Democrats Fight Over Language as Immigration Negotiations Head South

While the White House remains open to an immigration deal with the Republican establishment and Democrats, leaders in the Democratic Party have started fighting over politically correct language.

This week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) attacked a group of Democrat leaders who met with President Trump to discuss a deal on immigration.

“The five white guys I call them, you know,” Pelosi said of Trump’s meeting with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), as well as others. “Are they going to open a hamburger stand next or what?”

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“That could’ve been done four months ago. The very idea that this week they’re saying, ‘Oh why don’t we get four white guys and General Kelly to come and do this,'” Pelosi said.

Immediately after Pelosi’s attack on the Democrats’ meeting with Trump, Hoyer told POLITICO, “That comment is offensive. I am committed to ensuring DREAMers are protected and I will welcome everyone to the table who wants to get this done.”

While Hoyer and Pelosi fought over language, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) hinted at stopping and ending all negotiations on immigration with the Trump administration.

On Friday, in an interview, Durbin said negotiations “died yesterday” with the White House.

So here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to prepare our bipartisan agreement for introduction into the Senate next week. If the Republican leadership has a better alternative, bring it forward. If they don’t, for goodness sakes, give us a vote. I’ll be on the phone today with my Republican colleagues and my Democratic colleagues begging them to support this measure.

Time is running out. We have to get this done. I thought we might get a bipartisan agreement approved by the White House, died yesterday. We have to do this and show leadership in Congress to solve this important challenge.

At the same time, Durbin attacked Trump’s use of the term “chain migration,” a technical immigration term used to describe the process whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. with them.

Durbin, in the interview, claimed “chain migration” was racist.

When it came to the issue of, quote, “chain migration,” I said to the president, do you realize how painful that term is to so many people? African-Americans believe they migrated to America in chains and when you talk about chain migration, it hurts them personally.

Not mentioned by Durbin was that he used the term just this week in the White House immigration meeting with Trump, as Breitbart News reported.

You said at the outset that we need to phase this. I think the first phase is what Chuck and Steny and I have mentioned, and others as well:  We have a deadline looming and a lot of lives hanging.  We can agree on some very fundamental and important things together on border security, on chain, on the future of diversity visas.  Comprehensive, though, I worked on it for six months with Michael Bennet, and a number of — Bob Menendez, and Schumer, and McCain, and Jeff Flake — and it took us six months to put it together.  We don’t have six months for the DACA bill. [Emphasis added]

Though the White House has endorsed an immigration bill by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) which would give amnesty to the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the legislation has not been touted by House Speaker Paul Ryan, nor has Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled that the Republican establishment in the Senate will get behind the bill.

The Goodlatte legislation trades DACA amnesty and a new agricultural visa program – that will import hundreds of thousands of new foreign workers to the U.S. to take blue collar jobs – for mandatory E-Verify, an end to chain migration, an end to the Diversity Visa Lottery, and the full authorization for the construction of a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, about 9.3 million foreign nationals have come to the U.S. as chain migrants between 2005 and 2016. In that same time period, a total of 13.06 million foreign nationals have entered the U.S. through the legal immigration system, as every seven out of ten new arrivals come to the country for nothing other than family reunification.

This makes chain migration the largest driver of immigration to the U.S. — making up more than 70 percent — with every two new immigrants bringing seven foreign relatives with them.

As Breitbart News reported, five years of chain migration to the U.S. adds more people to the country than one year of American births.