Bush’s Amnesty Coalition: Cut Illegal Migration by Raising Legal Migration

Former U.S. President George W. Bush attends the flag raising ceremony prior to The Walker
Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images
Neil Munro

The federal government can reduce illegal migration by raising legal immigration, says a new pro-amnesty coalition of establishment leaders, including George W. Bush and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“We can end the cycle of compromising situations at the southern border by ensuring that migrants have appropriate and accessible legal channels to migrate,” the May 11 announcement by the group says.

The legal-ends-illegal claim “is completely absurd unless the position is that there should be unlimited immigration,” Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News on Tuesday.

“There’s no reasonable level of capped immigration that could be set that would satisfy all the [worldwide] demand” for U.S. jobs by would-be-migrants, he said.

In March, Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, warned that 42 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean want to migrate into the United States. He continued:

In addition to finding a solution for the thousands of migrants currently at the border, let’s include the bigger, harder question — what about all of those who would like to come? What is the message to them? What is the 10-year plan?

330 million U.S. citizens are wondering. So are 42 million Latin Americans.

Bush’s coalition also sidelines the interest of working Americans and American families who lose wages, careers, good housing, and political clout amid massive legal or illegal immigration.

For example, the group touts the economic interests of the government, of investors, and CEOs — but not of wage earners or home buyers — saying:

The current situation underscores the urgent need to modernize America’s immigration system so it can increase the efficiency of legal immigration, more effectively ensure American security, welcome refugees, and maintain the fabric of the American Dream.

…

We call upon Congress and the Biden Administration to take further bipartisan action to meaningfully modernize the whole of America’s immigration system to ensure the future prosperity and security of our nation.

Most members of the Bush group would be considered by the media as “right of center.” But they share the same cheap labor, pro-migration goals as the left-of-center amnesty groups funded by progressive billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg and his investor allies at FWD.us.

The coalition members include many establishment advocacy groups, such as the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, the National Association of Manufacturers,  the Business Roundtable, and Mike Bloomberg’s New American Economy group.

But the coalition also includes many groups that get funding from left-wing donors, such as Human Rights First, HIAS, the National Immigration Forum (NIF), the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and World Relief. For example, Zuckerberg funds the NIF.

The letter is one play in a larger fight, Law argued:

The underlying objective here is just unlimited immigration, but they don’t come out and say that directly. So what they’re doing is trying to get an incremental increase … If Congress increases the levels of real emigration, some groups are still going to be excluded. And they’ll complain, and then the levels will be increased again and again and again. The intentional drive is to get to unlimited immigration.

Bush tipped his hand in a recent interview where he suggested employers be allowed to freely hire foreign workers instead of Americans. He said:

Can we get something done? I think so, but it’s going to have to be in bite-sized pieces … We don’t recognize the fact that there are jobs that need to be done and [foreign] people willing to do them and that needs to be part of a reform.

Bush explained his low-profit, old-economy business on his estate could not survive if he had to hire workers from within Americans’ higher-wage national labor market:

I’m a tree farmer — live oaks, red oaks if you need any … It’s not a very profitable business I want you to know, but it works because there are eight H-2B visa holders who come up [from Mexico] and work for us. They’re skilled, big family people, they send their money home to their families, but [the H-2B visa program requires] they have to go home every year for two months.

Then there’s a question as to whether or not the government let him back in after the two-year hiatus. That creates enormous uncertainty and if at some point, the government says “You can’t come back in,” then all of a sudden, we got a real problem.

“There’s nothing free about a market that props up bad business models with gifts of cheap foreign labor,” Law said.

Bush’s establishment group also blames the migration on corruption in the Central American countries, and ignores the long-standing U.S. welcome for illegal migrants:

It is vital to address the root causes of this migration while improving border conditions and legal immigration pathways. Challenges in the Northern Triangle of Central America—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—are displacing thousands, driving them to the U.S.-Mexico border and increasing tensions upon their arrival. Violence, corruption, economic turmoil, and recent natural disasters leave the region in urgent need of diplomacy and strategic economic support; on both of these fronts, a significant effort is needed by the United States.

But those countries’ economic and political development are being drained by the U.S. policy of pulling and extracting young workers, educated graduates, and consumers into the U.S. economy.

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