GOP Leader Mitch McConnell Slams Business Support for Amnesty

GOP Senate leader Sen. Mitch McConnell criticized the “big business” that is pushing President Joe Biden’s amnesty agenda.

The rare criticism of the GOP’s traditional donors suggests that McConnell will lead a fight against the Democrats’ draft amnesty, which would push more than three million illegal migrants on a fast track to the voting booths in 2024.

The Democrats, McConnell said March 3, “want to fast-track 11 million illegal immigrants into temporary legal status, then green cards, and then full citizenship.” He continued:

The far-left loves this approach. But so does a certain cross-section of Big Business. There’s a whole lot of cultural power and economic power pushing the liberal vision.

As for the best interests of American workers — well, that’s not as trendy a cause in certain circles. The truth is that it’s not helpful or compassionate to just open up our borders.

It’s not fair to American citizens and workers, but neither is it fair to the people who are being lured into a humanitarian crisis in the middle of a pandemic because they believe this Democratic administration just conspicuously turned on a neon ‘Vacancies’ sign.

For at least 30 years, the GOP has backed immigration bills that import legal immigrant consumers and workers for Wall Street, while they also reassured worried voters with vague and unfilled promises to end illegal immigration.

But that two-track policy hit a wall in January 2021, when immigrants tipped Georgia’s two Senate seats over to the Democrats, so pushing McConnell and the entire GOP Senate caucus out of their jobs as members of the Senate majority.

Many investor-run Fortune 500 companies favor the amnesty bill, which would provide them with a huge spike of cheap workers, taxpayer-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters. Democrats are pressuring the companies to collectively lean on the GOP to accept the passage of the amnesty bills — and the resulting personal and collective irrelevance for GOP Senators and their party in Washington D.C.

McConnell said:

In January, Customs and Border Protection logged more than 78,000 encounters on our southwest border. More than double the figure from January of 2020. Last week, HHS sources told reporters we just logged the busiest February in the history of the Unaccompanied Alien Child program.

The number of kids turning up on our border with no parents is soaring. And everyone expects the numbers to keep climbing. Now the Biden Administration is reportedly planning to reopen the same kinds of emergency shelters over which Democrats vilified the Trump Administration a couple years back.

Both President Biden and his Secretary of Homeland Security have said this week they don’t think this is a crisis. Not a crisis, they say. Well if this isn’t a crisis, with unaccompanied kids pouring in and exceeding capacity amid a pandemic, then I’d sure hate to see one.

The cause of this emergency is not some mystery. Everyone knows what’s happened. This new Administration explicitly campaigned on weakening border security. Six weeks in, they’ve reversed the Remain In Mexico policy, begun letting more people in in a haphazard way, and broadcast confusing mixed messages.

The L.A. Times says, quote, ‘Biden immigration policy stirs confusion at Mexico border.’ They interviewed one woman who’d crossed the Rio Grande ‘on a smuggler’s raft’ and was only briefly detained before being released into the country.

She explained she’d specifically come because of the new Biden Administration. Quote: ‘That gave us the opportunity to come.’ Another reporter put it this way: ‘The message received in Tijuana and other Mexican border cities was simple: Joe Biden was now letting people in.’

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Republicans just spent four years making major headway on the security and humanitarian crises on our border. It took serious policy changes. It took international diplomacy with multiple countries. It took border enforcement.

The American people would be better served if the Biden Administration had chosen to build on this progress, instead of rapidly trying to tear it down.

The current inrush of legal migration was created by the 1990 immigration bill, which was jointly pushed by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and then-President George. H. W. Bush.

The bill roughly doubled legal immigration, expanded the H-1B program to let the tech sector build its own non-American workforce, and supercharged Wall Street profits. The subsequent inflow also sucked jobs, investment, and wealth from heartland states — including McConnell’s Kentucky — and inflated investment and wealth in the coastal states, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer’s New York.

The decades since 1990 have shown that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

The 1990 bill passed 78 to 17, with yes votes from McConnell and nearly all GOP Senators.

In 2013, however, McConnell worked behind the scenes to block the “Gang of Eight” amnesty.