A group of Republican Senators has introduced legislation that would require President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to make public the monthly total of border crossers and illegal aliens released into the United States — a figure that is currently buried and must be estimated by experts.
Led by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republican Senators introduced the “Southern Border Transparency Act” to ensure that DHS discloses all relevant information regarding the number of border crossers and illegal aliens released into the United States interior every month, as well as what countries they are from and how many are rewarded with work permits, among other specifics.
“The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to hide record levels of illegal immigration at the southern border, but Americans deserve to know exactly how many migrants are being released into our country,” Cornyn said. “This legislation would shine a bright light on President Biden’s catch and release practices and reveal the devastating consequences of this administration’s unlawful actions.” [Emphasis added]
In early 2021, Biden’s DHS began implementing its expansive Catch and Release network which includes a parole pipeline for border crossers and illegal aliens hoping to be released into American communities after arriving at the United States–Mexico border.
According to the DHS Inspector General, Biden’s DHS is releasing more than 60,000 border crossers and illegal aliens into the United States interior every month, though little is known about their nationalities, whereabouts, and if they have ultimately secured asylum.
Most recently, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said he estimates that Biden’s DHS has welcomed to the United States about six million border crossers and illegal aliens in less than three years. That figure includes those released by DHS and those who successfully crossed the border.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a co-sponsor of the legislation, said the plan “will bring needed transparency and oversight to this manufactured crisis” spurred by Biden’s lax enforcement of federal immigration law.
“We have an immigration crisis because Joe Biden has abandoned his responsibility to secure the southern border,” Cotton said.
The bill’s other co-sponsors are:
Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), J.D. Vance (R-OH), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), James Lankford (R-OK), Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Ted Budd (R-NC), Todd Young (R-IN), Steve Daines (R-MT), Mike Lee (R-UT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Roger Marshall (R-KS), John Hoeven (R-ND), John Kennedy (R-LA), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Katie Britt (R-AL), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA).
In the last nine months alone Biden’s DHS has released nearly 520,000 border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities — a foreign population twice the size of Spokane, Washington.
Mass immigration creates downward pressure on American wages, job prospects, housing prices, and social costs that are often difficult to capture in data.
While the Biden administration has focused on getting more foreign workers into the United States labor market than ever before, a boon for big business, there is seemingly an epidemic of working-age Americans falling out of the labor market. Today, about 44 million of these able-bodied Americans are not in the workforce.
“Raising wages would be one of the most important things to make work more attractive,” Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota told Congress in September. “Immigration lets us not do any of that, including the current flow of massive illegal immigration.”
Likewise, mass immigration drives up the costs of homes for Americans as demand increases. This is a fact that has been repeatedly noted by a number of establishment media outlets including Axios, New York Magazine, and the New York Times.
In 2013, a study by the Michael Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, which promotes mass immigration, explained how the importing of tens of millions of immigrants over decades had helped raise housing costs by $3.7 trillion for the next generation of homebuyers but spun the figure as the creation of “housing wealth.”
WATCH — CNN: As Rent Inflation Remains Sticky, Rising Mortgages Fueling ‘Worst Affordability Crisis’ in Housing in 40 Years
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.