A quick no-strings amnesty for younger illegal immigrants would invite more illegals, disadvantage Americans, cripple the GOP and wound President Donald Trump, say immigration reformers.
Amnesty Without Reform Means More Illegals
Sen. Tom Cotton told CBS that any extension of the DACA amnesty would encourage another wave of illegal immigrants, and also benefit the illegal-immigrant parents who brought their young children across the border. He said:
It is going to open up a whole new category of people who could get legal status, namely their parents who violated the law by bringing them here, and it’s going to encourage other people to bring their children across the border in the future, which is a very dangerous thing to do … You really can’t dispute, just as a logical matter if we give legal status to these people in their 20s and 30s, that it is going to encourage more illegal immigration and it wil open up legal status for the very people that violated the law … we should have an open, common sense discussion about that.”
The nation of 320 million Americans already includes a population of at least 11 million illegals, many of whom are former temporary workers and tourists who overstay their visas.
The same amnesty-invites-illegals point was made by Dan Horowitz, the editor of Conservative Review:
Mickey Kaus, a left-winger who oppose cheap-labor immigration, makes the same point:
Cotton told CBS that he’s working with President Donald Trump to combine his RAISE Act merit immigration reform, plus tighter border enforcement, to any revival of the DACA amnesty which now provides work permits to 800,000 younger illegals. Cotton also wants to include some form of mandatory “employment verification” legislation to deter companies from hiring illegal immigrants.
The RAISE Act, in cooperation with improved border enforcement and better oversight of employers’ hiring, is intended to offset the economic damage caused by mass immigration of low-skilled foreigners into U.S. society. Unsurprisingly, polls show the public strongly favors the provisions in the RAISE Act.
Amnesty Will Cost Americans Hundreds of Billions of Dollars
Former President Barack Obama’s DACA amnesty covers 800,000 younger illegals, but there are another 1.1 million younger illegals who might try to claim the same DACA status, as they grow older or return to school to get a High School qualification.
Add in their illegal-immigrant parents, and the number of people who gain from a formal DACA amnesty could reach 2.5 million. Once the 2.5 million gain citizenship, they can petition to bring in yet more relatives, most of whom will be unskilled and also dependent on the Democratic party’s welfare policies.
The direct cost of mass immigration has been gauged by Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation. For example, he recently calculated a $1 trillion taxpayer-saving for cutting the annual inflow of unskilled migrants by roughly 50 percent or by 5 million people per decade.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on Rector’s data suggests that the cost of providing an amnesty to Obama’s young illegals — plus their lower-skilled peers and parents — will add up to $500 billion over the next 75 years.
Unskilled immigrants – both illegal and legal — cost taxpayers much money because the taxes that they can pay into the state, local and federal treasuries are far below the benefits they do receive in the form of education, health care, retirement and income support. The details are included in the September 2016 report from the National Academies of Sciences, which also showed that recent immigrants are failing to integrate into the United States’ society.
That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration 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.
Those problems are echoed in nation’s increasingly turbulent politics, which featured the unprecedented election of a New York real-estate developer to the White House in 2016 because of his popular opposition to the mass-immigration policies favored by the business and political establishment.
Rector’s calculations do not include the hidden cost of companies’ continued reliance on cheap imported labor instead of new, labor-saving machinery. In contrast to the United States, both Japan and China have national economic policies that oppose immigration and instead favor increased automation and robotics — and they have growing economies and rising per-person productivity and income.
Under current rules, 4 million young Americans enter the workforce each year to search for decent jobs. But each year, the government also hands out 1 million green cards to new immigrants who compete against Americans for good jobs.
The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals.
Understandably, business groups strongly favor high levels of immigration because the taxpayers’ huge costs become business revenues once the immigrants buy food, lodging, transport services, and education services. The immigrants also provide federally subsidized labor for new business operations, so reducing pressure on companies to hire labor-saving, American-made machinery, such as crop-picking robots.
Amnesty Will Push the GOP Towards Extinction
Any amnesty for the younger illegals damages the GOP’s support among the millions of ordinary Americans voters who backed Trump in 2016 because he promised a reform that would benefit Americans, not illegal immigrants.
The damage would be greater if the GOP also failed to push through other GOP priorities, such as a reform of the failing Obamacare government-run medical system.
It would also contradict Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” inauguration slogan, damaging his influence in 2018 and his reelections chances in 2020.
The public wants to be nice to the young illegals, but polls show that voters strongly prefer immigration policies that help Americans and their children earn a good living in an increasingly turbulent, globalizing economy. That preferences deeply shaped the GOP primaries and the 2016 election, much to the advantage of Donald Trump.
Already, multiple business groups admit that Trump’s popular RAISE Act immigration and economic reform would raise Americans’ salaries. Higher salaries allow people to buy houses, get married and create families — all of which tend to nudge them towards voting GOP.
The mass immigration of mostly unskilled government-dependent migrants is also gradually expanding Democratic power throughout the nation. This process is most clear in California, where pro-immigration Democrats now hold all state-wide elected offices. That huge advantage is also helping Democrats move step-by-step towards federal dominance. Democrats now hope to use expanding Latino populations in Florida and Texas to gain political dominance in those two states, so ending GOP hopes of winning presidential elections.
There is little or no evidence that the DACA illegals — or their future children — will vote Republican. In contrast, there is much evidence that some DACA youths are more loyal to their foreign families than they are to the Americans whom they want to live with.
Late in the game, and only after the rise of Donald Trump, GOP leaders now seem to be slowly recognizing how their decades-long deference to their cheap-labor business allies is wrecking their party’s future. This week, multiple GOP leaders have said they oppose a no-strings DACA and prefer some sort of package deal that helps Americans — perhaps the RAISE act which is being pushed by Trump, Cotton, and Georgia Sen. David Perdue.
“We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past with a comprehensive immigration bill that does not work,” Perdue said. “The RAISE Act’s changes to our legal immigration system should be part of the solution.”
Georgia’s other GOP Senator, Sen. Johnny Isackson, added: “Congress should protect these young people while also working toward stronger measures to secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws going forward.”
“The bottom line of it is, I don’t think DACA as a clean bill can get through the Congress by itself,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the judiciary committee. The dispute is an “opportunity for compromise between people that want DACA plus a lot of other things dealing with legal immigration, and I suppose even some things dealing with illegal immigration, that can probably be packaged together.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s leader in the Senate, pushed the same package approach; “President Obama wrongly believed he had the authority to re-write our immigration law. Today’s action by President Trump corrects that fundamental mistake … This Congress will continue working on securing our border and ensuring a lawful system of immigration that works.”
“We will not be advancing legislation that doesn’t have the support of President Trump because we are going to work with the president on how to do this legislation,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday. “The president also gave us the time and space we’re going to need to find where that [immigration] compromise is,” said Ryan who has a long history of pushing business-boosting cheap-labor immigration policies.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.