Senate Democrats Hope to Slip as Big an Amnesty as Possible into Budget

Senate Democrats are hoping to slip as big an amnesty for illegal aliens as possible in a filibuster-proof budget that would only need majority support in the United States Senate.

For months, Senate Democrats have eyed using the little-known reconciliation process to jam an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens through Congress with no threat of the filibuster stopping it and only 51 votes in the Senate to approve it.

This week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told reporters that while he hopes the amnesty plan includes giving green cards, and thus eventual naturalized American citizenship, to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, he wants the amnesty to be as big as possible.

“I hope it goes bigger,” Durbin said.

As Breitbart News reported, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) threw his support behind an amnesty plan via reconciliation last week and suggested this week that he wants the amnesty to resemble that of the failed “Gang of Eight” amnesty from 2013.

“I’m a 2013 immigration supporter. You can look at the 2013 bill and I thought that was a great bill,” Manchin told reporters. “If we had that bill then, we wouldn’t have the problems we’d have today.”

While Manchin has received pushback from West Virginia legislators who told Breitbart News he ought to be more concerned with the interests of American workers rather than multinational corporations, a number of swing state Senate Democrats risk alienating much-needed voters in their states if they support an amnesty plan via reconciliation.

A poll provided to Breitbart News showed that six swing state Senate Democrats — including New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock, and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, who are up for re-election next year — would lose support from voters if they back the amnesty.

Still, the open borders lobby and Biden administration officials have been relentless on slipping an amnesty through the reconciliation process.

Last week, Biden said he would rely on Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough to decide whether an amnesty could be passed via reconciliation.

“That’s for the parliamentarian to decide, not for Joe Biden to decide,” Biden said.

Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.

Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.