Exclusive: Republican Study Committee Creates Holistic Immigration Plan to Raise Wages, Grow Middle Class

A Republican Study Committee (RSC) budget proposal would create an immigration plan to secure the American border, curb illegal immigration, and reform America’s legal immigration system to boost wages and grow the middle class, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

The RSC releases an annual budget to showcase its ideas for how a budget should be crafted but also to outline their policy solutions to fix the problems facing the nation. The RSC is the only non-committee congressional group to release a budget proposal every year.

The RSC, led by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), has moved to propose the policy solutions that would better the American people and advance an America First agenda.

This section of the RSC budget could serve as a model for a House Republican model should they take back the House during the 2022 midterm elections.

An RSC policy document held that Republicans, if they obtained the House majority, should hold public health bureaucrats such as Anthony Fauci accountable.

In this section, the RSC details how their budget would secure the border, crack down on illegal immigration, and fix the incentives in the legal immigration system to aid American workers.

The RSC explained:

• Immigration policy should protect our national security by protecting the American people from terrorism, cartels, and other threats to their safety.
• Immigration policy should prioritize American workers, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents.
• Immigration policy should respect the rule of law, along with immigrants that honor our legal immigration processes, rather than incentivize law breaking.
• Immigration policy should aim to assimilate legal immigrants into the American family so they too can take pride in our values, history, and heritage.

Immigration experts hailed the proposal crafted by Banks, Budget and Spending Task Force Chairman Kevin Hern (R-OK), and the rest of the RSC.

RJ Hauman, head of government relations for the immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform, said in a statement:

The Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Fiscal Year 2023 budget blueprint correctly recognizes that the border crisis continues to threaten national security, public health, wage levels, employment security, and poses unsustainable strains on government resources. As FAIR has long noted, every immigration policy decision by the federal government must serve the interests of American citizens, families, and workers. The RSC understands this, while the party in power does not. FAIR applauds Chairman Banks, Budget and Spending Task Force Chairman Hern, and the entire RSC membership for their leadership on the immigration issue amid a historic crisis. Republican leaders and the entire conference should take note of what this blueprint contains going into the 118^th Congress. They will have a mandate to immediately legislate unflinchingly, and must ensure that our immigration laws protect and serve the interests of the American people as they were meant to do.

In addition, the RSC mentioned that its border proposal has introduced “dozens, if not hundreds, of bills to fix America’s immigration system and to fix the crisis at the southern border.”

The RSC stated that these bills to address America’s border and illegal immigration crises include:

The RSC Budget supports Rep. Clay Higgins’ (R-LA) bill, the Finish the Wall Act, which, among other things, would complete wall construction projects proposed by President Trump. The RSC budget would also implement Rep. Matthew Rosendale’s (R-MT) bill, REMAIN in Mexico Act of 2021 to require the Biden administration to continue to implement President Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols. This budget would also implement Rep. Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) bill, the Closing Asylum Loopholes Act, which would increase the “credible fear” standard to reduce fraud in the asylum process and preserve the programs for those truly in need. Additionally, the RSC Budget supports hiring more immigration judge teams to handle backlogs and make it easier to secure our borders and ports of entry.

The RSC Budget would prohibit federal funds from going to cities or jurisdictions operating as sanctuaries for illegal immigrants. There are at least 190 of these so-called sanctuary jurisdictions across the country,^[7] and many cities have seen increased crime rates since declaring themselves sanctuary cities.^[8] Accordingly, the RSC Budget supports Rep. Guy Reschenthaler’s (R-PA) No Sanctuary for Criminals Act, which would block federal grants from flowing to these jurisdictions. The RSC Budget also supports legislation that would allow victims of illegal alien crime to sue sanctuary jurisdictions for damages. The RSC budget supports Rep. Randy Feenstra’s (R-IA) bill, Sarah’s Law, to ensure that federal authorities can detain, until ICE can process them, any illegal alien that commits a crime that results in the death of another person.

