Politico: Donald Trump Finalizes Immigration Reform Priorities

amnesty
AP Photo/Evan Vucci

President Donald Trump is finalizing a pro-American amnesty-for-reform agenda for imminent delivery to the business-first Republicans and amnesty-first Democrats in Congress, GOP legislators told Politico.

The plan is being finalized as pro-American reform groups worry that Trump and his business-first aides will weaken his immigration reform policy, and trade it away for goals sought by business, such as tax breaks.

Trump sketched out the plan when he met with allied GOP legislators Monday night at the White House, said Politico, which reported Tuesday that:

“The president was very clear. Any effort to codify DACA needs to, one, be limited to DACA so the first criteria under the law should be you have a DACA permit today,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in an interview Tuesday. “Second, any deal has to end chain migration. And then third, it ought to include some kind of enhanced measures, whether it’s on the border or interior enforcement or what have you.”

Trump is also pushing to build the border wall, which he campaigned for throughout 2016, said the GOP’s Majority Leader in the House:

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he made the case to Trump that funding for a border wall should be part of any legislative package on DACA. Asked if Trump agreed, McCarthy said yes — which would go counter to an agreement that Democratic leaders thought they had struck last month.

Trump is backing the popular, merit-immigration RAISE Act, which would raise Americans’ wages by reducing the inflow of unskilled migrants, and he invited the bill’s two authors to the Monday meeting. Politico reported:

Cotton and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) also lobbied Trump on including their plan to overhaul the current green card system and slash legal immigration limits in a DACA deal … Perdue said the lawmakers also discussed including E-Verify provisions — a workplace system that checks whether an employee is here legally — during the dinner, which was also attended by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.).

The new amnesty-for-reform proposal may be released this week. It was developed following the disastrous September 13 meeting in the White House with the Democrats’ leaders in the Senate and House, Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi. The Democrats emerged from the meeting claiming that Trump had agreed to a no-strings, no-wall amnesty for the 3.3 million younger illegals. That record-breaking amnesty — even without counting subsequent chain migration — would have a record-breaking cost of at least $116 billion over ten years.

Democrats and their ethnic-lobby allies are already insisting they will not accept any curbs on the amnesty and they will not accept new security measures except a meaningless package of “border security” security measures. Those border security measures likely include commonplace sensors and extra border guards, but no legal changes that would help catch and penalize illegal aliens in U.S. workplaces or sanctuary cities. Democratic Senators portray the young illegals as an economic boon to the United States, even though relatively few of the illegals have productive skills.

Trump’s political allies know that if he does not deliver on his campaign promises — which include a border wall, deportation of criminal illegals and reform of white-collar guest-workers H-1B program — he will have a tough time reviving his “Make America Great Again” coalition in 2020. So far, Trump has failed to win congressional funding for the wall, failed to substantially reform the H-1B program, and has reversed his promise to repatriate all 12 million illegals — including the current 690,00 beneficiaries of former President Barack Obama’s 2012 DACA amnesty.

Many of the pro-American activists want a border wall, but they are more determined to win cutbacks in annual chain migration, “E-Verify” rules which penalize companies which hire cheap-labor illegals, as well as streamlined rules for enforcing immigration laws nationwide, including in so-called “Sanctuary Cities.”

For example, Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, outlined the group’s pro-American policies in October 3 testimony at the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. She testified:

The amnesty should be limited to qualified current DACA beneficiaries. These individuals are a special case, for the reasons articulated by their advocates: they arrived as children, through no fault of their own, and have grown up and been educated here. Nevertheless, because the screening of DACA applicants was so lax, without interviews, fraud safeguards, or comprehensive background checks, and because individuals with criminal records were eligible, all those who apply for permanent residency must be re-vetted under more effective and appropriate guidelines. In sum, only DACA beneficiaries should receive amnesty, but having DACA benefits is no guarantee of receiving LPR status …

The way to avoid the chain migration increases and to help mitigate the inevitable fiscal costs of a DACA amnesty is to downsize the family migration categories and terminate the annual visa lottery. The family visa downsizing is best accomplished by terminating the categories for married adult sons and daughters and siblings of U.S. citizens (the family third and fourth preference categories) and by imposing a numerical limit on the admission of parents of U.S. citizens …

Congress should also consider adopting measures to boost immigration enforcement and border security. These measures should include: adopting universal mandatory E-Verify; expanding information sharing between the Department of Treasury, the Social Security Administration, and ICE to identify illegal employment-related identity theft and fraud; addressing the problem of sanctuary policies; clarifying how states and localities can assist with immigration enforcement; accelerating completion of the entry-exit tracking to deter overstays; reforming the asylum system to end abuse; adding barriers and infrastructure at the border; and boosting the number of immigration enforcement officers and agents in the interior.

Read the entire Politico report here.

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But business groups have used their political power to tilt the labor market in their favor,  via the federal policy of importing 1 million consumers and workers each year. 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.

That Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign laborspikes 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 priceswidens 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 cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.

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

Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a growing percentage of the nation’s annual income is shifting to investors and away from employees. The business-funded Hamilton Project suggests that the shift is transferring $1 trillion per year from 160 million employees to the nation’s investors.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.