Amnesty: Democrats’ Dream Act Would Kill Donald Trump’s RAISE Act

Democratic and business groups are pushing President Donald Trump to accept a 2017 “Dream Act” — but the legislation would greatly expand the size the DACA amnesty, welcome more criminals, eliminate existing education expectations, sideline American youths, and greatly expand the financial costs paid by Americans.

For example, the Democrats’ Dream act would provide a near-automatic amnesty path to citizenship to a low-wage school dropout who was convicted of two felonies, providing he also enrolls in a neighborhood education program — and it would likely impose a $2 trillion cost on taxpayers over the next 50 years.

Those easy-citizenship proposals are the reverse of Trump’s promised “RAISE Act,” which would benefit 320 million Americans by cutting low-skill immigration, raising wages and reducing taxpayers’ long-term costs by $1 trillion per decade.

If Trump accepts the Dream Act, it will be a triple-victory for Democrats because Trump will also lose the chance to get funding for his border wall, or to pass his immigration-reform RAISE Act. Defeating the border wall and the RAISE Act are already a huge priority for Democrats and business executives because they would sharply reduce the annual inflow of future Democratic voters and of taxpayer-funded consumers.

The Dream Act of 2017 was drafted by Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham. They were two of the original eight authors of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty-and-cheap-labor bill which cost Democrats nine Senate seats in 2014, doomed Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential ambitions, and helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election.

Amnesty advocates “talk about amnesty for valedictorians and those who were ‘brought here through no fault of their own,'” said Robert Law, policy director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He continued:

The talking points on the DREAM Act never match the actual legislative text … In fact, the DREAM Act would grant amnesty to individuals with a history of criminal offenses and minimal education and English language requirements. Washington is bad at bailouts, and amnesty is the worst kind of bailout.

“We already know that the Obama Administration allowed gang members and other violent criminals as old as 36 to participate in DACA, failed to deport those denied DACA, and declined to confiscate fake or stolen identity documents from DACA applicants, among other problems,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relation ay NumbersUSA. She continued:

Apparently, that’s not enough for Sens. Graham and Durbin, who want to get rid of the upper age limit altogether, relax the criminal restrictions further, and actually make it illegal for DHS to use information provided by the aliens to enforce immigration law.

The fine print shows that the amnesty bill has no numerical limits, no age limits, loopholed education requirements, weak verification requirements, easy opportunities for fraud and a huge cost.

 

Structure

The bill includes a two-stage process. The first stage provides temporary green cards, dubbed “Permanent Resident Status on a Conditional Basis,”  to an unlimited number of illegals who apply for the benefit.

After two or three years,  the federal government will then convert the temporary green cards into citizenship for illegals who displace Americans from the military, take university slots from American teenagers, or win a job sought by an American. Under this fast-track procedure, many of the illegals will quickly get their citizenship and then be allowed to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

 

Numbers

Section 3 of the bill includes this paragraph: “(e) Exemption From Numerical Limitations.—Nothing in this section or in any other law may be construed to apply a numerical limitation on the number of aliens who may be granted permanent resident status on a conditional basis under this Act.”

Former President Barack Obama’s 2013 “DACA” amnesty has provided benefits to almost 800,000 illegals since 2012, but the pro-amnesty Migration Policy Institute says 3.34 million illegals would meet the Durbin-Graham act’s “minimal threshold [which] represents those potentially eligible to apply based on meeting only the age-at-arrival and years of U.S. residence criteria.”

That 3.3 million number includes 1.1 million people who have not graduated from high-school, but who can use the loopholes in the legislation to get citizenship.

The Graham-Durbin act also expands the DACA amnesty by adding roughly 400,000 people living in the United States under “Temporary Protected Status,” bumping the numbers past 3.6 million. The TPS migrants were allowed to stay in the United States after disasters in their home countries, but few have extensive educational credentials. Their U.S.-born children of TPS migrants have been given citizenship.

The post-amnesty inflow could also spike the numbers much higher as the former illegals become citizens and gain the power to bring in their siblings, and parents.

If each beneficiary only brings in an average of 1.1 new people, then the Graham-Durbin bill could bring in eight million people, or ten times as many people over the next ten years as the advertised number of 800,000.

The Dream Act also does not include any funding or legal upgrades to block another rush of migrants, even though prior amnesties have encouraged subsequent waves of unskilled illegals to walk, drive or fly into the United States. The 1986 double-amnesty, for example, included a side-amnesty for farm workers, but, as the Atlantic reported in 1995:

Backed by Congressman Leon Panetta and Senator Pete Wilson, both from California, the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program was expected to grant legal status to 350,000 illegal immigrants. Instead more than 1.3 million illegal immigrants–a number roughly equivalent at the time to a sixth of the adult male population of rural Mexico–applied for this amnesty, most of them using phony documents in what has been called one of the greatest immigration frauds in American history. More than a million illegal immigrants were eventually granted legal status; many were soon joined illegally by their wives and children. Instead of shrinking the farm-labor force, IRCA has guaranteed an oversupply of workers.

