DACA Illegals Should Get ‘Greatest Thing on Earth’ Citizenship, Says Sen. Lankford

The greatest thing on Earth is American citizenship, says Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, who is offering it to a huge number “DACA” illegal immigrants if they merely take education courses after high school and avoid getting jailed for more than a year.

“I believe — just my personal belief as a Christian — the greatest thing you can have other than salvation in Christ on Earth is American citizenship,” Lankford said during a September 27 softball interview by Dana Perino on Fox News Tonight.

“You don’t give it away because of an illegal act — you have to earn it,” insisted the GOP Oklahoma Senator as he described his amnesty bill.

Lankford’s new procedure for earning American citizenship is described in Section 3 of the amnesty bill drafted and announced by Lankford and North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis:

(1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law and except as otherwise provided in this Act, the Secretary may cancel the removal of an alien who is inadmissible or deportable from the 13 United States and grant the alien conditional permanent resident status under this Act, if the alien—

(A) has been physically present in the United States for a continuous period since June 15, 2012; (B) was younger than 16 years of age on  the date on which the alien initially entered the United States; (C) was younger than 31 years of age and had no lawful status in the United States on June 15, 2012; ….

(i) has, while in the United States, earned a high school diploma, obtained a general education development certificate recognized under State law, or received a high school equivalency diploma; (ii) has been admitted to an institution of higher education in the United States …

(iv) has not been convicted of— (I) a felony under Federal or State law, regardless of the sentence imposed; (II) any combination of offenses under Federal or State law for which the alien was sentenced to imprisonment for at least 1 year;

The amnesty bill also offers an alternative to illegals: Take a job in the U.S. military, even if that job is sought by a young man or women in Lankford’s home state of Oklahoma or Tillis’ home state of North Carolina.

Lankford’s “SUCCEED Act” also offers citizenship to millions of additional foreigners who can earn their citizenship by waiting 15 years and by showing they are a close relative of one of the illegal immigrants who get the Lankford-Tillis amnesty.

American citizenship is extremely valuable because it allows each person to live and work in America’s free, fair-minded and low-corruption civic society, to seek welfare and medical aid from the government and to pass on all of those benefits to their children whom they raise from birth to adulthood. One poll showed that at least 138 million foreigners would like to immigrate to the United States to gain those benefits.

Perino did not ask the two Senators about the scale and cost of their amnesty, which likely will be very large.

For example, the pro-amnesty Migration Policy Institute suggests that 1.18 million illegals have high-school credentials, and 190,000 have post-HS degrees. That adds up to 1.4 million illegals.

Another 435,000 imported children and youths will become eligible when they graduate from high-school and turn 18, boosting the number to 1.8 million.

An additional 1.12 million more illegals would become eligible if they get a high-school credential and also enroll in subsequent education. That dropout population boosts the eligible total up to almost 3 million.

The MPI’s numbers show that how the population of young illegals is far larger than the 690,000 now covered by former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty. This revelation means the impact of the Tillis-Lankford amnesty would be much larger than the impact of the DACA amnesty. By late 2016, 30,000 people in North Carolina had enrolled in Obama’s DACA amnesty, and 7,500 people in Oklahoma had enrolled, according to federal data.

In addition, the Lankford-Tillis bill allows migrants to get citizenship in 15 years and then bring in their foreign relatives. That sets a delay for sponsoring foreign relatives, but the delay may also mean that the foreign relatives will be closer to retirement when they arrive in the United States.

In fact, chain-migration more than doubles the annual inflow of immigrants, according to a September 2017 report by the Center for Immigration Studies. The report said:

According to the most complete contemporary academic studies on chain migration, in recent years each new immigrant sponsored an average of 3.45 additional immigrants. In the early 1980s, the chain migration multiplier was 2.59, or more than 30 percent lower.

Of the top immigrant-sending countries, Mexico has the highest rate of chain migration. In the most recent five-year cohort of immigrants studied (1996-2000), each new Mexican immigrant sponsored 6.38 additional legal immigrants.

Chain migration is contributing to the aging of the immigration stream. In the early 1980s, only about 17 percent of family migrants were age 50 or over. In recent years, about 21 percent of family migrants were age 50 or older — a rate that is more than 24 percent higher. This trend has implications for the fiscal consequences of immigration.

