President-elect Joe Biden’s draft immigration plan does not include any protections for Americans, while it offers the huge prize of American citizenship to at least 11 million migrants from around the world, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
The January 15 report says:
The proposed legislation would not contain any provisions directly linking an expansion of immigration with stepped-up enforcement and security measures, said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center Immigrant Justice Fund, who has been consulted on the proposal by Biden staffers.
“This notion concerning immigration enforcement and giving Republicans everything they kept asking for … was flawed from the beginning,” Hincapié told the newspaper.
The measure “will not seek to trade immigration relief for enforcement, and that’s huge,” Lorella Praeli, who was brought to the United States as an illegal immigrant by her Peruvian parents. Praeli is a pro-migration advocate and has close ties to Biden’s pro-migration appointees.
But the shocking exclusion of safeguards may merely be a negotiating tactic that helps journalists and GOP legislators to keep the debate away from the economic damage caused by amnesty.
In 2013, pro-migration advocates minimized safeguards in the early draft of their “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill. This tactic helped the media to focus the deep public criticism of the bill around the security gap.
Just before the floor debate, the bill’s authors announced a big-spending security plan — the Hoeven-Corker amendment. The planned surprise allowed the advocates to claim they had answered all security criticisms of the bill — and it helped them rush the bill through the Senate, 68 votes to 32 votes, in June 2013.
In reality, the Hoeven-Corker amendment was a magicians’ trick intended to divert media attention from the legal loopholes in the bill, and the economic shift caused the bill’s deliberate inflation of the labor supply.
For example, the bill did not prevent the catch and release of migrants at the border, did not close the “Unaccompanied Alien Child” loophole, and did not protect American graduates from visa worker outsourcing. In fact, the bill allowed an unlimited supply of foreign college graduates into the jobs needed by American graduates, even as it promised to build just 350 miles of a claimed border wall.
The trick amendment was named after two GOP senators who claimed to be saving Americans from illegal migration — the now-retired Sen. Bob Corker from Tennessee and the still-incumbent Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND).
Most importantly, the Hoeven-Corker trick helped Democrats and reporters keep the public’s attention away from the money that would have been sucked from Americans’ wages and shifted over to investors’ stock portfolios.
A last-minute, little-mentioned report by the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the Gang of Eight amnesty bill would have reduced wage earners’ share of new national income and would have increased the share that went to investors.
Those investors included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who was a major advocate of the 2013 bill and is now backing the planned 2021 bill.
“The bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, [so] average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said. The flood of immigrant labor would boost corporate sales and revenues, and so spike the stock market, the CBO report said.
“The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” according to the report titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
The same point about the supply, demand, and wages of American labor was repeated in a January 2020 CBO report: “Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign-born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
Many polls show that cheap labor migration is deeply unpopular because Americans know that it is used by companies to displace Americans and to cut their wages.
Economists recognize that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the heartland states to the coastal states that are home to many investors and Democratic donors.
That economic transfer has shriveled the wealth and health of many red states, and so helped Donald Trump defeat the GOP establishment and get elected in 2016. The same economic shift boosted Trump’s support among working-class whites, blacks, and Latinos in 2020.
The multiracial, cross-sex, nonracist, class-based opposition to cheap labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
However, establishment journalists have ignored the evidence of deep and broad opposition to cheap labor migration — and the inflow of temporary contract workers — into the jobs young and old Americans need. Similarly, the reports by the Los Angeles Times and Politico ignored the huge economic impact of migration.
But few politicians believe the pro-amnesty tales offered by lobbyists, donors, and reporters — partly because Senate Democrats lost a net five Senate seats after Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D-NY), pushed the 2013 amnesty through the Senate.
That disastrous mistake by Schumer and his media allies kept the Democrats in the minority for six years — and it also persuaded the American public to back Donald Trump in 2016.
In contrast, GOP House Leader Rep. John Boehner bottled up Schumer’s amnesty in 2014, kept control of the House in 2014, and so provided Trump’s GOP with clear majorities in the House and Senate throughout 2017 and 2018.
But Boehner’s pro-migration successor, House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan, lost Boehner’s Houe majority in 2018 after opposing Trump’s populist agenda.
Many Democrats know their proposed amnesty is very unpopular. Politico reported January 15:
Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) said a “piecemeal” approach is not an option. “The administration has a very limited window of opportunity before House members begin running for reelection,” she said. “Every day that passes is a day that the window shuts just an inch more…We’ve got to get it done in one fell swoop.”
On January 19, GOP senators will have a chance to slow Biden’s amnesty push when they hold a confirmation hearing with Alejandro Mayorkas, who was nominated by Biden to run the Department of Homeland Security.
The Mayorkas hearing is being chaired by Sen. Rob Portman R-OH) and also includes Sen. Josh Hawley (D-MO) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).
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