The bigger-than-expected 1986 amnesty expanded the subsequent family “chain migration” by at least 743,000 between 1989 and 2012, according to a 2013 analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Similarly, illegal immigration surged to back up to roughly 1.5 million per year after Obama’s 2012 DACA amnesty, which also encouraged at least 100,000 unskilled Central Americans to cross the Texas border and ask for amnesty. “President Obama’s refusal to enforce our immigration laws and decision to unilaterally create immigration programs encouraged more illegal immigration and contributed to the surge of unaccompanied minors and families seeking to enter the U.S. illegally,” said a September 5 statement from Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a former immigration lawyer and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

The Graham-Durbin amnesty expansion is very different from Trump’s popular RAISE Act, which would reduce legal immigration by roughly 400,000 people a year, or 4 million fewer people in 10 years. The bill was drafted with two GOP Senators, Georgia Sen. David Perdue and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, both of whom won election following the 2013 “Gang of Eight” disaster.

 

 

The RAISE act cuts immigration by narrowing the family relatives that new immigrants can bring in via “chain migration.”  RAISE stands for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. Advocates for the RAISE Act routinely say it should be combined with other bills which set penalties for employers who hire illegals, and with streamlined immigration enforcement rules.

In a world of political options, Graham-Durbin Dream Act is an extra 8 million legal immigrants in 10 years, and RAISE is 4 million fewer immigrants in 10 years. That’s a difference of 12 million immigrants is just one decade — and a massive windfall for progressives, CEOs and Wall Street.

 

Costs

Trump’s RAISE Act is expected to save taxpayers $1 trillion in long-term expenditure every ten years, according to a recent study by the Heritage Foundation.

But the Graham-Durbin Dream Act likely will cost more than $2 trillion, largely because most of the applicants are not skilled enough to get a job that pays more in taxes than they receive.

This estimate of the Dream Act’s cost is drawn from a 2013 report by the Heritage Foundation estimated that taxpayers would be hit by a $6 trillion cost over 50 years for amnestying 11 million illegals. If Durbin-Graham act boosts the immigrant population by just 4 million people over ten years, Heritage’s data suggests that it would cost roughly $2 trillion over the next several decades.

That’s good news for some because the extra immigration and resulting government expenditures will be a multi-trillion dollar stimulus to business groups who want to sell food, entertainment, and services to the imported consumers.

The draft bill also includes an obscure sentence allowing states to grant valuable university slots, tuition grants and in-state tuition rates to current and future illegals who miss the Durbin-Graham amnesty. The sentence says “Section 505 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. 1623) is repealed,” so allowing state Democratic politicians and allied university lecturers to offer the incentive of free university education to foreigners debating whether to become illegal immigrants.

The bill does not offer compensation to the next wave of American college students who will be crowded out of good slots and financial grants by the next wave of illegal immigrants.

 

Criminals

The Graham-Durbin bill relaxes the existing rules against the legal immigration of criminals.

To be denied the amnesty, a person must have been convicted of three separate felonies that have nothing to do with immigration, which were committed on three different occasions, and also have served at least 90 days in jail — despite the commonplace courtroom practice of allowing felons to plea-bargain their way out of expensive jury trials if they quickly plead guilty of low-penalty misdemeanors.

The exemption for immigration felonies means that officials must ignore any applicants’ record of immigration crimes, tax fraud, workplace fraud and even identity theft that has hurt Americans.

The Graham-Durbin bill also includes this obscure language:

With respect to any benefit under this Act, the Secretary may waive the grounds of inadmissibility under paragraph (2), (6)(E), (6)(G), or (10)(D) of section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)) for humanitarian purposes or family unity or if the waiver is otherwise in the public interest

An expunged conviction shall not automatically be treated as an offense under paragraph (1). The Secretary shall evaluate expunged convictions on a case-by-case basis according to the nature and severity of the offense to determine whether, under the particular circumstances, the Secretary determines that the alien should be eligible for cancellation of removal, adjustment to permanent resident status on a conditional basis, or other adjustment of status.

In plain language, according to a statement provided to Breitbart News by NumbersUSA, criminal applicants can also claim exemptions for humanitarian, “family unity” or “public interest” reasons in cases of criminality, smuggling, student visa abuse, and unlawful voting.

Already, at least 2,000 DACA recipients have lost their DACA status by breaking the law. The Dream Act does not include any funds for the many Americans who will be victimized by Dream Act migrants.

The RAISE act does not lower the normal barriers against criminals getting green cards.

 

Work Skills 

Obama’s DACA amnesty supposedly excluded high-school dropouts. But the Durbin-Graham legislation includes several loopholes to deliver citizenship to unskilled people.

First, the 1.12 million dropouts identified by the Migration Policy Institute would be eligible for the “conditional” status if they merely enroll in a state-run education course for “a general educational development exam, a high school equivalence diploma examination, or [an]other similar State-authorized exam.” The legislation does not include any provisions to exclude fake education courses, and students do not actually have to pass a high-school test to win conditional status.

