Watch: House Speaker Mike Johnson Holds Border Press Conference

Neil Munro

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is leading a group of 60 GOP legislators to the border to showcase President Joe Biden’s refusal to guard the nation’s families and communities from foreign migrants.

He is scheduled to open a press conference at 3:30 Eastern at Shelby Park Boat Launch in Eagle Pass, which has been used by Biden’s deputies to import hundreds of thousands of economic migrants. A statement said:

Speaker Johnson and House Republicans will hold a press conference highlighting the failures of the Biden Administration to enforce border policy, their experience on the ground, and their discussions with federal, state, and local officials.

Democrats and pro-migration journalists are trying to downplay the event, which may be the largest group of legislators to visit the border.

The event comes after Biden’s deputies admitted that at least 300,000 economic migrants walked across the border in December. In 2023, Biden likely imported roughly 3.3 million migrants across the southern border — or roughly one migrant for every American birth.

The event was scheduled to help remind senators that the GOP has already passed a comprehensive, legally vetted, popular, border stabilization bill, dubbed H.R. 2.

Johnson has repeatedly pushed the H.R. 2 bill as GOP senators negotiate a border-curbs deal with Biden’s pro-migration deputies. Those talks are entangled with Biden’s demand for $14 billion to accelerate and hide his migration during the 2024 campaign.

However, the GOP senators do not want to deal with the deeper issue of migration’s pocketbook damage and civic harm to ordinary Americans. Just “asylum reform, limitations on parole, re-invoking Title 42, I think would be enough to get it through the House,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told CBS News on December 31.

In response, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) told Punchbowl News:

I have told [GOP senators] that whatever package comes out of the Senate is going to look different than a package the House would ultimately agree to. … They don’t get that yet. They kind of feel like, “Oh, we are senators and we are working with the White House and we figured this all out.” This is a different House.

Gonzales is important because he is working with the GOP’s pro-migration business donors. Their support helps him bring GOP politicians to the border for business-skewed briefings that downplay the pocket impact of Biden’s migration on American families.

Many GOP legislators at the press conference will try to dodge the migration crisis by instead focusing on border crossings. Partly because of donor pressure, few want to talk about the growing economic and civic impact of mass migration on the nation’s cities and towns, young workers and families, schools and workplaces, and communities and hospitals.

The focus on the border will minimize conflict with GOP donors who openly welcome Biden’s huge inflow of new consumers, renters, and low-wage workers. The critical donors include many local business owners — auto dealers, landlords, retailers, ranchers, and builders — as well as the national lobbies for Fortune 500 companies and coastal investors.

Punchbowl, for example, quoted Gonzalez:

Gonzales said he wants Congress to significantly increase how many repatriation flights it conducts each day for undocumented migrants. As of now, Gonzales said ICE uses this practice for migrants who have no claim of asylum in the United States. In addition, Gonzales said he’d push for tougher border security in the bill.

Gonzales is part of the GOP’s establishment wing, alongside his fellow Latino Republican, Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-TX). Business interests gain from the inflow of lower-wage workers, welfare-aided consumers, and apartment-sharing renters.

Johnson holds a very narrow majority in the House and must zig-zag between the GOP’s growing populist wing, the establishment bloc, and the Democrats’ near-united opposition to curbs on migration.

GOP politicians know their voters will strongly oppose any giveaway to pro-migration business groups.

For example, immigration will be the most important political issue for Americans in 2024 — except for the current war with nuclear-armed Russia, according to a poll for the Associated Press.

Nationwide, “35% cite immigration and the border wall as a top concern, an increase from 27% last year,” said the December 2023 poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Among Republicans, immigration was the top issue for 55 percent, far ahead of “foreign policy” at 46 percent, inflation at 41 percent, and the economy at 32 percent.

Many polls show the public increasingly opposes Biden’s invitation to millions of economic migrants.

In New York, 62 percent of Catholics described legal migration as a burden, and just 27 percent describe it as a benefit, according to an October poll by Siena College for the New York Times.

A majority of Americans say migration is an invasion and the public increasingly rejects the Cold War-era narrative that the United States remains a “Nation of Immigrants.”

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