Establishment publication Politico confirms the repeated warnings of Senators Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, that Paul Ryan’s omnibus spending bill will fully fund President Obama’s refugee resettlement operation.
“Ryan (R-Wis.) has been negotiating with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for several days on the policy specifics of the massive spending bill,” Politico writes.
According to Politico‘s report, “GOP attempts to insert language into the bill to impose tougher controls on Syrian and Iraqi refugees were unsuccessful.”
Politico’s report affirms Sen. Sessions’ repeated declarations that Ryan’s omnibus would fund Obama’s entire immigration agenda. As Sessions has explained:
This year’s appropriations bills [will]… amount to a blank check for the President to carry out his refugee resettlement plans… It is further expected that the omnibus will continue federal funding for “sanctuary cities” and allow for the continued operation of the President’s 2012 executive amnesty program, which provides work authorizations and certain government benefits to some 700,000 illegal aliens under the age of 30. And, shockingly, the omnibus may also include a huge expansion of the H-2B foreign worker visa program, used to fill blue collar jobs such as truck driving, landscaping, construction work, and hotel service. This action would further replace and reduce wages of American workers during a time of record immigration and historically low workforce participation rates.
Senator Ted Cruz and Sessions have explained that the President’s admission of Muslim refugees will be in addition to the nation’s autopilot distribution of hundreds of thousands of visas to predominantly Muslim nations. As the two Senators wrote in a letter to administration officials:
Congress is days away from consideration of an omnibus year-end funding bill that would set the U.S. on an autopilot path to approve green cards, asylee, and refugee status to approximately 170,000 migrants from Muslim countries during the next year. In addition to that would be tens of thousands of temporary visas for entry and employment, and the entire sum is added to the rest of the annual autopilot green card, asylee, refugee, and foreign worker flow.
The Politico report came on the eve of tonight’s CNN Presidential debate.
Many of the GOP candidates have taken starkly different positions on the issue. For instance, donor class favorite Sen. Marco Rubio has said that he’d “hate to use” the funding mechanism to stop President Obama’s refugee resettlement operation– seeming to undermine conservative lawmakers’ efforts to strip the omnibus funding bill of its blank check for refugee resettlement.
While Donald Trump has called for a temporary Muslim migration moratorium, a number of Republicans who support immigration expansions– such as Paul Ryan and former Gang of Eight Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio– have condemned Trump’s stance. Marco Rubio has even said that a religious test would be unconstitutional– in effect, defending the constitutional rights of foreign citizens living in foreign countries. As Rubio told popular Fox News anchor and conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity last week, “We’ve never had a religious test, and I would just say to you that to have a religious test would violate the Constitution.”
However, Mark Krikorian, Jeff Sessions, Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, and even a new report in the Los Angeles Times have all argued that– contrary to Rubio’s assertion– constitutional protections do not apply to foreign nationals seeking entrance into the United States, and that there is no constitutional right to immigrate.