Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the status of immigration legislation on Capitol Hill.
“Listen, it’s not likely that Congress is going to get a lot done between now and November,” Stein noted. “They’re looking at trying to use some CR language that would cut refugee resettlement funding because yesterday it was disclosed that Obama really torquing up his refugee admissions from Syria and places like that. So they may do something there, but I guess it’s a question of whether or not the CR language in the House is ever going to survive.”
“The broader question is, what could happen in a lame duck?” he continued. “Depending on who wins the election, there are House Republicans who could try to move amnesty legislation through in a lame duck. But in terms of the big legislative picture right now, there’s not a lot on the agenda.”
Stein talked about FAIR’s new report on “the incredible cost to the American taxpayers of financing the education of people here illegally”:
Taxpayers are paying about $60 billion a year, mostly for limited-English education programs. I encourage people to take a look at this report. This is a huge unfunded federal mandate, goes back to 1982, when illegal immigration was much lower – but today, the cost of educating illegal alien children is about $44 billion, about twelve thousand bucks a student, and now about 13 states are already spending more than a billion dollars on limited English proficiency programs.
The basic reading level of most of the kids in LEP programs is below basic, by far the majority. Thirteen states now spend more than a billion, including Maryland, California, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia – and taxpayers don’t get a single voice in any of these expenditures.
So, at a time of increasing challenges in public education, the only way we can solve this problem is basically secure the borders, curtail unskilled immigration, overturn the Supreme Court decision Plyler vs. Doe legislatively, with a Constitutional amendment, and then remove some of these incentives that are causing people to bring family members up illegally.
There are things that can be done, but the first thing we need is information, and that’s what this report lays out.
Stein noted there is “a big split within the Republican Party” on immigration, combined with a “radical change in the Democrats’ position because they’re no longer tethered by organized labor to support border control.”
“Hillary Clinton’s positions are radically different on immigration from where they were as recently as 2008,” he said. “They’re unrecognizable from she and her husband said in 1993.”
“The point about Trump here is that he has taken on the most problematic wing of the Republican Party, that has worked with the Chamber of Commerce to decimate immigration limits and border controls for years,” Stein said.
He praised Trump’s immigration team, and looked forward to how a President Trump might repair decades of damage to America’s immigration system:
I tell you this in all sincerity: Donald Trump has the best, most seasoned, and knowledgeable group of people advising him on immigration policy issues, of any Republican candidate to run for President, probably in American history. He’s got people who really grasp what Obama has done, how to turn it around, how to fix it, working with point people in Congress like Jeff Sessions.
If Trump were to win, he’d be in a position really advance some real, meaningful, true immigration reform that would restore the rule of law, re-empower the American people to determine how many people can come in, and how the rule of law and the borders are controlled.
Look, Donald Trump says you can build a castle to the sky, right? He can build a building, he can build a wall. And building a wall is a surrogate, basically, for getting the job done. We’ve been promised for 30 years we’re going to get immigration under control, get these borders under control, stop the benefits, stop the magnet.
And now, after eight years of the Obama feast, where he has literally, systematically dismantled every phase of interior immigration law enforcement, you need somebody who has strong executive authority, strong executive credentials, who can actually take on these special interests, and the cheap labor lobby, and get this stuff advanced.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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