President George W. Bush’s top strategist, Karl Rove, is now backing the Democrats’ bill to amnesty at least one million illegal migrants brought to the United States by their illegal-migrant parents.
The news was buried in a report by the Dallas Morning News on February 2:
Rove, a GOP strategist and longtime adviser to former President George W. Bush, joined in the coalition’s launch Tuesday. He said he recognized that “there are a lot of people in my party who don’t share my views.” But he said a permanent solution is still the “right thing to do.”
“It would be a blot on our country’s soul if we were to take hundreds of thousands of people who’ve known no country but America and tell them to get lost,” he said, adding that it would be “politically smart for both parties” to secure permanent legal status for Dreamers.
Rove worked for Bush when he pushed the “Any Willing Worker” plan. The plan would have abolished Americans’ right to a national labor market by allowing employers to hire foreign workers for meager wages if the employers could not persuade Americans to take the offered wages. Rove also worked for Bush when he tried and failed to pass pro-employer amnesty and cheap labor bills in 2006 and 2007.
In November 2020, President Donald Trump lost Georgia, Arizona, and many other former swing states because of the demographic changes ensured by the GOP’s past support for immigration. In January 2021, all GOP senators lost their jobs as members of the Senate majority because immigrant voters in Georgia provided Democrats with a working majority in the Senate. The defeat came 30 years after GOP senators in 1990 helped President George H. Bush doubled the inflow of migrants, mostly for the benefit of the GOP’s donor class.
“It’s politically smart for politicians to put policies in place that actually promote opportunities for jobs and better wages for Americans,” said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. Rove’s comments are “just the latest disconnect between the elites and the business fat-cats and your run-of-the-mill American voters who respect the law, want to have a good job, and have a decent opportunity at life in this country.”
The business coalition cited in the Dallas Morning News is a business-funded group of employers and vendors, dubbed the Texas Opportunity Coalition. The coalition includes two groups – the Texas Business Leadership Council and the Texas Business Immigration Coalition, which is backed by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us’ coalition of wealthy West Coast investors.
The Democrats’ amnesty was introduced on February 4 by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and was partially backed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The migrants include some who hold jobs in the healthcare sector, and “it would be an American tragedy to deport these brave and talented essential workers in the midst of this pandemic,” Durbin said in a statement.
But the draft bill includes no protection for Americans against future illegal or legal migration and no compensation for the Americans whose dreams of a decent income, schooling, and homes have been damaged by Congress’ inaction amid large-scale illegal migration.
The bill also includes no penalties for companies that hire illegals and no compensation for heartland states and rural towns that lose investments, jobs. And wealth because investors can ignore their residents while hiring compliant immigrant workers at the arrival desks of coastal airports.
The Durbin amnesty “just repeats the common flaws of every amnesty,” said Law, who added:
You get the legalization first and the enforcement never, and all that does is causes the next wave of illegal aliens, to be even larger. The 1986 amnesty was supposed to be the end-all-be-all, the one-time-only amnesty. And from an illegal alien population of just a couple of million, it has exploded to over 12 million.
The Dallas Morning News also reported that Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn is offering conditional support for the Durbin amnesty: “’Hopefully,’ Cornyn said, ‘we can learn from the lessons of the past and begin working on smaller packages that can gain broad bipartisan support and hopefully build trust in the process.’”
In a January 28 interview, Cornyn told a Texas TV station, “I am ready to act on that and come up with a stable future for these young people who have done nothing wrong. They came as children, and I think that is a good place to start.”
But pro-migration advocates fear that Cornyn is zig-zagging between his voters, donors, and his pro-migration opponents. The Dallas Morning News reported:
“Cornyn has mastered the art of pretending to be somewhat moderate, because of the way he speaks, because of the way he looks, because of the way he comes off,” Frank Sharry of America’s Voice said last year, calling the Republican “insincere.”
Several other GOP senators, however, have spoken out against the Democrats’ amnesty push, saying that the federal government should first help Ameican get good jobs. The opposing senators include Sen. Marco Rubio (FL), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
Other GOP senators, however, are signaling cooperation with the Democrats, including Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Dan Sullivan (D-AK), Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), and retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH).
While endorsing the Democrat’s pro-business amnesty, Rove ignores the voters’ desire to curb migration so they can earn get jobs and higher wages. For example, Rove did not mention wages or jobs in a January 20 column for the Wall Street Journal that argued the GOP should rely on pre-Trump rhetoric:
President Donald Trump’s most popular achievements were conservative: originalist judges, a pro-growth tax cut, regulatory relief, strong national defense, recognition of the global threat posed by China, secure borders, and respect for life and religious liberty …
… There are more conservatives in America who believe in traditional values, family, faith, personal responsibility, patriotism and law and order than there are liberals who don’t.
Rove buried the electoral value of Trump’s policy achievements for American employees — including major wage gains in 2019 — and instead argued for appearances by claiming that “The party should also increase efforts to recruit candidates who are female, Hispanic, Asian-American, black and younger. More diverse candidates were key to the GOP’s surprise gains in the House and the states.”
Rove suggested no policy changes, just better messaging:
If Republicans are to win in 2022, new prospects for the 2024 presidential nomination must have space to road-test messages and show who does better at bringing together traditional Republicans and working-class Trump supporters. That’s a very tall order.
Texas employers use many foreign workers, including illegals and foreign contract workers — such as H-1Bs and OPTs — instead of paying American decent wages. For example, the pro-migration group, the American Immigration Council, reported in 2020 that that “undocumented immigrants comprised 8 percent of Texas’s workforce in 2016.”
The result is widespread poverty, especially outside the major cities. In March 2020, the Bureau of Labor Standards reported
When all 254 counties in Texas were considered, all but 32 had wages below the national average. … The counties with the highest average weekly wages were concentrated around the larger metropolitan areas of Dallas, Houston, and Austin, as well as the smaller areas of Midland, Odessa, and Amarillo. Lower-paying counties tended to be located in the agricultural areas of central Texas, the Texas Panhandle, and along the Texas-Mexico border.
In the November election, President Donald Trump won many additional votes among American Latino districts. The voters see how their wages are supped by the business’ preference for illegal workers with no workplace rights. Politico reported:
ZAPATA, Texas — Of all the results from the November 3 election, few drew as much attention from national political observers as what happened in a quiet county on the banks of the Rio Grande. Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Zapata County’s vote in a hundred years. But it wasn’t its turn from a deep-blue history that seemed to be the source of such fascination but rather that, according to the census, more than 94 percent of Zapata’s population is Hispanic or Latino.
Zapata (population less than 15,000) was the only county in South Texas that flipped red, but it was by no means an anomaly: To the north, in more than 95-percent Hispanic Webb County, Republicans doubled their turnout. To the south, Starr County, which is more than 96-percent Hispanic, experienced the single biggest tilt right of any place in the country; Republicans gained by 55 percentage points compared with 2016. The results across a region that most politicos ignored in their preelection forecasts ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.
…
Ross Barrera, a retired U.S. Army colonel and chair of the Starr County Republican Party, put it this way: “It’s the national media that uses ‘Latino.’ It bundles us up with Florida, Doral, Miami. But those places are different than South Texas, and South Texas is different than Los Angeles. Here, people don’t say we’re Mexican American. We say we’re Tejanos.”
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and immigration in theory.
The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.