Twenty Democratic Senators are calling for fewer border agents, fewer deportations, and fewer detention beds in the 2019 budget, echoing their home-state demands for a continued inflow of cheap illegal-immigrant labor.
“We urge you to reduce funding for the administration’s reckless immigration enforcement operations that are tearing families apart and harming our economy,” said the Democrats’ letter to Sen. Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Appropriations. The letter continued:
We are particularly concerned about the threat that such [enforcement] operations pose to former and current Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients who are now at risk as a result of the administration’s unilateral and callous decision to end the program.
The majority of the 690,000 illegal immigrants with ‘DACA’ work-permits hold service-class jobs, so dragging down wages for Americans holding similar jobs, and often aiding urban white-collar professionals. A September 2017 report by the billionaire-backed New American Economy advocacy group showed the top 10 jobs held by the Democrats’ DACA migrants:
The chart shows that almost 80,000 DACA people wait tables or cooks for customers, indicating their important role in reducing the cost of hiring Americans for restaurant jobs in New York City, Oakland, Calif., and many other places.
The letter also suggested that the federal government should stop deporting migrants holding jobs, and only repatriate migrants who pose a threat to “public safety”:
Under current funding levels, the Administration has expanded immigration enforcement within American communities in an indiscriminate manner, failing to distinguish Dreamers and other hardworking individuals with deep community ties from actual threats to our public safety.
The request for a stealth amnesty for the roughly 8 million wage-cutting illegals with jobs was supported by nearly all Democratic Senators and by several GOP Senators in a February 15 vote.
The anti-enforcement letter was pushed by California Democrat Sen. Diane Feinstein, who is facing a tough primary race in a state increasingly dominated by the Democrats’ high/low alliance of wealthy business owners and low-skill employees, including many Latino immigrants.
Feinstein’s policies have largely being implemented in California, which has lost many middle-class people to neighboring states and now boasts very high levels of economic inequality.
The 19 other co-signers include Senators Kamala Harris, (D-Calif.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.).
In November 2018, the voters will have a chance to replace Feinstein, Baldwin, Hirono, Menendez, Carper, and Cardin.
The 20 Democrats also denounced President Donald Trump’s continued push for a border wall, saying:
We also strongly urge the Committee to reject any funding for President Trump’s border wall … Investment in port-of-entry security and technologies to monitor border crossings would be a much more effective border security investment than a physical wall.
The pro-migration Senators’ complaints about border agents, deportations, and detention beds come as blue-collar wages are beginning to rise after decades of minimal growth, and as Trump’s deputies step up their efforts to deter migration by illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers.
On May 2, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he is sending 35 extra prosecutors to the border to prosecute illegal immigrants, plus 18 immigration judges to process requests for asylum.
Currently, border officers are forced into “catch and release” practices because the huge number of migrants with children overwhelms their ability to process and deny asylum requests within the 20-day deadline required by the 1997 Flores court settlement. But with the extra judges, migrants claims’ can be carefully processed by the 20-day deadline, allowing many to be processed, rejected and sent home before they have to be released into the United States for an eventual asylum plea in a courtroom.
In 2017, Trump asked Congress to fund additional officers can help detain illegal border crossers, and more detention beds so that migrants are not released into the United States while their legal cases are being processed. Trump also asked for more agents to help repatriate illegals living in the United States and asked for $1.6 billion to start building his wall.
When the budget deal was wrapped up in March, Democrats and business-first Republicans blocked all those increases — except for funds to build 50 miles of border fence. The defeat was a surprise to Trump, likely because his aides — including Marc Short — kept him in the dark during the talks.
Since that debacle, Trump has promised to get more funding from Congress this fall. That push for funding will likely fail unless Trump vetoes budgets that exclude his priority items just before the November elections.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, 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 at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.