Eight Immigration Victories Won for Americans in 2016

Last year was a success for Americans who are fed up with mass immigration, outsourcing, and trade deals that they think are hollowing out their society.

Here are a handful of wins from 2016—victories achieved by Americans in the face of opposition from the media, big business, the political establishment, and progressives.

1) The collapse of Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio. Bush infamously called illegal immigration an “act of love” and wanted to force middle-class Americans to compete with an unlimited supply of foreign professionals for decent jobs. He said he wanted to grant legal status, and U.S. citizenship, to tens of millions of illegal aliens. He declared enforcing immigration law was not an “American value.” Rubio, of course, pushed for the nation-killing “Gang of Eight” bill that would have flooded America with 33 million new migrants seeking U.S. jobs and granted amnesty plus an unlimited supply of foreign college graduates and refugees —after swearing to the Tea Party voters who put him in the Senate he would never vote for an amnesty bill. GOP voters reacted by tanking Bush in South Carolina and dealing Rubio a humiliating defeat in Florida during the Republican primaries.

2) Electing Donald Trump as President of the United States. Voters elected Trump not because he was a billionaire celebrity who writes his own tweets, but because he campaigned at great personal expense and risk to build a wall, deport illegal aliens, reform contract-worker programs, halt the illicit drug trade, prevent Islamic terrorism, renegotiate trade deals outsourcing U.S. jobs, and curb American involvement in never-ending Middle Eastern conflicts. Rubio and Bush were comically out of touch with Americans’ concerns about these issues. In a mere 18 months, the conventional wisdom about ratcheting up immigration and handing out amnesty to illegals was swept away. Trump’s first term is very promising for pro-American immigration reformers—and at the very least, Hillary Clinton will never have the chance to make her open borders “dream” a reality.

3) Victims of illegal alien crime and their families receiving national awareness, sympathy, and outrage on their behalf. Forget reporters calling them a “hate group” and a “hate rally”—for the first time these long-suffering families told their stories directly to their fellow citizens on the national stage and asked for justice. Celebrities are told they’re “so brave” for posing nude and tweeting about women’s’ rights, but it takes real courage to recount your son’s death at the hands of an illegal alien, publicly, in the hopes no parent is ever made to suffer such a loss. Illegal alien crime is almost completely preventable, and Americans rewarded the only candidate who took their side in this crisis with the presidency.

4) Fewer Americans trust the media and its stealthy pleas for amnesty and mass immigration. Despite wall-to-wall media propaganda about mass immigration and the aggressive denials that any drawbacks exist, over half of all voters are openly insisting they want immigration levels halved or reduced to zero. Another 58 percent believe illegal aliens should not be allowed to stay in the U.S., period. Breitbart News previously reported on a poll that found 75 percent of voters want unemployed Americans to receive U.S. jobs, compared to only three percent who think the U.S. should import more foreigners to fill them. Sixty-one percent said politicians “who would rather import foreign workers to take jobs rather than give them to current U.S. residents [are] unfit to hold office.” Meanwhile, trust in the media continues to hover at an all-time low.

5) The facts about immigration continue to “come out of the shadows.” There is now no excuse for leftists and the media to sneer at anyone who questions mass immigration as “demagogues.” Forty-two million migrants is an enormous number of people to fit into a country in only a few decades. Businesses got cheaper workers and Democrats got more voters, but the nation got millions of new residents who have little incentive to assimilate. Voters are finally allowed to ask: Do we want to live in a country where barbaric practices — such as beheadings, animal sacrifice, and female genital mutilation — take place? Do we want our children to learn “the value of diversity” instead of math, reading, science, writing, and American history? The media can no longer cover up these stories so easily, and political correctness lost much of its power over the immigration debate.

6) The nomination of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Thanks to the Democrats’ nuclear option, the well-liked Sessions is almost certainly a “lock” for Attorney General. A Sessions-run Department of Justice will crack down on lawless sanctuary cities, help craft tougher sentences to penalize drug trafficking, and overhaul the department to answer voters’ calls for law and order.

7) Paul Ryan abandoning the H-2B visa program. This visa program would have given 198,000 blue-collar jobs to migrants instead of unemployed or underemployed Americans. Ryan’s decision to not continue the pink-slip program may be a sign that one of the nation’s leading advocates for importing foreign workers may have learned a lesson or two.

The long-standing H-2B program allows companies to annually bring in 66,000 foreign workers instead of hiring Americans. The program provides the companies with cheap seasonal workers, minimizes the need for companies to recruit and train Americans, and it also cuts the salaries paid to full-time American workers, say advocates.

Ryan’s December 2015 language expanded the visa program by saying that foreign H-2B workers would not count towards the annual 66,000 limit if they had worked for a H-2B employer during the prior three years. In effect, the “returning worker exemption” covertly quadrupled the size of the H-2B program from 66,000 visas per year up to 264,000 visas per year. That is an increase of up to 198,000 outsourcing visas each year.

Ryan has retreated on his “Pink-Slip Plan” before Trump assumed office, but cautious voters should still assume that he adheres to his long-held, pro-mass immigration and amnesty beliefs. 

8) The death of the bill promising to slash prison sentences for drug traffickers, including many illegal aliens. As murders rise in major cities and a raging opioid epidemic claims tens of thousands of lives, some Republicans partnered with Democrats to spring federal drug traffickers from prison. As Breitbart News has previously reported: Nearly a quarter of all inmates in federal prison are non-citizens, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, most of which are Mexicans. The bill would have released illegal alien drug traffickers into American communities without requiring their deportations. Fortunately, under a Trump administration, the bill has virtually no chance of becoming law.