Immigration reform advocates are showing 10 Senators up for election in 2018 that their voters strongly support President Donald Trump’s wage-boosting merit-based reform plan.
The data comes from 10 polls in 10 swing states conducted by NumbersUSA, a pro-reform group which is trying to pressure Senators in those states to either support or be neutral in the populist versus elite fight over immigration and the nation’s cheap-labor economic strategy.
In Michigan, for example, where Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow is up for election, the poll shows that 61 percent of people “strongly” support “setting up rules to ensure that businesses give first preference for jobs to American workers and legal immigrants already in this country before businesses can ask for new immigrant workers.” Only 10 percent “somewhat” or “strongly” oppose that rule.
The Michigan poll also showed that 74 percent of people say “business should be required to try harder to recruit and train from groups with the highest unemployment,” while only 11 percent said, “government should continue to bring in new immigrants to compete for jobs.”
The group released polling data from Florida, Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Those states were won by Donald Trump in 2016 and will get to vote for or against incumbent Democratic Senators next November.
For the next 17 months, those Democratic Senators will likely try to avoid picking sides in the immigration debate. If the GOP leadership schedules a vote on Trump’s reform, their Democrat leaders will try to defeat it — while also trying to let several of the 10 Democratic cast voter-friendly and ineffectual votes in support of the bill.
For the next 17 months, those Democratic Senators will likely try to avoid picking sides in the immigration debate. If the GOP leadership schedules a vote on Trump’s reform, their Democrat leaders will try to defeat it — while also trying to let several of the 10 Democratic cast voter-friendly and ineffectual votes in support of the bill.
On the GOP side, legislators will try to mollify their business donors by staying quiet on the proposed reforms. But GOP candidates who want to win in 2018 can use the polling data to carefully undermine incumbent Democrats, several of whom already voted for the cheap-labor, wage-cutting ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill in 2013.
The NumbersUSA polls echo prior economy-focused polls which show that Americans strongly favor rules which help the pocketbooks of other Americans, regardless of color.
The NumbersUSA data is likely to be challenged by business and progressive groups. Their polls will push respondents to declare support for the hopes of migrants or to back the country’s supposed tradition of favoring migrants.
When executed skillfully, those “nation of immigrants” polls can show up to 80 percent support for an amnesty. That manipulation is easy to do because Americans do like immigrants, want to be seen liking immigrants, and fear being stigmatized by progressives and the media.
Those fears are muffled or overcome in the polls by NumbersUSA, which ask people to focus on economics — not on sympathetic migrants — and also ask people to choose whether they support fellow nationals or unknown foreigners.
Some pollsters go to great efforts to find out what people want, rather than what they say. For example, a pair of academic polls from 2005 and 2010 showed that more than half of white Americans prefer all immigration be stopped.
That understated American-first view is spotlighted by the NumbersUSA polls, which show that Americans strongly favor the reduction of annual immigration numbers. When asked this balanced question:
Current federal policy automatically adds about one million new legal immigrants each year giving all of them lifetime work visas. Which is closest to the number of lifetime immigrant work visas the government should be adding each year — none, 250,000, half a million, one million, one and a half million, two million, or more than two million?
Two third of Michigan voters urged an annual immigration rate of 500,000 or roughly half the current level of 1 million. Only 22 percent said the annual inflow of should level or greater than the current level of 1 million.
The 2016 election showed that many voters do sympathize with migrants, but also will use their secret vote to back the candidate who helps them pay their bills and help their boyfriend or kids get decent jobs. In the voting booth, voters can safely ignore the candidate who scolds them for ignoring unskilled Central American migrants or Muslims who can’t speak English.
Trump’s new merit-based reform would shrink the inflow to 500,000 per year, and encourage the award of green cards to young, well-educated, English-speaking people who can help Americans productivity and wages.
Progressives and their ethnic political groups hate the reform. It would end their plan to seize national power via the mass immigration of unskilled, government-dependent migrants. That plan has already won them near-complete power in California and Illinois. But without those future migrants, progressives would be forced to seek the votes from actual blue-collar and white-collar Americans, so shifting the focus of national politics back towards a focus on middle-class Americans, and away from the progressives’ media-magnified push for pro-transgender laws, free abortion and weather control.
Under pre-Trump policies, the federal government annually imports 1 million legal immigrants into the United States, just as 4 million young Americans turn 18.
The federal government also awards roughly 1.5 million temporary work permits to foreigners, grants temporary work visas to roughly 500,000 new contract workers, such as H-1B workers, and also largely ignores the resident population of eight million employed illegal immigrants. That huge extra inflow of wage-cutting workers is to be handled via different legislation and regulation.
The current annual flood of 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, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families.