If the past trend continued, the Lankford-Tillis amnesty bill alone would allow citizenship for 3 million illegals by 2032 — and they would bring in roughly 10 million more immigrants over the subsequent two decades.

DACA recipients told Breitbart News they oppose future limits on immigration because they wish to help their foreign families.

In contrast, chain-migration would be reduced by the popular, wage-boosting RAISE Act, which was drafted by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Georgia Sen. David Perdue, and is backed by President Donald Trump. The pending bill boosts Americans’ wages by halving the inflow of lower-skilled chain migration arrivals while allocating valuable green cards to the migrants who are best able to raise the productivity and wealth of Americans.

The cost of the Lankford-Tillis amnesty would likely reach into the trillions of dollars. For example, a 2013 study by the Heritage Foundation showed that amnesty for 11 million would cost $6 trillion in government aid and welfare over the following five decades, not counting chain migration or Obamacare. The Obamacare health system would dramatically grow the near-term costs by $115 billion in the first ten years once 3.3 million illegals are eligible, according to an estimate by Breitbart News.

The taxpayer costs are only part of the equation because the extra inflow of workers drives down Americans’ wages via workplace competition, according to a September 2016 report by the National Academies of Sciences. Both Tillis and Lankford are vocal supporters of wage-cutting workplace competition.

For example, on September 25, Lankford told a D.C. press conference that:

The job issue is an interesting issue, because those individuals are already in the job market. Many of these DACA students are actually DACA young adults, they already have access to the job market right now because they’ve been given deferred action. So they are in higher education, they are in the job market, they are currently a part of our economy, currently. That continual competition in our economy doesn’t hurt us, that continues to help us. It actually hurts us to put those individuals out of the economy.

Lankford’s support is earning him applause from the state’s business interests, according to the New American Economy business group, which is cofounded by the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch.

The bill reflects Tillis’ hard-nosed push for greater use of foreign workers, in both the blue-collar H-2B program and the white-collar H-1B program.

Tillis has repeatedly said he wants to let companies hire more cheap-labor blue-collar and white-collar contract workers. He was quoted by an Indian newspaper saying that any foreigners who get an advanced degree in the United States should be allowed to become citizens and compete against Americans for jobs. Before being elected in 2006, he worked as a manager at IBM and at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Both firms are heavily involved in the white-collar outsourcing business.

Many North Carolina companies, such including universities, are importing foreigners for white-collar jobs sought by young American graduates. In 2016, for example, companies in Charlotte, N.C., asked for almost 2,200 H-1B visas to import white-collar outsourcing workers.

@khart H-1B is not 65/85K a year, actually near 110K https://t.co/XPgYLiDAIk Also, total pop of white-collar contract workers near 1 millon

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) January 30, 2017

A July poll showed Tillis’ approval as low as 29 percent in his home state, according to McClatchy. Tillis is up for reelection in 2020. Lankford was elected in 2016, so he will not face the voters until 2022.

In general, business groups support mass immigration because it stimulates the economy with 1 million new consumers and workers each year, while it also deflates individual Americans’ wages and salaries. That stimulus argument was echoed in a statement to Breitbart News from Lankford’s office:

Passing the SUCCEED Act would increase net federal revenue by $22 billion over 10 years, while deporting SUCCEED-eligible immigrants would cost the economy $738 billion over 10 years.

Lankford’s statement also wrapped his legislation in a statement from Trump that indicates some support for the DACA illegals:

On September 5th, after rescinding the DACA Executive Order, President Trump said in a statement, ‘As President, my highest duty is to defend the American people and the Constitution of the United States of America. At the same time, I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents.’ Senator Lankford has introduced the SUCCEED Act because he agrees with President Trump,

Individual Americans’ won’t be disadvantaged because the illegals are already here, said the statement:

The SUCCEED Act has virtually no economic, fiscal or marketplace impact on Americans because these young people are already here in America, most of them working or attending school.

In his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to send all illegals home, immediately end the DACA amnesty and push for immigration reforms which help raise Americans’ wages and salaries.

