Jeff Sessions to Anti-Amnesty Americans: Send DC a 'Message They Won't Forget'

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is urging Americans who oppose President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal immigrants to send a message on Tuesday by providing Sessions some reinforcements in the political battle.

In a Fox News op-ed, Sessions, who has led the fight against massive amnesty for illegal immigrants, said though “a nation’s first loyalty must be to its own citizens,” Obama and Congressional Democrats, with their immigration policies, only want to help “billionaire special interests, amnesty activists, and the citizens of other countries — while reducing jobs and pay for our own.”

Sessions said the “elite denizens of Washington and Wall Street scorn and mock the good and decent people of this country for wanting their laws enforced and their communities protected. They try to make you feel bad for having sensible and rational concerns about how uncontrolled immigration impacts your jobs, schools, neighborhoods, and community resources.” He blasted the hypocritical “cosmopolitan elites, these great citizens of the world,” who “turn a blind eye to the suffering and poverty in their own backyards.”

These ‘Masters of the Universe’ have forgotten that a nation owes its first loyalty to its own citizens,” Sessions declared. “And they want you to believe that you can’t win. But they are so wrong.”

Sessions says that Americans, “through their vote, have the power to stop” Obama’s executive amnesty on Tuesday. 

“And with your vote, you have the power to prove them wrong,” he noted. “You have the power to deliver a message they won’t forget.”

After the border crisis and Obama’s promise of executive amnesty, Republican candidates started to surge in red states. Even in blue New Hampshire, GOP Senate candidate Scott Brown erased a double-digit deficit against Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen by focusing on illegal immigration. Sessions, as he has repeatedly reminded voters, noted that every Senate Democrat has supported Obama’s plans for comprehensive amnesty legislation. And Republican Senate candidates in Georgia and Arkansas have also made illegal immigration a campaign issue.

“Every single Senate Democrat voted for the Obama-backed plan to provide immediate work permits to 12 million illegal immigrants – allowing them to compete for any job in America,” Sessions wrote, reminding voters of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill. “This legislation would also double the rate at which low-wage guest workers are brought into the U.S. to fill jobs throughout the economy. Further, the legislation would triple the rate of permanent immigration, giving lifetime work permits and citizenship to over 30 million immigrants over the next ten years.” 

Sessions said America’s already generous immigration policy has created a “large surplus of labor” that has pulled down wages. He mentioned that all of the net gain in jobs since 2000 has gone to immigrants–legal and illegal–while America’s immigration screening and enforcement policies are being decimated. He noted that “interior removals have plummeted more than 40% since 2009” while 40,000 “illegal immigrant family members who had just recently crossed the border were released by the feds and failed, predictably, to appear in court.”

“People just show up at the border and are simply released into the country – free to claim local benefits funded by U.S. taxpayers,” he said. 

Sessions also mentioned that 70 percent of “asylum applications show warning signs of fraud,” which are ignored by immigration officials who also are handcuffed in pursuing the 40 percent of illegal immigrants who have overstayed their visas. In addition, as Sessions mentioned, recent “internal DHS documents show that there are 167,000 convicted criminal aliens who were ordered deported but are at large in the U.S. and released from custody.”

Sessions noted that massive amnesty legislation is “is championed by open borders billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — global CEOs who don’t think you’re entitled to the same protections their gates and fences provide them.”

Sessions said that America will “functionally have open borders” if Obama enacts his executive amnesty, which Republicans Senators tried to block. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Democrats “repeatedly thwarted” those efforts, which were led by Sessions and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).