Senate Democrats are trying as hard as possible to slip an expansive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens into a budget plan that would only need majority support and face no threat of the filibuster, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) says.
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.
During an interview with PBS News Hour, Sanders — the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee — said Senate Democrats are “going to do the best that we can” to ensure an amnesty that would provide millions of illegal aliens with green cards, and eventual naturalized American citizenship, gets slipped into the budget.
Sanders said:
Well, we’re trying to cover people who have been in the forefront, among other things, of protecting our economy, critical care workers, dreamers, and others.
I have believed for a long time, as I think almost all the members of the Democratic Caucus and some Republicans, that the time is long overdue to pass comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship.
So we can’t do it completely, the way I would like to do it, in a reconciliation bill. There are real constraints, in terms of policy, what you can do. We’re going to do the best that we can.
Despite his self-identified socialist persona, Sanders is an unlikely champion for flooding the United States labor market with millions of newly legalized foreign workers who will be competing for jobs against America’s working and middle class — the two socioeconomic groups that have suffered the most during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
As Breitbart News has chronicled, from his time as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, to at least 2015, Sanders has said unchecked immigration only makes America’s working-class “even poorer” because they are largely the demographic group that is forced to compete against illegal aliens and newly arrived immigrants.
In 2015, Sanders famously called open borders “a Koch brothers proposal,” a reference to the nation’s donor class and corporate elite’s endless cheerleading for amnesty for illegal aliens, increased legal immigration, and lax border controls that keep a constant flow of foreign workers arriving in the U.S. labor market.
During the 2020 Democrat presidential primary, a supporter of Sanders’ called him out during a town hall for dropping his opposition to mass immigration on the grounds that it hurts, most prominently, working and middle class Americans.
“So one issue that you have not been consistent is open borders,” the voter said:
When you first ran, you said it was a Koch brothers scheme and seemed to recognize that low wage workers being dumped into the country does not help low wage workers.
My family is at 134 percent of the poverty level. So I worked at a restaurant this summer and the dishwashers were starting at $14 an hour, teenagers. Can you please explain why you changed on that issue? Did you have to change because donors seem to want the low wage workers?
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 toward employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly noted that mass immigration cuts Americans’ wages.
In 2013, CBO analysis stated that the “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan would “slightly” push down wages for the American workers. A 2020 CBO analysis stated that “immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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