Business and ethnic lobby pressure ensured that all Democrats — plus nine GOP members — voted for a huge amnesty bill that provides no offsetting benefits to working Americans.
The giveaway to migrants, businesses, and Democrats passed 228 to 197, marking a comfortable win for a high-priority Democrat agenda item.
The bill, H.R. 6, is titled “The Dream and Promise Act,” and it would provide a quick amnesty to several million migrants who have been brought to the United States as children by their illegal immigrant parents. It would also deliver green cards to several hundred thousand foreigners who were given “Temporary Protected Status” or “Deferred Enforced Departure” status.
Progressives hope the amnesty bill will give them a political lock over Texas, Florida, and other states, so pushing the GOP and its supporters into a long-term subordinate status.
The bill was supported by nine of 206 GOP members, despite a pressure campaign by GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
But the relatively small number of GOP supporters will minimize pressure on the 50 GOP Senators to vote for the citizenship giveaway.
The nine GOP members are:
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE)
Rep. David Valadao (R-CA)
Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI),
Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL)
Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA)
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Rep. Chris Smith (D-N.J)
Rep. Carolos Gimenez (R-FL)
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
In 2019, seven GOP members vote for a similar amnesty bill, including Newshouse. He is an orchard owner in an agriculture district where the many employers rely on migrant labor. Valadao is also from an agriculture district and narrowly won his election in 2020.
Bacon’s district includes a growing population of immigrants, including former illegal migrants who took jobs in the state’s low-tech meatpacking plants. In 2020, Bacon won with a four-point margin — but President Joe Biden also won a majority of votes in the district.
Salazar is also pushing an amnesty and cheap labor bill in cooperation with Newhouse, Diaz-Balart, Upton, Valadao, and a few other GOP members.
The Democrats’ amnesty bill echos the progressive view that America is not a homeland for American citizens, but is instead only an idea, or only a “Nation of Immigrants,” that is open to any foreigner, regardless of what ordinary Americans prefer. The view is increasingly pushed by wealthy Americans, in part, because it boosts their stock market wealth with additional cheap workers, consumers, and renters.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to legal migration, labor migration, and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
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.