Pro-amnesty GOP Senators are working hand-in-glove with Democrats to block a government budget until President Donald Trump agrees to break his campaign promise and his presidency by amnestying millions of wage-lowering illegal immigrants.
The hostage-taking is being fronted by a group of GOP legislators, led by Sen. Jeff Flake and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who announced Wednesday they would not allow 2018 funding for the Pentagon until Trump approves an amnesty, saying:
To the defense hawks, the only way you’re going to get your money is to deal with immigration rationally.
Graham urged defense-minded legislators to accept the amnesty in exchange for a Pentagon boost, declaring, starting at 04:38:51:
I am not going to go any longer in allowing sequestration to destroy the military at a time we need it the most. Look through the eyes of a soldier and you’ll find out what to do on the military. Look through the eyes of a DACA recipient, and you’ll find out what to do there. Don’t be blinded by loud voices and hateful people. We owe it to this great nation to fix hard problems. We owe it to those who are in the fight to give them the equipment they need to win a war we can’t afford to lose. We owe it to the families of military members to have more certainty, not to be deployed so much. We owe it to ourselves to get these DACA kids right with the law because they’ll add value to our country. To my Democratic colleague: Now is the time. Give us the space. To my Republican colleagues, this is a defining moment for our party.
Democrats and their media allies are eager to let Graham and his GOP allies take the leading role in this shutdown-or-amnesty fight.
Pro-amnesty Democrats are minimizing their visibility by pretending they will oppose a budget deal until the Congress funds various spending programs—such as community health centers, and disaster aid—which the GOP majority is largely willing to fund. On January 17, for example, New York Rep. Joe Crowley declared:
Republicans have the ability to pass a short-term CR [Continuing Resolution budget]. They’ve done that without Democratic support or help. If they want to have the support, we demonstrated in the past as well. When it’s reflective of the values of the Democratic caucus, it has the support of the Democratic caucus. Absent, it won’t have the support of the Democratic caucus.
On Thursday, House GOP leaders will try to pass a “Continuing Resolution” to keep the government funded until mid-February. Graham and his allies have clout because they can ally with the 49 Democratic Senators to block a similar Senate CR. If the Senate and House cannot agree on a short-term CR, the government shuts down Friday night.
If the Senate and House GOP leaders overcome the opposition, then Graham and his pro-amnesty allies will still get another month to push and pull for a wage-lowering amnesty while legislators argue over the 2018 government funding package.
The “DACA kids” cited by Graham are only a small portion of the illegals who will get an amnesty under Graham’s “Gang of Six” bill.
The Gang of Six bill makes only token changes to chain migration and the visa lottery, and only provides one year of wall funding. That amnesty bill would provide citizenship to 3 million young illegals, plus their illegal immigrant parents, plus 400,000 people with “Temporary Protected Status,” plus millions of their chain migration relatives.
The gang includes one of GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s top deputies, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who is the GOP campaign manager for the 2018 Senate elections.
Graham also boasts that his group includes Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, Tenessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, and South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds.
But many of GOP’s defense hawks in the House are denouncing the Senate’s blockade by Graham, Flake, and Gardner. According to Politico:
“There should be no connection. We ought to do the right thing by the military, regardless of agreement or disagreement on other issues,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry of linking immigration to spending talks.
Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, another senior defense hawk on the HASC, called the Democrats’ ploy “a travesty.”
“Other people who have jobs don’t get to go to work every day and say, ‘I’m not going to do my job for weeks … until you get to the thing that I like.’ And that’s what the Senate’s doing,” Turner said. “They’re blowing off all of their responsibilities to fund this government.”
Amnesty-advocate Graham argues that the ‘DACA kids’ will be a net plus for American society. But the data shows that the vast majority of these young illegals are poorly educated and work in minimum-wage jobs, such as restaurant and janitorial jobs. Only about 4 percent of ‘DACA’ people have college degrees, and less than 2 percent of the ‘dreamer’ population have college degrees, compared to a four-year college graduation rate of more than 20 percent among young Americans.
Graham acknowledged in his speech that the young illegals are sought by business to provide cheap labor for jobs where young Americans demand higher pay. He said about the larger population of 11 million illegals:
How did 11 million people get here? They did not sneak up on us. If you know anything about South Carolina, there is a lot of tourism and heavy service industry. [If] you go to a golf course in South Carolina, you will see beautiful golf courses maintained by good people. and you’re going to see mostly Hispanics. If you go to a meatpacking plant in South Carolina, you’re going to see people doing a job you wouldn’t want, making a decent living, working really hard, and most of them are Hispanic.
If companies cannot hire the illegals, they will be forced to compete for Americans workers by offering higher wages. That competition is already nudging up the wages paid by Graham’s donors.
The Washington Post reported January 5:
“By spring and summer, I think you’ll see a lot more action from companies on wages” and more training, DS Economics’ Swonk said. “I think this is the pivotal year. It’s good news for workers.”
CEOs are complaining they can’t find enough good workers to fill all of their job openings. Talented workers have largely figured out that the best way to get a raise in this economy is to change jobs. ADP, a company that processes payroll for many of America’s largest corporations, tracks wage and salary data. For years, ADP has pointed out that people who change jobs get a bigger pay bump than people who stay put.
If CEOs don’t want their best workers to leave, they are likely going to have to pay more.
If the amnesty does get approved by Trump and the GOP, it would wreck Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” presidency, 2018 turnout, and his re-election. The approval would prove that Democrats, the establishment media, and business lobbies have the political power to simply raise the supply of cheap imported labor whenever companies are forced to pay higher wages to Americans, regardless of Trump’s stunning victory in 2016.
But if the amnesty push is foiled, then voters will be able to decide in November if they want a Congress to reduce or raise the immigration which has helped freeze Americans’ wages since 2000.
Polls show that Trump’s American-first immigration policy is very popular.
For example, a December poll of likely 2018 voters shows two-to-one voter support for Trump’s pro-American immigration policies, and a lopsided four-to-one opposition against the cheap-labor, mass-immigration, economic policy pushed by bipartisan establishment-backed D.C. interest-groups.
Business groups and Democrats tout the misleading, industry-funded “Nation of Immigrants” polls which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants, including the roughly 670,000 ‘DACA’ illegals and the roughly 3.25 million ‘dreamer’ illegals.