GOP’s Populist Caucus to Join Donald Trump on Border June 30

The populist Republican Study Committee (RSC) will be joining former President Donald Trump when he visits the border on June 30.

“President Trump spent four years fixing the border,” said a June 23 statement from Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who heads the caucus of like-minded conservative Republicans within the GOP. He continued:

But the Biden administration broke it again, and we are now experiencing the worst border crisis in our history. That’s why the RSC has made carrying on the Trump legacy on immigration our top priority this Congress and why we are heading to the border with President Trump to explain how we can end this national embarrassment.

The committee is pushing the business-dominated GOP caucus to adopt policies that would lead to lower- migration and higher wages. An April 12 strategy memo from Banks said:

The Biden Immigration Agenda sacrifices the interests of the American People in order to serve the interests of foreign citizens, criminal cartels, and ultra-wealthy multinational corporations. Biden’s agenda rejects responsible limits and controls on the number of people entering the country.

…

We, as members of the Republican Study Committee, on behalf of all Americans who believe in the rule of law and the fundamental rights of our people, condemn the Biden immigration policies and will work to block all efforts to achieve it, including by rejecting requests for funding that would facilitate any aspect of it. We instead express our support for a return to a set of policies that live up to our nation’s core obligations, values and principles.

While Biden reshapes our immigration system to serve rich donors and giant corporations, we believe it must serve the interests of American citizens, families and workers.

Trump’s lower-migration policies have helped push up wages and workplace investment for working Americans and their families.

In contrast, the investor-funded establishment wing of the GOP  tries to minimize media attention on the economic damage caused by Biden’s immigration policies. The wing prefers to tout the border chaos, drug crime, and cruelty to migrants. For example, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel interviewed Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and portrayed President Joe Biden’s migration-raising policies as just a border crisis:

I’m going to move to another issue that’s facing your state but the whole world is watching right now, what’s happening on our, on our southern border, which I don’t think as many Americans completely understand the picture of what’s happening with these children that are coming over, the influx at our border, and the drain on resources this has been for our border agents. Can you paint that picture for us a little bit and how bad it really is?

But Abbott described Biden’s goals:

There’s something else different about this administration. When you go back to the presidential campaign, they were open and obvious. They said “Yes, we want open border policies, yes, we are going to allow anybody to come in who wants to come in,” and so they are fulfilling their campaign promise to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and that’s why this is nothing but chaos right now. It will not be solved until the Biden administration realizes that trying to appease the progressive wing of their party is going to be detrimental to them … Biden’s approval rating on the border is 29 percent.

Pro-migration groups have tried to minimize public recognition of the economic damage imposed by migration on American families and say their focus on migrants’ personal stories has shifted the polls in Biden’s favor.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that both legal and illegal migration undermines democratic self-government, fractures Americans’ society, moves money away from Americans’ pocketbooks, and worsens living costs for American families.

Migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.