Nearly all of the taxpayer and workplace costs of keeping the illegals in the United States would be paid by ordinary Americans who are trying to get themselves educated, get married, buy houses and also raise their own children to do well in a turbulent global economy. Americans pay because immigrants without a college degree already receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

The nation’s population of roughly 12 million illegal immigrants costs Americans roughly $116 billion each year, according to a report issued September 2017 by the Federal for American Immigration Reform. That adds up to roughly $700 for every American with a job.

To offset the scale, costs, and unpopularity of their amnesty, Lankford and Tillis are using poll-tested terms to pitch their amnesty.

For example, Tillis describes the illegals as “children,” even though the average age of the DACA beneficiaries is 24, and 72 percent of DACA recipients are aged 21 or older, according to a September 2017 analysis by the Pew Research Center.

The authors also claim their bill imposes multiple conditions to ensure that illegals “earn” the amnesty. That same tactic was used in the Democrats’ disastrous 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty which helped cost them nine seats in the 2014 election. The Lankford-Tillis amnesty, for example, says the illegals can earn their amnesty if they pay back-taxes, take higher education courses, stay out of jail, and serve in the military.

But the fine print in amnesty legislation usually contains loopholes which invalidate the apparent conditions. For example, the Tillis-Lankford amnesty says that each migrant is only expected to enroll in — but do not have to pass — education courses, and can still get citizenship providing his or her cumulative jail sentences add up to less than one year.

The pay back-taxes tactic was also used in the 2013 legislation, but the final language revealed that very little back-taxes would be paid because the illegals rarely earned enough money to require tax payments. In fact, the 2013 “back-taxes” rule would have actually made the illegals eligible for valuable Earned Income Tax Credit taxpayer-grants for the years when they were working illegally.

Tillis used the poll-tested language in his easy interview on the pro-immigration Fox News network, while Tillis nodded in approval, saying:

The SUCCEED Act is based on the basic premise that is that children aren’t held accountable for the actions of their parents in American law. So we’re trying to look this evaluate what do we do, how do we solve the problem that we’ve talked about now for decades and have ignored. What the president has said [is] ‘We need to solve this legislatively’ and I want to be able to support it only with a larger piece.

So this is designed to be a single piece of a larger immigration reform, and it is designed to provide a step-by-step option where these individuals could earn the ability to be able to stay in the United States. Now, they basically have to show they’re working, they’re going to school, they’ve joined the military, they have no criminal background. They are able to get a five-year waiver to be able to be here to do those things. If they stay consistent for five years, they can reapply, get another five-year waiver.  If they still stay consistent, out of crime, they stay in schools, stay in work or in the military, then they’re able to apply to get a green card. And at the end of that five years they could have naturalization at that point. But is a minimum 15-year time period so they get to naturalization but is a process where they could earn the right to be able to get to that spot by showing they’re excited to be an American citizen.

In pro-immigration polls, promised conditions are very effective in boosting apparent support for a DACA amnesty, simply because a huge majority of Americans want to be generous to both legal and illegal immigrants. However, Americans don’t make their voting decisions based on their decency towards illegals — they instead consider whether an amnesty is fair to their neighbors and to young Americans.

In alternative polls where voters are asked to say if they think immigration policy should help illegals get jobs or instead should help Americans get jobs, Americans overwhelmingly support laws which help Americans.

That fairness calculation is ignored by pro-immigration pollsters, but it played a central role in defeating the 2013 amnesty and in multiple elections, including the 2014 primary which defeated GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and in Donald Trump’s shocking rise to power in 2016. In fact, the DACA amnesty issue helped Alabama’s Judge Roy Moore break an apparent polling tie to win his September primary race against incumbent Sen. Luther Strange by 10 points.

WashPo comes close to saying DACA illegals are preferable to unemployed Americans. Employers seem to believe so https://t.co/v7nBb1ifrX

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) September 12, 2017

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. But business groups favor the economic strategy of mass-immigration because the inflow stimulates the economy by adding 1 million consumers and workers each year. That bipartisan economic policy inflates company revenues and profits, but it deflates Americans’ wages and salaries.

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, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

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. Universities employ roughly 100,000 foreign guest workers.

Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with illegals.

Amid the huge inflow of new workers, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades.