Lamar Smith: ‘It’s Going to Be Amnesty’ for Illegals If Democrats Win Midterms

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) says that should the Democrats win the House or Senate in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, their agenda will be a sweeping amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.

During a discussion with the Center for Immigration Studies, Smith said the Democrats’ entire agenda if they take back Congress in the midterms is amnesty to allow the more than 12 million illegal aliens currently in the United States to permanently stay in the country.

“I think it’s going to be amnesty, number one, number two, and number three,” Smith said.

Smith also said that the establishment media’s reporting on the issue of immigration — where more than 1.5 million legal immigrants are admitted to the U.S. every year — is some of the “worst” media bias he has seen.

“I almost never see an accurate immigration story. There are few reporters who will try to present both sides, but most of the time it’s an editorial, it’s not an immigration news story and it’s very slanted,” Smith said.

“The coverage of immigration is probably the worst example of media bias and slants that I’ve seen,” Smith continued.

The current U.S. legal immigration system allows for newly naturalized citizens to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. This process, known as “chain migration,” makes up more than 70 percent of all legal immigration to the country.

As Breitbart News has extensively reported, any form of amnesty of illegal aliens would increase chain migration to the U.S., potentially to levels where more than nine million foreign nationals are allowed to enter the country through their family connections.

Princeton Policy researcher Steven Kopits has previously noted that an amnesty for illegal aliens would cost American taxpayers about $2 trillion.

Amnesty, although beneficial to illegal aliens, comes at the expense of American citizens. For the nearly 800,000 to 3.5 million illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, granting an amnesty would cost taxpayers at least $26 billion.

Additionally, about one in five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one in seven would go on Medicaid, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated.