Long-time pro-mass immigration billionaires Charles and David Koch became the latest force to pressure congressional Republicans to nullify the end of DACA with a legislative amnesty Thursday.
Koch spokespeople told the Daily Beast that the brothers’ vast, ostensibly conservative and libertarian political empire will be brought to bear on Republican legislators. The Kochs will throw their weight behind the growing effort to force a two-house GOP majority that has refused to pass either funding for the southern border wall or the RAISE Act, a key nationalist immigration reform, to quickly pass an amnesty for those who were once exempted from federal immigration law under President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
As the Beast puts it, “With its formidable political and policy operation, the Koch network could provide more political cover to Republican members of Congress as they consider a replacement to the DACA program.”
The Koch amenability to open borders and amnesty is nothing new. For example, in 2013, the pair sponsored a Buzzfeed “Immigration Summit” featuring the likes of admitted illegal alien Jose Antonia Vargas and a half dozen other open borders fundamentalists with only the most token immigration restrictionist opposition. In 2016, Charles Koch compared then-candidate Donald Trump’s immigration proposals to “Nazi Germany.” Even left-wing presidential candidate phenomenon Bernie Sanders came to refer to open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal” during his campaign for the Democratic nomination.
This year, Koch-funded groups stepped up their pro-illegal alien rhetoric. In April, the LIBRE Initiative, a Hispanic-outreach wing of the Koch political empire, launched a campaign to pressure Congress to grant driver’s licenses and other government benefits to illegal aliens. In August, the same group issued a press release calling for amnesty and saying so-called “Dreamers” “represent some of the best and brightest in our country.”
After Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the phased end of DACA, the group doubled down, calling for Congress to pass amnesty for illegals who violated American immigration laws when they were young. “It is more important than ever that Congress act to remove this barrier that stands between these Dreamers and their full potential,” LIBRE President Daniel Garza said. “It is long overdue.”
The Daily Beast, for its part, was uncharacteristically charitable in describing the Kochs for its DACA-replacement piece, calling them merely “libertarian billionaires.” In the recent past, the Beast portrayed the pair as little better than Nazi collaborators, referring to them as “the industrial interests” behind “morally bankrupt Republican leadership,” “who want all environmental restraints on fossil fuels destroyed—just as in Nazi Germany the Krupp, Volkswagen, and I.G. Farben (later Bayer) industries saw the vast profits to be made in Hitler’s war and rode with the devil all the way.”
As the Daily Beast points out, pro-amnesty politics are hardly unusual among America’s business elite. Facebook founding billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is very much in tune with the Koch network over DACA, as is the Chamber of Commerce.
With 18 Congressional Republicans clamoring to quench the business elite’s thirst for young illegal alien labor even before the end of DACA was announced, the Koch’s and their ilk in that world are unlikely to have trouble finding allies in their push for amnesty.