Despite efforts to draw distinctions between each other, the leading 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidates are unified to bring more immigration, and thus more labor market competition for American workers, to the United States if elected.
Though polling among all U.S. voters, and particularly with swing voters, finds campaigning for immigration, illegal and legal, is the most unpopular policy position, leading candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have gone above and beyond past Democrat candidates in their vows to drive a large migration to the country.
That increase in immigration would likely have significant consequences for states like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia. As research by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Axios, experts, and demographers has repeatedly discovered, an increase in the foreign-born population via immigration inevitably translates to an increase in likely Democrat voters.
At current legal immigration levels, the U.S. is already on track to bring at least 15 million new foreign-born voters to the country in the next decade. These voters’ swing towards Democrats has already been realized in the 2016 presidential election, where despite winning almost 50 percent of native-born Americans, Trump lost foreign-born voters to Hillary Clinton by 64 percent.
Elizabeth Warren
Warren has portrayed her run for president as a populist movement, similar to that of Sanders’ and Trump’s campaigns in the 2016 presidential election, but her immigration platform is a carbon copy of the donor class’s and Washington, D.C. beltway’s longtime effort to force down wages for Americans by increasing legal immigration levels.
Aside from promising to decriminalize illegal immigration and provide free taxpayer-funded healthcare to all 11 to 22 million illegal aliens, Warren is seeking to gift the big business lobby with a massive increase in legal immigration — levels which are already historically high, as at least 1.2 million legal immigrants are added to the U.S. population every year.
That increase in legal immigration, Warren has said, will include an increase in chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. Today, chain migration makes up more than 70 percent of all legal immigration, and in the last decade the process has brought almost 10 million foreign nationals to the U.S.
Like her legal immigration agenda, Warren plans to surge refugee resettlement to the country by at least 700 percent. As Breitbart News has chronicled, mass fraud is prevalent in the refugee system, with African refugees often fraudulently obtaining refugee status.
Joe Biden
Biden has been less direct about his plan to increase immigration to the U.S.
Like the majority of 2020 Democrats, he has endorsed providing free taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal aliens, a plan that healthcare experts have said will drive a migration of illegal aliens with “serious health problems” to the country.
Biden’s strategy to increase immigration, though, has been to provide green cards to all foreign students who graduate from American universities and to bring as many legal immigrants to the country as feasibly possible — regardless of its impacts on U.S. citizens and workers.
Biden said in August:
We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need … is absolutely bizarre … I would also move to increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United States.”
In 2013, while speaking to the financial industry, Biden touted a plan to increase the number of H-1B foreign visa workers that corporations are allowed to import to replace American workers.
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
Bernie Sanders
Sanders has on occasion denounced the idea of open borders, calling such a policy a “Koch brothers proposal” to drive down the wages of American workers by forcing them to compete against the world’s workforce.
“It would make everybody in America poorer,” Sanders said in 2015 of open borders. Sanders has revisited that sentiment in his 2020 presidential campaign — even calling for more detention space for border crossers to end Catch and Release — but his broader immigration plan reflects that of the open borders lobby.
For example, Sanders’ latest plan ends deportations of illegal aliens and border crossers, decriminalizes illegal immigration, and promotes the DREAM Act, which would provide amnesty to the majority of illegal aliens currently living in the U.S., creating a new flood of legalized foreign labor that American workers would be forced to compete against.
Where Sanders has differed from his two top contenders is on his plan to make subtle changes to the H-1B visa system and prevent American workers from having to compete against illegal aliens for U.S. jobs.
Like Trump, Sanders has warned against corporations using the H-1B visa program to import cheaper foreign workers instead of hiring qualified and job-ready Americans.
Out of all the 2020 Democrats running for president, Sanders is the only candidate who earns a “mixed” review from NumbersUSA’s scorecard, the organization that tracks the records of politicians on whether or not they support less immigration to boost wages and job opportunities for Americans.
Sanders is the only 2020 Democrat that has mostly endorsed nationwide mandatory E-Verify to ban U.S. companies from hiring illegal aliens over American citizens. Nonetheless, Sanders’ support for mass amnesty, critics have said, will mean that those illegal aliens currently in the country would be able to eventually compete against Americans in the workforce and pass through the E-Verify system.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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