Mitch McConnell OKs Partial Immigration Reforms

The Senate’s establishment GOP leadership has endorsed valuable but limited reforms to immigration policy because of populist pressure from the House GOP amid the end-of-year budget negotiations.

The draft changes endorsed by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are valuable but are also inadequate to block inevitable evasions by President Joe Biden’s deputies,  said Jon Feere, the director of investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The devil is in the details and there’s not much detail here … and there’s no language that requires actual [measurable] results,” he told Breitbart News.

Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, “will just come up with workarounds … [because] this administration has already proven that it has no interest in enforcing existing federal law,” he said, adding:

There are some provisions that are worth considering, but this proposal entirely avoids any conversation about the aliens that Biden has already allowed in … It almost appears as if the preference is to allow all of [Preisdent Joe] Biden’s illegal aliens to remain here.

‘The GOP proposals were drafted by several senators working for McConnell in response to public pressure from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

McConnell quietly helped to block reforms in 2018. But this year, he picked the group’s leaders — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).

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The members reflect the outsized role of business donors in the Senate’s immigration politics.  Graham was one of four pro-migration GOP Senators in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty push. Lankford supports more migration for CEOs.

But Johnson promised last week “to force the issue” in the end-of-year negotiations over funding for agencies,  Israel, and Ukraine’s war with Russia. He also tweeted his support for the GOP’s H.R. 2 comprehensive immigration reform bill that would:

“Finish the wall, End catch and release, End abuse of parole authority, Reform the broken asylum system, Restart Remain in Mexico.”

The GOP senators’ bill does address some — not all — of the reforms in the GOP’s H.R. 2 immigration-stabilization bill.

For example, the Senate plan would direct the Department of Homeland Security to continue building the border wall and its network of sensors.

It would block asylum by requiring migrants to seek asylum in each country that they transit on their way to the United States border, it would tighten and streamline asylum requirements, and also restore the “Remain in Mexico” policy that prevents migrants from getting the U.S. jobs they need to quickly repay debts to cartel-aided migrant smugglers.

The Senators’ bill would also tighten rules for asylum-seeking families and it tries to narrow the parole loophole that has been ruthlessly used by Biden’s deputies to import job-seeking migrants directly from their home countries.

The changes in rules for asylum and parole are especially important because those two legal rules are being used to launder more than one million illegal migrants each year.

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But the Senator’s list does not set clear outcomes on these reforms, noted Feere. For example, the Senate bill could try to set up a cap on parole awards which would cleanly block Mayorkas’s inflow, he said.

The bill does not defund Biden’s other schemes to import more workers via the federal refugee program, or the new “Safe Mobility Offices” that are being created in countries south of the U.S. border.

It also does not defund the catch-and-release pipeline of aid groups that house, train, and transport migrants to the U.S. jobs and homes that are needed by several million sidelined Americans.

Also, “there are zero mention of interior enforcement and zero mention of ICE officers, and that’s a serious omission that really makes me question the seriousness,” said Feere, who worked as a top enforcement official for President Donald Trump.

The GOP Senate plan is likely to face strong opposition from Democrats, few of whom are willing to reduce the massive inflow of wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants into American communities.

But many GOP Senators are also going to publicly or quietly oppose the GOP proposal, which would slow the delivery of new workers, renters, and consumers to influential CEOs and donors across the United States.

For example, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), is pushing two bills that would help CEOs import foreign workers instead of hiring, training, and paying Americans to do the jobs.

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One bill would allow hospital CEOs to import an additional 25,000 foreigners for jobs that would otherwise go to better-paid American nurses. The bill is backed by at least seven other GOP Senators.

He is also backing a bill that would help CEOs import Indian graduates to take white-collar American jobs in exchange for low wages and the government-provided, deferred bonus of green cards. That visa worker inflow is already being expanded by Biden’s deputies, so helping to push many more American graduates out of good jobs and careers.

Cramer’s EAGLE Act bill is backed by a lobbying group of Indian contract workers: “We are incredibly grateful to Senator Cramer … for leading the bill and urge its swift passage in Congress,” said Aman Kapoor, a founder of the group, Immigration Voice.

Cramer describes himself as a “strong advocate for the free market system,” even though his “EAGLE Act” bill would tilt the labor market in favor of donors and against ordinary American voters.

Both bills have repeatedly failed to win support — but they show the determination of many GOP Senators to provide donors with cheap foreign labor regardless of the pocketbook damage to their fellow citizens who have been pushed out of jobs and homes by the federal policy.

Many Democrats are also pushing for more migrant workers.

For example, eight Democratic Senators, including Sen. Bernie Saunders (D-VT), sent a November 2 letter to Mayorkas listing ways in which he could use his legal authority to accelerate the flow of foreign workers into the jobs needed by Americans.

“We now urge you to implement these policy changes swiftly and to adopt additional changes to ensure that all new arrivals who are eligible to work can do so promptly,” the eight Senators wrote.

House Democrats also oppose the GOP’s stabilization plans.

Business groups also oppose any reduction to the inflow of workers, renters, and consumers by insisting the migration problem is really about border chaos, not the economic damage to Americans.

“The Administration should be expanding access to legal pathways to reduce the number of people attempting unauthorized crossings,” said a November 3 report by FWD.us, a lobby group for West Coast investors.

The investors’ progressive allies have already prompted the White House to back away from a minor update to the asylum rules, and are now trying to sink the GOP reforms.

The “Senate Republican border proposal effectively ends asylum,” claimed Tom Jawetz, a prominent progressive for greater migration.

“Senate Republicans also want to end the Biden admin’s parole program that provides a literal lifeline to people fleeing Ukraine,” he claimed — as if Ukrainians were not allowed into Western Europe.