Democrats say they will not offer any concessions in exchange for the Tuesday suggestion by a top White House deputy that President Donald Trump could support a costly, no-strings amnesty for several million illegal immigrants.
The aide, Marc Short, told reporters on Tuesday that the president does not expect to get anything in exchange for agreeing to extend and expand President Barack Obama’s DACA amnesty. He added, however, that an amnesty might improve the chances of a big tax-cut sought by CEOs and investors.
“Whether or not [a border wall] is part of a DACA equation or whether or not that’s another legislative vehicle, I don’t want to bind ourselves into a construct that makes reaching a conclusion on DACA impossible,” said Short, a former president of the Koch brothers political group.
“That’s a very, very good thing and good progress,” declared the Democrats’ Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, as he restated his opposition to Trump’s election-winning promise of a border wall. “I’ve told [Trump] over and over again. At one point he said, ‘go easy on the wall.’ I said no,” Schumer said. “I made it so, so clear to the president that there’s not going to be a wall in the appropriations process or in others,” Schumer added.
Trump sold himself to the voters by promising a pro-American immigration reform and touting a successful record as a deal-maker. “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’ ” he said in June 2016, referring to his 1987 book.
Schumer’s deputy, Sen. Dick Durbin, also threatened to block federal spending bill at the end of the year until Trump agrees to sign the Democrats’ huge new amnesty bill, dubbed the “Dream Act.” “We are not going to leave town without it,” Durbin told Bloomberg Sept. 11, adding “the wall is a non-starter.”
If passed, the amnesty would offer green cards and citizenship to at least 3.6 million illegals, likely impose a $2 trillion cost on Americans over the next 50 years, and also sink Trump’s campaign promise of passing pro-American immigration reform which raises Americans’ wages and productivity.
Durbin’s spokesman also told Bloomberg that Durbin also opposes any deal which requires companies to check the legality of job-applicants.
Durbin also told reporters that Trump’s agreement with Schumer and Pelosi to set another debt-ceiling vote in December makes Trump vulnerable to Democratic pressure. “We are not making a contingency, a quid pro quo [for an amnesty],” he told former Democratic officials in a podcast dubbed Pod Save America. “We believe … that we’ll be in a better position to make that happen because look at what we’re going to face in December,” he said.
GOP Senators agree that the debt deal is damaging for the GOP. “Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi now have most of the cards for when we get to December,” Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, said in a September 7 Senate floor speech. “This is an embarrassing moment for a Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican administration.”
The Democrats’ top leader in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi also restated her uncompromising position on the border wall, saying, ”We’ve been very clear: There is no wall in our DACA future. It’s just not going to happen. I think it’s immoral; I think it’s expensive and ineffective. And so we’re not going to that place.”
On Tuesday, Pelosi said Trump offered to sign the amnesty in exchange for merely symbolic and token improvements in border security, such as new sensors, but not funding for a substantial wall. “‘You pass it, I’ll sign it, I want some border stuff.’ That’s what he said,” Pelosi said, according to Politico. “We always want border stuff, so that’s not a problem. Especially with all the technologies,” she added.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to deny claims that Trump would accept the amnesty even without getting a border wall, when she was asked about it September 11. She said:
“The President and the administration are looking responsible immigration reform. And part of that would be part of that process, but we want to do something that addresses a multitude of issues. And again, Congress has six months to do their job. We’re very hopeful and confident that they will.
Pelosi is expected to meet late Wednesday with House Speaker Paul Ryan to talk about the amnesty plans.
In recent days, Ryan has repeatedly said that any amnesty plan has to be combined with some form of border security bill. “If we just rubber stamp a stand-alone DREAM Act, then we’re going to have another DREAM Act that we’re going to need in 10 years from now,” Ryan told Fox News Radio.
Ryan, however, strongly oppose Trump’s border wall, and favors “any willing worker” policies which allow companies to import new workers to prevent any wage increase for American workers.
The Democrats’ rejection of the wall comes as more polls agree that Trump’s principled pro-American stand on immigration and the border wall won the 2016 election, despite furious opposition from the establishment parties and media outlets. “Trump’s Hardline Immigration Stance Got Him To The White House,” says a report by fivethirtyeight.com, a media company which analyses political data.
“In 2016, moreover, immigration may have been the issue most responsible for Trump’s winning the Republican nomination. In every state with a caucus or primary exit poll, he did best among voters who said immigration was their top issue,” said the site.
In August 2016, Trump declared on the campaign trail that “Our message to the world will be this: you cannot obtain legal status, or become a citizen of the United States, by illegally entering our country.”
“When politicians talk about immigration reform, they usually mean the following: amnesty, open borders, and lower wages,” he said.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. However, the government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants to compete against Americans for jobs. Not all do go to work, for example, or else file for government aid, almost 100,000 legal immigrants per year are close to retirement.
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. Some of those imported white-collar workers gain outsourced jobs at Jan’s alma mater, Stanford University.
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.
Amid the huge inflow of new workers, the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades: