Rep. Steve King: Passing Another Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Would Be ‘Republican Suicide’

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about President Trump’s decision to end President Barack Obama’s DACA amnesty for illegal immigrants.

King said President Trump “should have ended DACA on January 20, at the moment that he swore in as President of the United States.”

“That would have been the most painless time to do it,” King said. “It was a clear campaign promise. A ‘kinder and gentler’ way might have been just not to issue any new permits and let the others expire so the numbers didn’t grow, but either one of those. Instead, they’ve been issuing DACA permits and the numbers have grown.”

“I wrote an op-ed several months ago, and the number we had was 750,000. Now the number is 800,000 or more, and in the next six months, they’ll be signing up as fast as they can,” he predicted.

“To throw Congress into this conundrum, to have an intense debate over DACA, we’ve had a number of debates over DACA. I brought amendment after amendment to defund it, and in the House, my amendments prevailed. I believe they prevailed every time,” King recalled.

“That was, of course, under Barack Obama’s presidency. I think that going at this now, and for the president to be listening to Paul Ryan and probably Mitch McConnell and some other folks that are pro-amnesty/open borders – he’s trying to come to a diplomatic solution to this thing and get the best kind of an arrangement he can. I want DACA gone and dead because it represents amnesty,” said King.

“I often tell people that I was in the construction business, just trying to put my bulldozers out on the job to make a little money, and I wasn’t in politics, but I watched the debate on the 1986 amnesty act under Ronald Reagan. All along, I thought, ‘Well, it’ll fail in the House’ or ‘It’ll fail in the Senate,’ and it didn’t. It passed both. But I wasn’t worried because I knew Ronald Reagan understood the principle that you can’t reward lawbreakers, or you get more lawbreakers. But he signed the amnesty act,” King recalled.

“At least he was kind enough to call it the amnesty act. The Cabinet that surrounded him advised him to sign it. Several of them have recanted, and Ronald Reagan recanted. He regrets that he signed the amnesty act. I would think that’s enough lesson for all of us, Matt,” he told Boyle.

King said it would be “Republican suicide” to pass another amnesty bill.

“It’s going to split the Republican Party,” he warned. “All the Democrats are going to be for this DACA peace because they know that it grows their political base. They could care less about the rule of law or securing our borders. None of that means anything to them. What matters to them is building political power. They will get more Democrats. That’s why they’ve been involved on that side of the immigration thing all along.”

“But on the Republican side, you have the pro-DACA people, people that are like Paul Ryan and a number of others. If they came up with the Democrats to legalize this thing in DACA, then the whole conservative base that was behind Trump in this election is going to leave,” he cautioned.

“Maybe they don’t just walk away. Maybe they don’t turn and work against the president, but he needs the energy behind him for re-election. We also need that energy behind us for the 2018 midterm elections. I think that hurts us a lot,” King predicted.

“It’s political suicidal not to follow through on the promises that have been made, the campaign promises. Those promises energized people more than any other issue. Donald Trump would not be president today if he hadn’t taken such a strong stance on ‘build the wall, secure the border, end the unconstitutional DACA.’ When I think about what that means, I’m thinking of the next Republican candidate that would come along for president. They’re going to have a hard time making a case that we can ever secure the border if we don’t get it done this time,” he said.

Boyle asked King to elaborate on a Tuesday Twitter message in which he said former DACA recipients “will make great ‘Peace Corps’ volunteers in home countries. None would take more hardship or risk than we ask of the Peace Corps.”

“People are saying, ‘You send these poor DACA kids back to a country that they never knew, to a language they don’t speak, a place where they don’t have any connections whatsoever.’ That’s not true,” King explained. “That’s how they paint it. They say these are valedictorians, they’re the salt of the earth, they’re all good people, and they’re the cream of the crop. Some of them do fit that category, but there’s a lot of them that don’t.”

“I’m making this point that if we shut off the DACA program, and there are 800,000 of them in the United States today, they would deploy – and I use that word that way – back to their home territories most likely,” he continued.

“They would go back there with a U.S. taxpayer-funded education, many of them a college education. They would have top-notch English skills. They would understand how a free enterprise economy works, how a generally corrupt-free society First World works. They would have seen the transportation systems we have, the educational system, the research and development systems that we have, how a civilized people interact with each other. All of that would go with them back to their home countries,” he proposed.

“Wouldn’t that be the best economic and cultural development, a civilizational development, that, say, Mexico could ever experience?” King asked. “If these are their best and brightest – some of them are; just give them to the people that organized DACA. What if their words were right? Send them back home again. It will have far more impact than you’ll get out of Peace Corps volunteers.”

