House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has picked amnesty advocate Rep. John Katko (R-NY) to lead a team of GOP legislators that will “focus on solutions to secure our borders.”
“John Katko is the typical corporate Republican,” said one person active in the immigration debate. He added:
He speaks a great game on illegal immigration, and is sorrowfully bad on legal immigration to the United States. He has never found a guest worker program he does not support, he’s never found a legal immigration program he does not think should be expanded, and I don’t think that he considers immigration as something that affects working Americans.
“2021 has seen chaos at our southern border brought on by an administration in denial about a crisis,” said a statement from McCarthy’s office about the task forces:
The American Security Task Force, led by Ranking Member John Katko, will focus on solutions to secure our borders, protect the nation against cyber-attacks, and support the men and women in law enforcement. The American people deserve safety and security and a Congressional majority that delivers common sense solutions, not dangerous policies that weaken law enforcement and open our borders.
In March, Katko voted for a bill that would provide farm companies in his district and nationwide with an unlimited inflow of cheap H-2A visa workers. The H-2A workers would displace many Americans, shrivel spending at local stores, shrink towns’ tax revenue, and reduce the pressure on farm companies to invest in wealth-generating machines, such as cow-milking robots.
The bill would also provide a fast-track amnesty for more than a million Democrat-leaning illegal migrants plus their families. It would also pay future H-2A workers with shares of Americans’ citizenship, providing more voters for Katko’s Democrat opponents.
Katko was one of the 30 GOP legislators who voted for the giveaway to investors, employers, and the Democrat party.
The farm amnesty is pushed by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, a group of West Coast investors that also includes Gates and the Business Roundtable, representing the nation’s largest companies. These business groups favor a greater inflow of consumers, renters, and workers into the U.S. economy — especially white-collar workers. For example, Bill Gates helped create FWD.us, and he would gain from the farmworker bill because he is reportedly the largest owner of farmland in the United States.
Katko’s office did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.
There is no obvious mention of Katko’s new role on his website. His Twitter account announced his new role but portrayed it as a pro-police role.
Katko’s 14-member task force only includes one notable immigration reformer, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX).
The other members are Ralph Norman (R-SC), Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Greg Steube (R-FL), Tony Gonzales (R-TX), Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), John Rutherford (R-FL), Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Warren Davidson (R-OH), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), and Troy Nehls (R-TX). Some committee members openly support labor migration, including Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Greg Pence (R-IN).
Katko gets many donations from investors and real estate groups that favor migration.
But he also gets hammered by pro-migration business groups who want even more migrant consumers, renters, and workers. In March, Syracuse.com reported:
A coalition that wants immigration reforms will begin a $200,000 ad blitz today that criticizes Rep. John Katko for taking a trip to the Southwest border after voting against a Covid-19 relief bill.
…
The We Are Home campaign, launched in January, urges members of Congress to pass immigration reforms that include a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
The pro-migration campaign is funded by wealthy progressives and by Zuckerberg’s FWD.us investor group. The $200,000 spent on the anti-Katko attack-ad campaign is an “insane” amount of money to spend so early in the two-year election cycle, one Hill staffer told Breitbart News.
Joe Biden won Katko’s district in 2020 by nine points. But Katko won his 2020 race by 10 points. His district has few immigrants but has many labor-intensive dairy farms that prefer to hire skilled, disposable, and powerless migrants instead of Americans or robots.
The per capita income in his district is roughly $35,000, significantly below the $42,000 annual income in New York. Overall wealth in his district is relatively low because real estate values are far below the government-inflated values in the coastal cities.
The real-estate wealth in cities is higher because investors concentrate their job-creating investment in the coastal and urban districts preferred by government-imported, lower-wage immigrants. Without those desperate immigrant workers, consumers and renters, investors would be forced to hire young Americans in other districts, such as Katko’s district or Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D) West Virginia.
Katko’s district is adjacent to Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) similarly investment-starved, low-wealth 21st district. In May, Stefanik was elected as House Republican Conference chair, despite her prior support for amnesties and cheap labor, and her alliance with the former GOP leader, Paul Ryan.
Katko is the top Republican on the House’s Committee on Homeland Security. In hearings, he has not confronted Biden’s homeland security chief about Biden’s strategy of opening up the border by allowing job-seeking migrants to enter through various small side-doors.
In a March hearing with DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas, Katko said that “We will only be successful by working together, and I must say, engaging into divisive rhetoric is not the answer and never will be.”
Katko continued by pleading for cooperation from Mayorkas, who is publicly refusing to comply with Congress’s border-wall spending laws, or to enforce deportation laws, or to protect Americans’ right to their national labor market, or even to recognize the dignity of Americans.
Katko told Mayorkas:
I do not want to simply throw stones. I just don’t. I would sincerely like to work with you and the administration on this issue and come to the table with solutions. Today, I would like to propose several measures the administration can take in short order to get this crisis under control. We can restart [spending] already appropriated wall funding … reimpose the Remain-in-Mexico policy, end catch-and-release … I sincerely hope that despite the rhetoric, the administration has taken this crisis seriously and that we can work together to find solutions that are good for the country.
In a June 17 hearing, Katko asked Mayorkas about diversity at DHS and visits to the border, but not about the legality or scale of Mayorkas’s open-door rules and regulations.
“He talks a great game about why we need to enforce the laws on the books for illegal immigration, and that’s fine,” said the immigration activist. “But immigration affects family economics in a significant way, and if he’s not willing to talk about that, then he’s not fit to lead this task force for national security,” he added.
“Katko is the classic example of a Wall Street Republican where as long as stocks [values] are up, as long as overall GDP is up — not [median income] — I think he is content,” he said, adding:
There are a lot of Republicans — certainly fewer than pre-Trump — who still think that as long as we have material prosperity, regardless of the social impact, regardless of the cultural impact, regardless of the impact on the middle and lower classes, then [migration] is okay.
Katko and other establishment Republicans chatter about illegal immigration and the border because they want to divert attention from the economic impact of national migration, he said:
Republicans have been guilty of this for years. … Immigration doesn’t change because of whether it’s someone who’s illegal or illegal. The numbers matter because of their effect on the economy: Whether you’re an illegal alien working in construction, or whether you’re a legal alien working for Amazon, you’re displacing an American.
Democrat pollsters smile when Republicans focus on the border, crime, or illegals.
“In the suburbs … we have very good evidence, going back more than a decade now, that there are white female suburban voters who do not care for the politics of meanness, and they tend to vote against that,” pollster Gary Segura said in a June conversation with Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group. The FWD.us group is part of the coalition which dropped the $200,000 attack ads on Katko.
In contrast, the FWD.us investors are urging pro-migration legislators to sideline mention of immigration economics — such as wages and jobs — in favor of uplifting or inspiring stories about migrants. They urge Democrats to win suburban and female swing voters with promises of “humane, orderly, and safe” migration, without any mention of jobs, wages, or migrant numbers.
“There’s often this kind of conventional wisdom out there, that Republicans have a magic bullet around this issue with just saying the word ‘security’ or ‘border security’ or something as the answer to all ills,” said Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group, which works for FWD.us.
But one of the key questions in our poll — “What do you prefer as an approach to the border: “Build a functioning immigration system that processes people in a fair, orderly and humane way” — gets 55 percent and [the offered alternative] “More border security, more border patrol agents and crackdowns on illegal immigration” gets 45 percent. So it’s a 10-point advantage in states and battleground states that are essentially tied politically.
“The obvious choice [for the GOP] is to make the immigration safe, legal, and rare,” responded Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. His group’s motto — “Fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome,” he said, adding:
Immigration is the elephant with seven blind men feeling different parts of it [even though] it is all the same thing. Economics is a big part of it, but so is Social Security and so is assimilation, and so is the government funding, and all the rest of … Money and wages and jobs. that’s part of it but it’s only part of the problem.
The chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), has proposed immigration-related talking points that emphasize the impact of immigration on Americans’ jobs and families.
Many polls show that the public’s quiet opposition to labor migration emerges whenever asked about the scale and economics of migration, such as the impact on housing prices in Los Angeles.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
Migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
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 leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
However, it is unclear if the GOP’s donors even want a GOP majority if the political price is more public opposition to the migration that inflates their stock market and real estate values.
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