Former President George W. Bush told radio host Hugh Hewitt on April 22 that he is working with the Koch Network to help President Joe Biden pass an amnesty and cheap-labor bill through Congress.
“We’ve got a coalition of like-minded people working this issue,” Bush told Never Trump Hewitt Thursday.
Bush, whose poll rating dipped to 33 percent in 2008 after pushing amnesties in 2006 and 2007, continued:
Many of them are involved on Capitol Hill. So the Bush Center is spearheading a reform movement. It’s quiet except for this book [of paintings], which makes it not quiet. … We’re talking to people about, you know, what needs to be done. I mean, the Koch Brothers, for example, I know that’s a word [Koch] that scares a lot of people on the left, but they’re very much in favor of a rational immigration policy. And they’re putting money behind it, and they’re pushing hard. … Now there hasn’t been interparty outreach, yet. But maybe it’s not quite ripe. My view is if the President is sincere about this, he ought to sit down with, you know, some rational Republicans. But … he’s got to finish his initial agenda, however. He’s got a lot on his plate right now. But eventually, I think there’s a deal to be done.
The Koch network includes a wide variety of Republican donors who would profit from any inflow of new workers, consumers, apartment renters, and home buyers. Many business groups are already working with Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group of investors to organize Democrats behind a bill that would import more labor, consumers, and renters.
However, Bush ignores the economic impact of more immigration, and he, instead, suggested that Americans will be irrationally afraid of amnesty. “What’ll happen is people will scream amnesty. And once you lob the word amnesty out there, it scares people.”
Bush did not name any of the “rational Republicans” who might join his immigration push. However, a group of GOP senators met this week with the Democrats’ top amnesty advocate, Dick Durbin (R-Il). The GOP members were Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mike Rounds (R-SD):
Bush said he also wants the legislation to bring in even more foreign workers. They would likely include foreign college graduates who will accept low wages — and the promise of green cards — in exchange for working white-collar jobs American graduates need. Bush said:
It [will] help our economy, but it’ll make the border more secure. If people are doing work that needs to be done, and we have a legal entry system that enables them to do so, they don’t have to sneak across the border. So step one of help fixing a broken border is to rework our work laws, both high-skilled and lower skilled.
Bush did not comment on the damaging impact of immigration on Americans’ wages, nor about how immigration — both legal and illegal — is driving up housing prices, discouraging high-tech investment, and moving wealth from interior states to the coastal states. Nor did he talk about Americans’ right to their own national labor market and their right to fight with employers for higher wages, better conditions, and more labor-saving investment.
Instead, Bush emphasized that business executives would get compliant, grateful workers to work jobs in their estates:
You know, Hugh, I’m a tree farmer, believe it or not. And you know, we’ve got eight Mexican [visa worker] laborers on our farm. And they, I think we’re in our third year with them working there. But every year, they have to reapply for a visa. So the way the rule works is you apply and you go through the bureaucracy, and then they have to go home for two months out of every year, which is fine, because they go home during the season where we’re not, you know, spending much time digging trees. And the question, though, can they get back in? Will the government let them in? And it creates a lot of uncertainty for a small business, because if the government at one point says no you can’t come back, all those years of training goes down the tubes. And so it sets us back.
Bush did not mention the option of hiring free-speaking Americans and of providing them with decent wages, labor-saving machinery, and employment stability that would encourage them to stay on the job for years. Instead, Bush prefers to hire grateful and cheaper foreign workers via the H-2A or H-2B programs, despite the cost of lawyers and regulations.
Bush has long been a strong advocate of replacing outspoken Americans with cheap and grateful foreign labor. In 2004, for example, Bush pushed Congress to create an “Any Willing Worker” program.
The program would have wiped out Americans’ right to a national labor market by offering shares of Americans’ citizenship to foreigners if they agreed to undercut Americans by taking jobs where employers offered meager wages.
“New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country,” Bush announced on January 7, 2004. “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job,” he said.
The New York Times reported January 7, 2004:
The president’s proposals were designed to appeal to Hispanic groups, a constituency that the White House is focusing on as Mr. Bush seeks re-election this year. The proposals are expected to be embraced by President Vicente Fox of Mexico, who has been lobbying for them for the past three years.
GOP staffers are scoffing at Bush’s campaign-like reappearances, which feature his paintings of immigrants.
“Any Republican still taking their cues from George W. Bush or the neocons is laughably out of touch,” a Senate GOP aide told Breitbart. “Calling for mass amnesty while lockdowns have forced millions of Americans out of work is unhinged. This kind of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and pro-corporate globalism decimated the working class. … People have had enough.”
Bush justified the hiring of visa workers instead of Americans by saying the policy would make the border more “orderly“: “And I’m just one of many, many, many examples of small business owners that rely upon foreign labor. And there’s got to be an orderly way to do it. So to me, that’s what a merit [immigration] system means.”
Once there is an orderly migration system that provides employers with plenty of legal migrants, he said, the federal government can build border barriers against migrants who try to enter illegally:
By the way, I, too, am for a fence. I probably built more fence than any president did. But a broken system makes it harder to enforce the border, no matter how much fence you have. For example, Border Patrol agents are no longer, they’re worrying more about asylum cases than they are about border enforcement. And therefore, it makes the border less secure. And so if we can fix the asylum system, you know, have more judges, more courts, then all of a sudden, we get a more secure border:
Bush’s political strategy is to first pass a DACA bill for at least three million foreign migrants, then pass a larger amnesty for the remaining illegals in the United States:
Start with DACA, and that’ll give people confidence to then go to the next issue. I think the two easiest issues to solve, at least the two more logical issues to solve, are DACA and work. And you know, you and I share the same view on undocumented aliens, that if they pay their taxes and are good citizens and are assimilating, they ought to be given not immediate citizenship, but a right to become a citizen after those who are going through the legal process finish their time.
Any amnesty creates massive new problems. For example, an amnesty offer paralyzes the enforcement of immigration law and also encourages mass illegal migration, such as the rising tide of migrants who are coming over Biden’s border since he offered an amnesty to migrants who persuade officials they were in the United States before January 2021.
The amnesty would also accelerate Democrats’ hopes for demographic change that would cement their national power. On January 5, legal immigrants in Georgia help Democrats win two Senate seats, pushing all 50 GOP senators out of their jobs as members of the Senate majority.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition by Americans to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs young U.S. graduates seek.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democrat, rational, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one aother in the union of 50 states.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly university-credentialed progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950s’ corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It 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, from red states to blue states, and from the central states — such as former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana — to the coastal states, such as New York:
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