The pro-mass-immigration Koch brothers’ network of billionaire, donor-class organizations is fighting President Trump’s economic nationalist agenda ahead of the 2020 election with efforts to give amnesty to illegal aliens and a campaign for free trade absolutism.
While Trump scores victories from his tariffs on Chinese imports and imported aluminum and steel, and from the increased interior enforcement of immigration, the Koch network of organizations — including Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners, and the Libre Initiative — is looking to crush the populist-nationalist gains with an unpopular economic libertarian agenda.
On the immigration front, the Koch-funded Libre Initiative brought illegal aliens, who were shielded from deportation by former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, to Washington, DC, last week to lobby vulnerable lawmakers to support a DACA amnesty.
Spokespeople for the Koch network were previously invited to the White House by advisers Jared Kushner and Brooke Rollins to lobby on behalf of illegal aliens for an amnesty that would subject 13 million unemployed and under-employed Americans to more cheap, foreign competition in the U.S. job market.
The Koch network is seeking to secure an amnesty for more than a million illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for DACA by pushing the White House to negotiate a large immigration deal, insiders have told Breitbart News.
While the Libre Initiative is laser-focused on amnesty for illegal aliens, other Koch-funded organizations are invested in stripping Trump of his power to executively enact tariffs for the purpose of national security and to protect American industry and U.S. jobs for the country’s working and middle class.
The effort is being fronted by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Ben Sasse (R-NE), who are hoping to ensure endless free trade by preventing the executive branch from enacting certain tariffs without going through Congress first.
Much like the billionaire and donor class, elected Republicans and Democrats are largely aligned in their support for protecting free trade at all costs and opposing protective tariffs to keep American jobs and industry in the U.S.
The Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has committed to supporting Gallagher, Toomey, and Sasse’s anti-tariff legislation and is now even demanding the Trump administration halt any effort to enact auto tariffs to protect American autoworker jobs.
Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips claimed in a statement that auto tariffs would put “America’s strong economy at risk,” though Coalition for a Prosperous America’s Jeff Ferry has said putting tariffs on foreign cars is needed to stop the flow of multinational corporations like General Motors (GM) and others from outsourcing and offshoring American jobs to foreign countries like Mexico and China.
“There is a way to provide additional incentives to US-based producers to produce more vehicles in the US: tariffs on auto imports into the U.S.,” Ferry has written.
“A tariff is likely to have positive effects on US auto industry revenue, employment, profit, and investment. GM sold its entire European business (to Peugeot) a year ago,” Ferry continued. “The Big Three are more North America-focused than ever (if we ignore China, where the Communist government makes it near-impossible to produce internationally for the China market). A tax on non-North American imports would tend to favor GM, Ford, and Fiat-Chrysler.”
The free trade absolutist and amnesty push would likely reverse Trump’s economic nationalist gains in terms of American manufacturing job creation for the middle and working class and the depression of wages, which have boomed in recent months, for blue-collar American workers.
The Koch/GOP donor class’s preferred economic libertarian agenda has little-to-no support among the American electorate. Analysis by New York Magazine following the 2016 presidential election found that it is right-wing populists who are the most underrepresented political group in politics—Americans who are socially conservative but who want their jobs and industry protected from foreign competition.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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