Washington Examiner: Ted Cruz Pushed to Dramatically Expand Muslim Migration in 2013

Cruz and Rubio post-debate
Julia Hahn
Washington D.C.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced legislative proposals that would have radically expanded Muslim migration into the United States, when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was pushing to open America’s borders in 2013, the Washington Examiner‘s Paul Bedard noted in a new exposé.

“Plans pushed by GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz under the immigration reform debate in 2013 that would have jumped the number of immigrants, including those from Muslim nations, were raised by the Trump campaign Tuesday,” Bedard wrote on Tuesday. “Under the Cruz plan, yearly legal immigration would have gone from 740,000 to 1,675,000. He said [subsequently] his idea was to actually help kill the bill not boost the numbers.”

Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski highlighted Bedard’s report on Twitter, too.

Back then, during the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill fight, Cruz said that the “best” part of the bill from Rubio and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), among its other co-authors, were its changes to legal immigration. Those changes would have resulted in a complete demographic transformation of the nation. Cruz complained that with regards to legal immigration, Rubio’s immigration expansion bill did not go “nearly far enough.” At the time, Cruz said:

The best aspect of the so-called Gang of Eight bill is the reform that is found concerning legal immigration. I think it makes some positive steps with regard to legal immigration, but I don’t think it goes nearly far enough… if we want to improve high-skilled innovation in my view we should not do so by half measures. We should do so with a significant step that materially improves the status quo, and for that reason I’ve introduced this amendment to increase the cap by five hundred percent.

As such, Cruz offered an amendment to double green cards—which would have resulted in an explosion of low-skilled immigration from non-Western nations. Today, approximately nine in ten green cards are given to non-Western countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asi, and Latin America. The U.S. has admitted 59 million immigrants since 1965, changing the structure of the country both economically and culturally.

Cruz also offered an amendment to quintuple the controversial H-1B program, which would have allowed corporations to replace American workers with lower-wage foreign workers and would have resulted in a vast expansion of Muslim migration.

As Breitbart News has previously reported, the H-1B visa is a direct pipeline for Muslim migration. According to State Department data, in 2014 the U.S. admitted over 4,000 migrants from Muslim-majority countries on H-1B visas, plus an extra 108,000 H-1B migrants from India. If the demographics of the employment visas match the demographics of the country, this would mean that more than 15,000 H-1B visas went to Muslim Indians (14% of 108,000)—meaning that in fiscal year 2014, the U.S. likely issued around 19,000 H-1B visas to Muslim foreign workers.

Reports have documented the unique challenges posed to the nation by trying to integrate large flows of unassimilated Muslim migrants. A September 2015 Congressional report found that Minnesota, which has the largest Somali population in the country, also has the largest number of radicalized individuals who have attempted to take up arms and join ISIS in the fight against the West.

Equality Now has issued a report detailing how Muslim migration means half a million girls in the U.S. are now at risk of suffering the anti-Western practice of Female Genital Mutilation.

In Ted Cruz’s home state of Texas, there are more than 33,000 girls who are at-risk of Female Genital Mutilation. It is likely that number could have increased under Cruz’s vision.

These amendments were addressed by the Trump campaign on Fox Business Tuesday morning.

“The pace of Muslim migration into the United States is extraordinary and we’ve shown that we are incapable of effectively screening and vetting those who arrive in the United States. And this is a major difference between the two campaigns,” said Trump’s senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller. He continued:

I served in the Senate for a number of years, for U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions before coming to work for the Trump campaign. In 2013, there was a Gang of Eight immigration bill… Senator Ted Cruz offered two amendments to that legislation which would have substantially increased the Muslim migration. The first was to double green cards, which would have basically increased Muslim migration from about 100,000 a year to over 200,000 a year. Secondly, he introduced an amendment to quintuple H-1B visas adding hundreds of temporary Muslim migrants into the United States. So that is a major difference between the Trump campaign and the Cruz campaign.

Recent events raise the possibility that Cruz remains wedded to this position of immigration expansion, even as polls show GOP voters would like record migration slowed or halted altogether.

On Monday Politico reported that Ted Cruz’s campaign is exploring the possibility of a Cruz-Rubio “unity ticket.” In 2015, Marco Rubio introduced an immigration expansion bill that would have allowed for an unlimited expansion in Muslim migration. This bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Mike Lee, who has endorsed Cruz. Sen. Cruz and has also embraced and touted the endorsement of open borders Lindsey Graham.

On Twitter, Cruz’s longtime former communications director, now-CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter, described a Rubio endorsement as “gold.” Carpenter also suggested that Cruz should continue aligning himself with open borders advocates like Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, and Nikki Haley.

Both Fiorina and Rubio have a long history with the H-1B program that is compatible with Cruz’s 2013 legislative proposals.

During her time at Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina was a pioneer of corporate H-1B job theft—replacing American workers with foreign labor. “There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore,” Fiorina said in 2004.

Similarly, H-1B enthusiast Marco Rubio as repeatedly pointed out that he and Cruz hold very similar views on the issue of immigration: “Ted is a supporter of legalizing people that are in this country illegally. In fact, when the Senate bill was proposed, he proposed legalizing people that were here illegally. He proposed giving them work permits. He’s also supported a massive expansion of the green cards. He supported a massive expansion of the H-1B program, a 500 percent increase. So, if you look at it, I don’t think our positions are dramatically different.”

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