people familiar with the internal discussions who described them on the condition of anonymity.
While the original idea had been to include protections for as many as 1.8 million undocumented immigrants eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program known as DACA that protected those illegally brought to the United States as children, Mr. Trump ultimately proposed shielding only the 700,000 who are enrolled.
However, Kushner has begun to play a larger part in the immigration debate, despite his lack of experience in the complex topic which has already wrecked or blighted the careers of many politicians, including GOP Sen. Marco Rubio and Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer.
In 2014, for example, Schumer’s caucus lost nine seats after he pushed the 2013 “Gang of Eight” cheap-labor and amnesty bill. If Schumer had not pushed the amnesty bill in 2013, it is likely the Democrats would have had a Senate majority during Trump’s first two years — and so would have blocked his tax bill and many judicial appointments.
The Washington Post reported Kushner’s rising clout on January 24, saying:
Kushner has emerged as an omnipresent and assertive player in the now-33-day impasse, despite deep skepticism on Capitol Hill about his political abilities and influence, according to more than a dozen Trump associates, lawmakers and others involved in the discussions.
But the Washington Post article includes many skeptical comments from Democrats and Republicans. The article includes a claimed quote from Trump, made during a recent Oval Office meeting:
“Apparently, Jared has become an expert on immigration in the last 48 hours,” Trump said, according to three people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Kushner argues he can craft a deal because he has good personal relationships with Democrats, said the Post:
Kushner, who referred a request for comment to the White House, has told Trump advisers that he has solid relationships with several Democrats, such as Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), and that he can sell a compromise to moderate Democrats and Republicans with whom he built a rapport while working on the criminal-justice bill.
The push by White House aides to win border-wall funding by offering amnesties is a growing worry for advocates who support Trump’s anti-amnesty “Hire American” policy. That policy is pushing up voters’ wage before the 2020 election.
The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The cheap labor policy 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 millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.
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