“Then they say, ‘Well, it’s too dangerous for them, and it’s a place they don’t know the language. They don’t know the culture.’ Nuts! We send Peace Corps volunteers to places where they don’t know the language, they don’t know the culture, and we say, ‘Figure it out, fend for yourself, and become an ambassador to and from the country you’re visiting as part of the network you build,” said King, anticipating one of the likely objections to his proposal.

“We’ve got 7,000-and-change Peace Corps volunteers around the world, and we think they’re doing a lot of good work. In my time, there’s never been a debate on whether it’s wise to keep the Peace Corps going or not. We believe in them. But if you go from 7,000 Peace Corps workers scattered over 120 or more countries to, let’s just say, 750,000 former DACA recipients that are American-educated going back to their home country, it would be a terrific economic boost for them,” he anticipated.

“I don’t know how you argue against that. We restore the rule of law, and we lift Mexico and Central America up to be on a path towards the First World,” said King.

“We’ve received the cream of the crop in the legal immigrants that have come to America,” he pointed out. “If you go over to Ireland and there’s ten siblings in a family, and one of them comes to America, which one do you get? You get the one that’s the most ambitious, that’s got the greatest aspirations, that’s willing to take the risks and do the work. They want to go someplace where they’re unfettered and free and they can succeed.”

“That’s true whether they came out of Italy or Ireland or whether they came out of sub-Saharan Africa,” he noted. “You get the best when they volunteer to come here. We’ve skimmed off the talent pool in legal immigration.”

“Now, there’s a worse element that comes here from illegal immigration,” he added. “First of all, they didn’t respect our laws, so anybody who jumped the border is a criminal. They violated criminal law. If they overstayed the visa and worked, they probably committed the felony of document fraud. So they’ve had great disrespect for our laws.”

“I recall a bill that came through a few years ago, they wanted to increase 5,000 nurse visas a year because they said we were going to be 42,000 nurses short in a very short period of time. So I said, ‘What country needs nurses less than America does? Who has surplus nurses? Have you identified any of those?’ Well, they think the Philippines. I’ve never heard about the Philippines having too many nurses and wanting to export some,” said King.

“We’re just skimming off of other countries, taking some of their best and brightest, and then we send our Peace Corps volunteers over there to help them, when the thing that could help them the most is if their best people would stay there – or sure, travel and come out and get educated, then go back home again to build their own countries,” he suggested.

Boyle noted that DACA recipients are almost always described as “children” or “high-school kids,” even though their average age is in the low-to-mid 20s. King said this contributes to an “oversupply of workers” that depresses wages.

“There’s no doubt about that. I’ve watched that happen within the packing plant industry, where we’ve got in my neighborhood beef and pork that needs to be processed,” said King. “There was a time about 25 years ago when those working at the packing plant were making about the same amount as someone with a college degree, say, a high school teacher. They could all buy a modest house, pay for it, and send their kids off to college, and life was fine.”

“Then they began bringing in cheap labor out of southern Mexico, putting up billboards in southern Mexico and cleaning out whole villages of able-bodied men, bringing them up and putting them on the line,” he continued. “Now, the people on the line are making approximately half of what high school teachers are. I’ve watched that shift over the last 25 years, right in my neighborhood just north and south of me, multiple plants in both directions.”

King noted that DACA recipients run all the way up to age 37, “if they’re telling the truth.”

“Some of these ‘kids’ that have so much sympathy, they’re balding by now, and they’re getting a little gray in their beards,” he joked.

“Also, we know this to be fact: these young men that came in, I’ve watched the films of hundreds of them crossing the border, smuggling drugs across the border. I’ve been able to be there and collared several of them while I was down working on the border and unloaded the illegal marijuana. I’ve picked up the backpacks that are left in the arroyos down there, along with the water bottles and the junk, and talked to the Border Patrol and ridden for several days at a time.”

“You pick up all of the chatter, and you can really understand what’s going on. There is a relentless passage across the border,” he testified.

“Most of these guys are carrying packs that range from 65 pounds on up to 90 pounds or so, most of these guys that are carrying this, they’re younger than 18 years old. If they come into the United States and can’t attest they were there, it’s just a matter of, how will they attest that they were in America at the times prescribed in the bill?” King asked.

“We know that fraud comes hard, it comes at us, and it is going to breed fraud. When Reagan signed the ’86 amnesty act, that was supposed to be for a million people. It ended up being three million people because of the fraud,” he noted.

King urged listeners to call their members of Congress and “tell them don’t vote to legalize DACA.”

“It is amnesty, and the public understands what amnesty is. The open borders are still telling me again that they’re going to redefine amnesty, and that I’m wrong, and that they’re right because they have heart. And I say, ‘I love the rule of law,’” he said.

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