President Donald Trump’s citizenship director told a Texas business group that House Speaker Paul Ryan “submarined” the best chance for immigration reform because he wanted illegal immigration.

“Let’s not forget … when [Rep.] Paul Ryan was the speaker, Paul Ryan submarined the best opportunity we had legislatively when [judiciary chairman Rep.] Bob Goodlatte’s bill … came through,” Ken Cuccinelli told the Texas Public Policy Foundation on August 22.

Cuccinelli, who is the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, said, “We had leadership there that defended the status quo. They were the Chamber of Commerce Congress. They wanted illegal immigration.”

In contrast, President Trump is following through on his promises and is giving American voters a clear choice in 2020, he said:

I actually think the 2020 election can help solve that problem. I believe when you run on things, and people know ‘This is what I get if I vote for X, if this party becomes the majority, I get this bill’ …. [then you get] good politics and good policy.

“Not enough people will challenge their own leadership in the GOP to beat them down when they are wrong,” said Cuccinelli, a populist conservative from Virginia. 

Goodlatte retired from Congress in 2018. In December, he said that Ryan blocked his bill by dividing the GOP votes between two reform bills: “That is just not a good strategy and I complained about it at the time. I said ‘You’ve got to narrow this down to one bill and then work really hard to get the members to vote for that one bill.’”

Ryan said in November 2018 that he preferred a rival bill, sponsored by GOP Rep. Chris Curbelo, who was defeated in the November election. 

On immigration, I really liked—I call it “the Curbelo bill,” it was Goodlatte II — the immigration compromise bill that I put on the floor in July, which satisfied the President’s four pillars.” he said.

“Our goal is to not cut legal immigration,” Rep. Carlos Curbelo told RollCall.com on June 2018. The number of illegals who get green cards from the amnesty should be “as high a number as possible,” he said. 

Curbelo repeated his demand, telling TheHill.com that “some visas may be shifted towards employment visas, but our goal is to not cut legal immigration.”

The Goodlatte bill would have cut legal immigration by ending the visa lottery, provided a work permit amnesty to just the 700,000 illegals who are registered in the DACA program, and ensured immigration cuts, said Rosemary Jenks, policy director of NumbersUSA.

It also included much careful language to hinder fraud and to prevent pro-migration judges from hijacking the bill’s limited amnesty for their own goals, said Jenks, who opposed the bigger Ryan bill.

Ryan’s support for the Curbelo bill allowed 41 GOP legislators to vote no on the Goodlatte bill when it came up for a June vote.

On June 14, the House blocked Goodlatte’s H.R. 4760, the “Securing America’s Future Act,” with a vote tally of 193 to 231. No Democrats voted for the reform.

“If it has been the only bill offered, it might have passed,” Goodlatte said. “We were 20, 21 votes short,” said Goodlatte. The [bill] would have passed “if we had gotten half of [the GOP ‘no’ voters] to join with us, we would have gotten there,” he said.

Immigration Numbers

Immigration is a government economic strategy which seeks to stimulate economic growth and stock prices by inflating the supply of labor and consumers.

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and rarely punishes companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.

This policy of inflating the new labor supply boosts stock values for investors by ensuring that employers do not have to compete in a free market for American workers with offers of higher wages and better working conditions.

This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.

The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

The federal government does not inflate the supply of money because it fears inflation would damage the value of money.