Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn suggested Tuesday evening he would push through an immigration bill with amnesty advocate Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA).
The suggestion came as Cornyn congratulated Republicans and Democrats as they voted for a bill to curb gun violence. A reporter for the Huffington Post tweeted:
More positive ~~ vibes ~~ on Senate floor. A smiling Cornyn tells Padilla, “First guns, now it’s immigration” “That’s right, we’re going to do it,” [Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema [D-Az] added
Cornyn has drafted a border security bill with Sinema, while Padilla is pushing for a formal amnesty for the more than a million illegal migrants who were brought by their illegal-migrant parents to the United States.
The Cornyn-Sinema bill would streamline the inflow with new processing centers and aid workers, plus easy migrant access to lawyers. The draft bill does not include any significant measure to reduce the flood of wage-cutting, and rent-boosting migrants into Americans’ communities.
In a June 14 hearing, Cornyn noted that his bill does little to curb the policy of catch and release at the border:
In addition to the Bipartisan border Solutions Act, this committee needs to give the Department of Homeland Security the tools it needs to effectively use existing legal authorities, including Expedited Removal. Our current lack of detention capacity has led to migrants being released into the interior instead of being placed into Expedited Removal proceedings.
Cornyn spoke to Padilla at the June 14 hearing and outlined his migration priorities. “I’ve long been a supporter of employment-based immigration,” he said:
It doesn’t matter where you’re from or where you live, if you have skills that can contribute to our economy and our country, our employment-based immigration program provides a path for you to come to the United States legally. Unfortunately, our demand for labor across sectors and skill levels outpaces supply, a problem that’s only been made worse by the pandemic.
And our immigration system is struggling to keep pace. Per-country caps have artificially limited access to employment-based visas for prospective immigrants from countries like India, preventing workers who want to contribute to our economy for being able to do. And our existing guest programs need to be updated to meet today’s challenges …
Today’s hearing is focused on one potential source of highly trained workers who could contribute to our economy: Individuals who come to study at our universities and other educational institutions on F, J and a M visa … Every year, more than 200,000 new highly skilled students temporarily join our workforce through the Optional Practical Training program, outstripping the number of permanent [U.S.] positions available to them when they finish this program. I look forward to hearing about the proposals that would allow us to harness these students’ skills in the longer term.
And as we consider more pathways for high-skilled immigrants to come to the United States, we should not forget our need for guest workers who may not hold university degrees, but are important to our economy.
Those policies are favored by donors and CEOs in Texas — including the CEOs of the many companies that employed Indian and Chinese visa workers instead of Texas graduates.
But Cornyn ended his speech by suggesting a reason that might prevent him from backing migration bills: “Continuing to ignore the crisis on the southern border — as the Biden administration has chosen to do — is only making it harder for us to build the support we need to grow our employment-based immigration system and our economy.”
The public is divided by immigration issues, partly because of widespread sympathy for illegal migrants.
However, both the GOP voters — and the suburban swing voters who are needed in November — oppose legislation that would allow foreign workers to compete for jobs against unemployed Americans, or to force down Americans’ salaries and wages. That concern over uncontrolled migration is also pushing Democratic-leaning Latinos in Cornyn’s Texas to switch their votes to the GOP.
In fact, a claimed shortage of workers is pressuring CEOs to raise wages for American voters before ballots are cast in the November election.
Rising wages “are good for national politics if you’re a politician, for sure,” Tom Donohue, then the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Breitbart News in 2020. “It’s good for national politics if you want people to feel more engaged in the healthy part of the economy and go out and vote to keep it that way,” he added.
The claimed labor shortage is also pressuring CEOs to invest in wealth-producing technology and to hire more workers from the poor, GOP-leaning states that are distant from the wealthy coastal states of New York, Texas, California, Florida, and Washington. The wage pressure is also pushing investors to seek new hires in the small towns outside the main cities, such as Houston in Texas.
The current wage gains come after President Donald Trump’s low-wage policies helped to deflate the cheap labor bubble that was inflated by the 1990 immigration bill. “Most college graduates have actually seen their real incomes stagnate or even decline” since 2000, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on April 29.
“I want … to associate myself with the comments of Senator Cornyn,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said at the June hearing. “I think it’s time to get something done.”
Many other GOP Senators oppose cheap-labor giveaways to investors, such as the draft open-borders rules in the House draft of the pending China-focused, technology spending bill. The opponents include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Cornyn’s potential partner, Democratic Sen. Padilla, is pushing a variety of business-backed bills that would accelerate the inflow of economic migrants into California and many other American communities. He is also pushing amnesty to naturalize many migrants so they can vote in Americans’ elections.
Another draft Padilla bill would allow convicted migrant criminals to get green cards.
Padilla has also drafted a bill with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) that would incentivize foreign workers to take long-term, lower-wage, white-collar jobs for CEOs in exchange for getting paid with green cards for themselves and their children. That bill would help Fortune 500 companies to replace American graduates with cheaper foreign visa workers.
Padilla has also drafted a bill that would provide the huge prize of green cards and citizenship to at least 5 million migrants who have taken low-wage jobs, including food-service workers, healthcare support workers, and farm workers.
Padilla is also pushing the American Dream and Promise Act, which would provide citizenship to at least 3 million illegals, temporary migrants, and children of visa workers.
Padilla’s bills are backed by FWD.us, which is an advocacy group for wealthy West Coast investors. The group is supported by funds from Mark Zuckerberg’s charity.
None of Padilla’s bills offer significant benefits to the 300 million Americans who will be forced to share their economy, civic life, and political rights with the migrants and the likely many relatives — such as their parents — who will join them via chain migration.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, equality-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The extraction migration economic policy is hidden behind a wide variety of noble-sounding excuses and explanations. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
But the colonialism-like economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it extracts human-resource wealth from the poor home countries. The migration policy also minimizes shareholder pressure on companies to build up complementary trade with poor countries.
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