Liberal Groups Warn Immigration Curbs Could Sink ‘Global Warming’ Bill

Left-wing groups are warning GOP amendments on migration could sink the Democrats’ world-saving, climate change “reconciliation” bill, as soon as this weekend.

“I made it very clear at the caucus [meeting] that adoption of such amendments, if they were to stay in the final [bill], would kill reconciliation,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), according to an August 2 report in a Bloomberg media site.

On Tuesday, RollCall.com described Mendenz’s written statement as a warning to Democrats “against voting for Republican amendments on issues such as immigration that could threaten the overall reconciliation legislation.”

The same day, 286 left-wing groups posted a letter urging Democrats to reject any amendments — dubbed “poison pills” — that would reduce the mass foreign migration into Americans’ workplaces and housing. “Adopting anti-immigrant amendments to the [climate bill] will likely bring forth challenges to the passage of this important legislation,” the letter said.

The warnings are “a clear sign that immigration is the most important issue for the political left,” said Jon Feere, a former border agency official who is now working with the Center for Immigration Studies. “Every other issue takes a backseat to their main agenda, which is mass immigration by any means possible,” Feere said.

The warnings are plausible because many liberal groups do not think the climate bill is anywhere near what they want, said Rosemary Jenks, the government relations director for NumbersUSA. So they could campaign against the bill if the Democrats allow substantial amendments, such as amendments that require “building the rest of the wall, changing the credible fear standard or [making] mandatory [the] Remain in Mexico [program] … because this [bill] is only a tiny fraction of what they wanted,” she said.

So far, the GOP has not announced amendments with significant changes, she added.

The climate change bill is being pushed through the Senate through the fast-track reconciliation process, and it has also been reframed as an anti-inflation bill. The liberals posted their veiled threat amid reports that Republicans will exploit a weak link in the “reconciliation” process.

The weak link is a so-called “vote-a-rama,” in which Senators are expected to offer many amendments to the spending package, starting this weekend. The amendments are each decided by a majority vote, so if even a few Democrats back a GOP amendment, it gets added to the Democrats’ climate bill.

The pro-migration groups are worried that a few Democrats will back legislation that would extend the Title 42 migration barrier on the U.S.-Mexican border. The barrier is potentially far more effective than the border wall because it allows officials to legally exclude anyone — even people who say they are seeking asylum from at-home threats.

One Tile 42 amendment likely to be included in the vote-a-rama has already been sponsored by several Democrats, including Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Joe Manchin (D-WV), Jon Tester (D-MT), Rob Portman (R-OH), Maggie Hassan (D-NH).

The amendment would require that the Title 42 barrier stay up until the coronavirus emergency is formally ended by the nation’s Surgeon General — and Democrats are touting the amendment as a disaster for immigration.

An amendment “functionally ends asylum,” Kerri Talbot, deputy director of the Laurene Powell Jobs’ Immigration Hub, told the Washington Post.  “Will the Democrats stick together and vote it down?”

The claim of disaster, however, is pro-migration PR because the Title 42 barrier is already being used as a political theater by Democrats to pretend they are guarding the nation’s border, said Feere.

The Title 42 barrier is operated by the border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. He is a Cuban-born, pro-migration zealot who disregards the nation’s immigration laws as he allows roughly a million illegals to cross each year on the legal grounds that they are allowed to file claims for asylum. That massive flood of migrants is tilting the nation’s economy in favor of Democratic donors by pushing down  Americans’ wages and driving up Americans’ housing costs.

Mayorkas has also gutted the Title 42 legal barrier by exempting more of the arriving women and children. Most of those family migrants are allowed to enter the United States even though they are trying to get their fathers, husbands, and family members who illegally sneaked into the United States via coyote-guided treks through the border region.

“Those kinds of amendments are purely messaging,” said Jenks. Any directives from Congress that are not tied to laws or budgets are “going to be misused by this administration — and everybody knows that,” she added.

Democrats may also set up a process where a few endangered Democrats can vote for popular anti-migration amendments, and then pass subsequent leadership-backed “wraparound” amendment that eliminates the prior amendments, she said.

So far, the GOP is also using the issue as political theater, said Feere.

For example, the draft Title 42 amendment does not force Mayorkas to close any of the loopholes he has created, said Feere. He added:

Unfortunately, there are a lot of weak Republicans who are also okay with political messaging that is ineffective [in stopping migration]. If Republicans were fighting harder, they would be adding amendments that require the hiring of thousands of new ICE officers and eliminating all of Mayorkas’ illegal-migration encouragement policies.

The political theatre “as always,” is operated by both sides, Feere said.

Many pro-migration Democrats are eager to play up the claimed threat posed by the Title 42 amendment.

“I call on all Democrats to stand firm and united against Republican amendments that would hurt immigrant families,” Menendez told Greg Sargent, one of the Washington Post’s many establishment leftists.

The Democrats “have huge opportunity to enact breakthroughs, but could threaten it by voting to effectively end asylum, a key part of Ted Kennedy’s Refugee Act of 1980,” tweeted Frank Sharry, a long-standing advocate for amnesty and extraction migration.

The amendment is “the ticking time bomb still threatening the big climate deal,” Sargent wrote.

“Codifying a Stephen Miller policy to end asylum is not one of our climate goals,” tweeted Julian Castro, a former housing secretary.  Democratic senators must be clear on this: they will not jeopardize our chance to invest in climate by adding right-wing poison pill amendments to codify Title 42.”

Meanwhile, other business-backed groups want to use the climate bill to accelerate migration.

Republicans should take up the challenge and use the vote-a-rama to press for significant changes, countered Jenks.

“This is the last opportunity that Republicans are going to have to force votes on issues of their choosing [before the 2022 election]. so it would be foolish not to push the immigration issue as far as they possibly can,” she said.

Even ordinary migrants can see through the Senate posturing, Feere said.

“Amid all of this political back and forth, the message [sent to] south of our border hasn’t changed — people around the world are still hearing that the United States is welcoming in virtually everyone who comes to our border illegally,” he said.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants —plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has tilted the free market toward investors and employers.

The inflationary policy makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.