Bloomberg: ‘On Immigration, George W. Bush Is a Portrait of Failure’

Former President George W. Bush is pointlessly trying to revive the establishment’s amnesty and migration-boosting deals that repeatedly have failed to overcome public opposition, says an op-ed published Tuesday in Bloomberg news.

Bush’s proposed combination of amnesty, increased migration, more visa workers, and this-time-we-really-really-mean-it border security will not work because voters “do not have confidence that the government will enforce the laws any more avidly or effectively in the future than they have done in the past,” writes Ramesh Ponnuru, a pro-migration conservative at National Review.

The article is headlined, “On Immigration, George W. Bush Is a Portrait of Failure.”

Ponnuru wrote Bush’s proposal is:

Essentially the same policy mix [that] failed to become law under a Republican president working with a Republican Congress (in 2006); a Republican president working with a Democratic Congress (in 2007); a Democratic president working with a Democratic Congress (in 2009-10, when such legislation wasn’t even taken up); and a Democratic president working with a divided Congress (in 2013).

On each occasion, legislation of the kind Bush likes had the support of many high-ranking politicians from both parties, business groups, religious leaders and editorial boards …

But Bush ignores the public’s reasonable concerns, Ponnuru added:

Why shouldn’t people on the bottom rungs of the economy, native-born Americans and immigrants alike, worry that an influx of newcomers will undermine their position? It’s not a question he feels compelled to address.

Nor does Bush explain why, if we need more high-skilled immigrants, we have to raise the total level of immigration instead of changing its composition. What’s in it for the people who are already here? The standard answer is that it makes us richer overall, although there is very little evidence it has more than a negligible effect.

Read it all here.

Bush’s effort to shape the immigration debate is meeting with indifference or laughter from GOP staffers who saw Bush’s popularity crash to 33 percent in 2008 and saw Jeb Bush swept away by the felt tide of support for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Breitbart News reported April 19:

Former President George W. Bush’s media tour promoting mass immigration to the United States is “laughably out of touch” with GOP voters and Americans at large, Republican insiders tell Breitbart News.

[…]

“Any Republican still taking their cues from George W. Bush or the neocons is laughably out of touch,” a Senate GOP aide said. “Calling for mass amnesty while lockdowns have forced millions of Americans out of work is unhinged. This kind of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and pro-corporate globalism decimated the working class … people have had enough.”

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary foreign contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, rational, and is based on the decent solidarity that citizens of the American union of 50 states owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly university-credentialled progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” corporate claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It 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, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

Bush has strongly supported the workplace replacement of Americans by “Any Willing [foreign] Worker” or by migrants who are tough enough to survive the Hunger Games migration through the desert. “Hell, if they’ll walk across Big Bend [of Texas], we want ‘em,” he told advisors while serving as governor of Texas, according to author Jan Reid.