Dropouts who work as low-skill, low-income day laborers can meet the three-year employment rules by simply getting a document from “a labor union, day labor center, or organization that assists workers in employment,” the act says.

Illegals who don’t work at all can still become citizenship by getting a hardship exemption. The draft laws says a hardship exemption could be granted to a person with a disability, women who are raising children, or if a person’s removal “would result in extreme hardship to the alien or the alien’s spouse, parent, or child who is a national of the United States or is lawfully admitted for permanent residence.” In turn, an illegal could provide the hardship by simply submitting “a least 2 sworn affidavits from individuals who are not related to the alien,” said the draft law.

Many business groups, especially the leisure and hospitality businesses in Graham’s home state, want to hire large numbers of low-skill immigrants to keep their costs low.

The Durbin-Graham offer of amnesty comes a year after the National Academies of Sciences reported that the integration of Hispanic immigrants is slower than during the 1960s. It also comes as economic experts worry about the drop in annual productivity growth since the early 2000s.

The Durbin-Graham bill’s support for low-skill immigration is another contrast with Trump’s RAISE Act, which creates a points system to ensure only the most productive people are offered citizenship. Under RAISE, points are awarded for education credentials, youth and business experience, for example, so using immigration to nudge up the average productivity and wealth of Americans.

 

Verification 

The Dream Act has very few safeguards against fraud, even though prior amnesties has prompted massive fraud.

In any amnesty, illegals face huge incentives and massive social-pressure from immediate relatives to win citizenship for themselves, the relatives and all their descendants – — especially if Americans are carelessly giving away the huge benefit without setting safeguards, moral obligations or penalties for prior lawbreaking.

There is some evidence that many DACA applicants have already engaged in massive fraud. Breitbart News reported:

In an interview with LifeZette, former USCIS manager of the agency’s investigative unit, Matt O’Brien, alleged that the fraud rate for DACA is roughly “40 to 50 percent” and potentially even “higher”:

“Based on what I had seen and what I discussed with my colleagues, the fraud rate is 40 to 50 percent. It’s possible that it was higher,” he told LifeZette this week.

According to O’Brien, the DACA program was riddled with fraud and abuse from the beginning, where illegal alien applicants for the program allegedly lied on applications and were rarely caught by USCIS officials:

“There’s a huge rate of fraud in this program,” he told LifeZette this week on the subject of DACA.

USCIS employees did quick checks of DACA applications, he said, rather than thorough reviews, “in order to get the DACAs all racked and stacked quickly.”

He and the investigators working under him, called adjudicators, often found evidence that someone had lied about his DACA qualifications, but the office of the chief counsel at USCIS, he said, almost always dismissed the adjudicator’s recommendation to deny the application.

“I would say 98 percent of the time, they defaulted to approving them,” he said.

 

Voting

The Dream Act puts the illegals on a five-year fast-track to the voting booth, because it treats the illegals as green card holders from the moment they get the initial “conditional” approval.

The inflow of new citizens — ranging from a minimum of 800,000 up to 8 million will further shift the state and federal governments to the left, boosting spending and regulation. For example, California’s politics are now dominated by the pro-immigration Democratic party, and there are no GOP members in statewide offices, because of prior immigration, amnesties, and naturalizations.

Nationally, the inflow of new citizens from the Graham-Durbin act will boost Democratic voting power in swing-states, such as North Carolina and Florida, and in Democratic-trending states, such as Texas and Georgia. Nearly all of the illegals will vote Democratic because 90 percent of the likely DACA beneficiaries are from Mexico, which has a tradition of big governments, deep economic divides and a religious tradition of economic redistribution.

The distribution of extra voters likely will match the current distribution of the 800,000 DACA recipients. The MPI estimates that roughly 30 percent of DACA illegals live in Democratic-dominated California, but Texas hosts roughly 14 percent, Florida has 5 percent, Georgia has 4 percent, North Carolina has roughly 3 percent, while Virginia and Colorado have roughly 2 percent. If 4 million people get citizenship in 10 years, and half turn out to vote in 2028, then each percentage point of the share provides roughly 24,000 additional votes to the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential candidate.

If only 4 million people use the Dream Act to get citizenship in 10 years, and half turn out to vote in 2028, then each percentage point of the DACA share provides roughly 24,000 additional votes to the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential candidate. In Florida, that would add 120,000 Democratic votes, which is greater than Donald Trump’s 113,000-vote margin of victory in 2016.

 

Current Practices

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. However, the government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants to compete against Americans for jobs.  Not all do go to work, for example, or else file for government aid, almost 100,000 legal immigrants per year are close to retirement.

The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals. Some of those imported white-collar workers gain outsourced jobs at Jan’s alma mater, Stanford University.

That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized  Americans and their families.

Amid the huge inflow of new workers, the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades: