Chairman of the Illinois Business Immigration Coalition and Jeb Bush donor John Rowe mocked Republicans on Monday for opposing President Obama’s executive amnesty order shielding five million illegal aliens from deportation.
“Since when did it become conservative to tell people they can’t work and pay taxes?” Rowe said, repeating a favorite taunt to the GOP base. “I always thought we were trying to get people to do that.”
Rowe dismissed the question as to whether or not the president has authority to unilaterally suspend immigration law to benefit an arbitrary group of foreigners illegally present in the U.S. It’s important, he said, that Republicans disregard the constitutionality of Obama’s order and push for even higher levels of immigration.
Publicly opposing the president is foolish, he added.
“But something strange is going on: President Obama issued his executive order, which if it is legal, does about half of the job,” Rowe continued. “Many Republicans believed it exceed his authority. It boggles my mind that instead of solving the right way through congressional action, members of my party burned too much of their time and energy on futile and sometimes foolish-looking protests.”
Rowe favorably mentioned Republican Illinois Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Aaron Schock, along with Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, who joined him in calls to grant citizenship to ever-increasing numbers of illegal foreign workers.
In February, Rowe warmly praised former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s appeal to wealthy donors who aren’t low enough on the economic totem poll to compete with foreign-born workers for American jobs.
“He is the kind of candidate that a lot of Republican donors have been looking for — someone who can win the general election and reach out beyond the party’s core supporters,” Rowe told the Wall Street Journal, after donating $25,000 to Bush’s Right to Rise SuperPAC.
Last February, Rowe trashed American workers during a television interview, saying they were unable to compete with low-skilled, poorly-educated, low-income aliens with for jobs.
“Most of these jobs are in places where the existing unemployed either are unable to compete for them or don’t want to compete for them,” Rowe said. “We need to find other ways to deal with that problem.”
After Republicans won a decisive victory in the 2014 midterm elections — after voters called for a crackdown on unprecedented waves of illegals pouring across the southern border — Rowe demanded Republicans cede to Obama and pass immigration reform that would grant illegal aliens taking billions out of the U.S. economy in remittances American citizenship.
“Our economy simply cannot stay competitive without the help of our immigrants,” Rowe wrote in November 2014. “Beyond that, I hear no serious answer to my question ‘since when is it conservative to tell people they cannot work and pay taxes?'”
Conservatives must give into the political demands of foreigners illegally living in the U.S., Rowe continued.
“While we support a more comprehensive reform package, my colleagues and I are most urgently concerned about ending the threat of deportation that hangs over so many hard-working families” illegally present in the U.S., he wrote. “Quick action by the House, along the lines Boehner outlined earlier this year, would show that bipartisanship can produce solutions that strengthen our economy, keep families together, and make America safer at the same time.”
Rowe got his wish on March 3: House Speaker John Boehner folded and the House voted to fully fund Obama’s executive amnesty, an order that both the Republican Speaker and the Democratic president acknowledged was illegal.
The unconstitutional means justify the political ends, Rowe told Politico’s Huddle before Monday’s IBIC gathering. Republicans should not be angry with a president who accomplished the establishment GOP’s goals with an illegal order.
“We’re trying to push Republicans. It’s widely popular among the Democrats, many Republicans were moving the right way on it and Obama did the executive order. And too many people are busy being mad at the president without solving the problem,” he said.
The day before Republicans voted to fund amnesty, Bush spoke to the Wall Street Journal in an extensive interview, expressing his support for greatly-increased levels of immigration.
Bush admitted that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 led to an enormous increase in chain migration, where as many as 75 percent of foreigners arrive in the U.S. to join family already present in the country.
“The cascading effect of this has crowded out all other forms of immigration,” he said, implicitly criticizing Obama’s expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals progam (DACA).
“What we proposed is to narrow that down to [a] spouse and minor children, and create a legal category that allowed for people to come regular order, if you will, and then to dramatically expand the economic visas, both on the high end as well as a guest worker program to deal with the significant shortages that are retarding the economic growth that we need,” he said.
Since 2000, the U.S. has welcomed two foreign workers for every job Americans created.
Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.
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