This budget also supports the following common-sense measures to support border security and protect the American homeland:

• Rep. Vicky Hartzler’s (R-MO) bill, Eradicate Crossing of Illegal Tunnels (EXIT), which would expedite the approval process that U.S. Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) agents must undergo to destroy tunnels at the border used for illegal crossings and the transportation of narcotics.
• Rep. Dan Meuser’s (R-PA) Immigration Transparency and Transit Notification Act of 2022, which would require the HHS Secretary to notify Federal, state and local health officials of any jurisdiction before placing an illegal immigrant there.
• Rep. Tom McClintock’s (R-CA) Illegal Immigrant Payoff Prohibition Act, which prohibits settlement payments to illegal aliens in connection with their inadmissibility.
• Rep. Dan Bishop’s (R-NC) Immigration Detainer Enforcement Act, which would give explicit authority to local law enforcement agencies to hold detained illegal immigrants for 48 hours to allow DHS to assume custody.
• This budget supports defunding the United Nation’s International Organization of Migration,
• Rep. Ted Budd’s (R-NC) Stopping Traffickers and Their Accomplices Act, which would require abortion providers to report suspected human trafficking to the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

The budget would also slash the Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund, which the conservative group believes operates as a “slush fund for liberal bureaucrats to subsidize Biden’s open borders agenda.”

Roy Beck, the president of NUMBERS USA Education & Research Foundation, said in a statement:

The RSC Budget contains a sweeping but practical blueprint for immigration policies that would provide a fairer playing field for American wage-earners and would begin to narrow current economic disparities that are destabilizing our society. The greatest beneficiaries would be Americans of all races and ethnicities in the economic underclass.  The many specific line items truly justify the authors’ claim to “prioritize American workers, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents.” Adoption of the budget proposals would create conditions that should result in bringing back into the job market millions of Americans who have abandoned it, or been abandoned by it. And they would remove barriers to the aspirations of American students in many careers. Most of the provisions are not speculative in that they either have been proven effective in the past or have been recommended by a succession of federal commissions over the last half-century. They would greatly reduce the illegal foreign worker competition by eliminating the major incentives for foreign citizens to enter the country illegally or to overstay their visas. And the budget provisions, if implemented by a President, would end the chaos at our borders. If adopted in full, the immigration budget items would be one of the greatest steps ever taken by Congress for a more equitable and harmonious society.

The RSC proposal also put forward numerous reforms to the legal immigration system to improve Americans’ lives, including:

• Ending the diversity lottery visa program
• Limiting chain migration to the spouses and children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents
• Support the intent of the 14th Amendment to only confer citizenship, at birth, to someone born of at least one U.S. citizen
• Add bonding requirements to certain visas with high overstay rates to mitigate visa overstays
• Require employers to use E-Verify to ensure that potential employees are legally eligible to work in the United States

Additionally, the budget would ban business deductions for wages paid to illegal immigrants. “Wages illegitimately paid to support illegal immigration should not qualify as a legitimate business expense,” it charged.

The proposal would also implement reforms to the H-1B Visa program to end “corrupt practices.” It would specifically implement Banks’ American Tech Workforce Act to ensure that businesses cannot undercut American wages by higher foreign H-1B workers at a lower wage:

The bill would also replace the current lottery system used in the program, which outsourcing firms abuse by flooding the system with applications to make it more likely they receive H-1B slots. Instead, the bill would award H-1B visas to companies willing to pay the highest wages for their workers. Finally, the bill would limit the ability of Big Tech firms to contract with third-party companies to fill positions with H-1B workers for jobs that are eventually outsourced.

The RSC proposal is especially powerful considering that a coalition of multinational corporations and the United States Chamber of Commerce have continued to lobby Biden to loosen the rules for foreign H-1B visa workers to pack the labor market with more foreign workers.

“There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements,” Breitbart News’s John Binder noted.

Goldman Sachs has also moved to cut roughly $100 billion from Americans’ wages by importing 2.5 million extra foreign workers.

The H-1B program has often been abused to the detriment of white-collar Americans.

The RSC budget also said the United States should deny admission and permanent residence status to any individual likely to abuse the American welfare system.

Many leading conservatives helped craft the RSC budget proposal, including Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), who is the RSC Budget and Spending Task Force chair and is also running to replace Banks for RSC chairman. Other task force members include:

• Byron Donalds (R-FL)
• Ralph Norman (R-SC)
• Trent Kelly (R-MS)
• Ronny Jackson (R-TX)
• Beth Van Duyne (R-TX)
• Bob Good (R-VA)
• Tom Tiffany (R-WI)
• Ben Cline (R-VA)
• Ron Estes (R-KS)
• Roger Williams (R-TX)
• Fred Keller (R-PA)
• Troy Nehls (R-TX)
• Michael Cloud (R-TX)
• August Pfluger (R-TX)

“As conservatives, we believe our country should be open to those that will seek the American dream, and not those that will seek to depend on the American taxpayer. We also believe it is morally reprehensible for liberal elites in the Biden Administration to use the hard-earned dollars of the American people to enact an open borders agenda,” the RSC budget explained.