Trump Tweet Deflates Ryan’s Amnesty Push

Amnesty
ALEX EDELMAN/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Donald Trump deflated House Speaker Paul Ryan’s amnesty push Thursday night with a Tweet saying that Democrats will block any amnesty deal.

Trump’s Tweet torpedoed late-afternoon hopes among Republicans that personal calls from Trump could deliver another 30 votes from wavering or hostile GOP legislators for Ryan’s bill.

The head of the Republican Study Committee, Rep. Mark Walker, urged the president to make those calls.

Trump’s Tweet is correct about the Senate Democrats’ opposition to a deal, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

The Democrats’ leader in the Senate has already dismissed Ryan’s bill, and “the Democrats do unity so well that even if there were Democrats considering voting for it, they certainly will not be given the wave-off from Schumer.”

But the underlying message in Trump’s Tweet is a soft goodbye to Ryan, Vaughan said. Like in a slow breakup, the message is “I’m just not that into you, I’ve changed, we’ve changed,” she said. 

“This is not exactly what Paul Ryan would ask him to do” to help his amnesty bill get passed, she said. 

Trump’s tweet also came after GOP leaders announced the vote on the bill would be postponed first to Friday, then to next week, and that the bill would be sweetened with an E-Verify mandate sought by populists, plus a huge program to import low-wage workers for low-tech farms.

That low-wage “H-2C” program is pushed by most of the farm-district legislators who pushed the discharge petition. The cheap-labor legislators are almost universally deemed to be “moderates” by the establishment media.

The bill’s outlook is poor, leaving Vaughan to consider the political accomplishments from the long fight, including the 193 votes cast for Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte’s reform bill.

The fight “provides a talking point for everyone,” including Trump, she said.

Trump’s tweet showed the talking point he takes for his campaign message:

You cannot pass legislation on immigration whether it be for safety and security or any other reason including “heart,” without getting Dem votes. Problem is, they don’t care about security and R’s do. Zero Dems voted to support the Goodlatte Bill. They won’t vote for anything!

GOP legislators can pull multiple campaign messages from the dispute, she said. Some can tell liberals they would have voted for Ryan’s amnesty, while others get to say they voted for Goodlatte’s border reforms and Trump’s wall, she said.

Democrats can tell their left-wing voters that “‘I refused to vote for the extreme Republican bill, the heartless Republican bill that denied the dreamers  citizenship and funded that silly wall and wanted to separate families,'” she said.  

For activists and journalists, the lesson learned is the growing strength of populist views among legislators, she said.

Goodlatte’s bill got 193 votes, and without any leadership whipping or a determined Presidential intervention.

“All during the [2013-2014] Gang of Eight episode, the people who voice the conventional wisdom were saying it was only a rogue group of 35 people like [Rep.] Steve King and [Rep.] Louie Gohmert, and this shows, this [reform] is the mainstream Republican position,” said Vaughan.

In contrast, “the Representatives who tried the discharge petition were the ones who are out of step,” she said 

Goodlatte got 193 votes for his bill despite opposition from the GOP’s usual donors, all of whom denounced Goodlatte’s planned cuts to legal immigration.

 

Migration Economics

Currently, four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market — but the government provides green cards to roughly 1 million legal immigrants and temporary work-permits to roughly 3 million foreign workers.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy 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.

Polls

Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants” push-polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.

But “choice” polls reveal most voters’ often-ignored preference that CEOs should hire Americans at decent wages before hiring migrants. Those Americans include many blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and people who hide their opinions from pollsters. Similarly, the 2018 polls show that GOP voters are far more concerned about migration — more properly, the economics of migration — than they are concerned about illegal migration and MS-13, taxes, or the return of Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

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