President Joe Biden is lobbying House and Senate lawmakers to increase immigration to the United States months before the 2024 presidential election.
On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the Senate would again attempt to pass an immigration bill that Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), and James Lankford (R-OK) negotiated earlier in 2024.
“I hope Republicans and Democrats can work together to pass the bipartisan Border Act this coming week,” Schumer wrote in a letter to Senators.
In a statement on Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said the bill “would actually codify many of the disastrous Biden open border policies that created this crisis in the first place,” making it clear that “should it reach the House, the bill would be dead on arrival.”
Still, Biden is lobbying for the bill. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration “strongly support[s] this legislation” and asked “every Senator to put partisan politics aside and vote” for its passage.
The bill would increase overall immigration to the U.S. and carefully manage large inflows of migrants into the nation’s interior, even as the foreign-born population has already hit 51.6 million on Biden’s watch — the largest ever recorded in American history.
While increasing the annual number of green cards given to foreign nationals by 50,000, the bill also provides work permits to the adult children of H-1B visa holders, green cards to the tens of thousands of Afghan migrants who have arrived under Biden, expedited work permits to those migrants released into the U.S. interior, and taxpayer-funded lawyers to certain unaccompanied alien children (UACs) and mentally incompetent migrants.
Among the most controversial provisions, the bill allows some 35,000 migrant encounters at the southern border before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can use fierce border controls to detain and quickly remove new arrivals.
The Biden administration’s lobbying for such an increase in overall immigration to the U.S. comes even as Americans are concerned with current inflows, which have proven unsustainable for even the largest cities and states.
Gallup found in April that, for the third consecutive month, immigration remained the “most important problem” facing the U.S. — a concern held by 27 percent of all American adults, nearly 50 percent of Republicans, and 25 percent of swing voters.
EXCLUSIVE: Thousands of Migrants Cross Border into Eagle Pass, Texas
Randy Clark / Breitbart TexasJohn Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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