President Donald Trump has effectively endorsed the House GOP’s immigration reform bill, just one day after he invited Democrats and Republicans from both the House and Senate to negotiate a deal.
The White House statement said:
President Donald J. Trump is grateful to Chairman [Bob] Goodlatte, Chairman [Mike] McCaul, Congressman [Raul] Labrador, and Congresswoman [Martha] McSally for introducing immigration legislation that would accomplish the President’s core priorities for the American people. The President looks forward to advancing legislation that secures the border, ends chain migration, cancels the visa lottery, and addresses the status of the DACA population in a responsible fashion.
The House legislation, announced Wednesday, is being applauded by pro-American reformers.
“The vast majority of Republicans in the House can vote for this — it is common sense stuff, and it is what President Trump campaigned on and won on,” Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA, told Breitbart before the Trump announcement. She added:
There are things in this bill that I don’t like, but the balance overall is pro-American. Trump needs to get on board with the House bill and tell the Senate that is what he wants.
The bill would implement the most important 35 elements of Trump’s 70-point October immigration plan while providing a minimalist amnesty for 670,000 enrolled ‘DACA’ illegals.
The illegals would be allowed to get renewable work permits, but not green cards or citizenship. In contrast, the Democrats’ DREAM Act would put 3.25 million illegals on a fast-track to citizenship and the voting booths and would allow them to invite millions of chain-migration relatives to enter the United States.
The House bill would also trim chain migration, so cutting annual immigration rates from roughly 1.1 million by 260,000 per year. Under the House bill, new citizens could only sponsor spouses and minor children. Under current rules, new citizens can import their parents and siblings, who can later import their own spouses and siblings.
The bill would end the visa lottery which annually awards 50,000 green cards to people by lottery. It penalizes cities which exclude federal immigration enforcement and sets legal changes to ensure that a border wall can exclude today’s growing wave of asylum seekers and people who claim to be unaccompanied children.
The House bill would also require all employers to verify the work-eligibility of prospective hires, so largely turning off the magnet which encourages migrants to walk, drive or fly into the United States.
“If you want the House to pass legislation… you need conservatives and moderates to come together… this is the only bill that will unify the [GOP] conference,” Goodlatte said January 10 when he introduced the legislation.
The bill “help President Trump keep his promise to the American people … the President would never have been elected without making that promise to the American people,” Labrador said January 10 when introducing the bill.
It is “a very important and reasonable and fair bill to address the priorities of the American people, said McSally.
The authors met with Trump before introducing the legislation, and “I got the sense that the White House is backing this effort,” McCaul said.
Homeland defense Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also applauded the bill, saying in a January 10 statement:
I appreciate the leadership of Chairmen Goodlatte and McCaul, Representatives Labrador and McSally and key staff in crafting this bill. The legislation introduced today reflects many of the policy principles and priorities identified by DHS’s frontline personnel which the Administration has advocated for this past year. I look forward to working with Members as they consider this and other legislation that will help us secure our borders, provide necessary enforcement authorities, and end diversity visas and extended family chain migration. Collectively, these elements are significant factors when it comes to protecting Americans and the Homeland.
The bill, however, would set up a huge new visa-worker program for the farm industry, which has become reliant on cheap labor. The reliance has been encouraged by the federal government, which has allowed the farm companies to hire millions of cheap illegals instead of developing and buying labor-saving machinery, such as robot harvesters.
The House bill would also raise the inflow of employer-sponsored foreign workers from 140,000 per year to 175,000 per year.
Business groups have already denounced the legislation. For example, FWD.us, a lobby set up by high-tech investors, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, to maximize the supply of foreign white-collar workers, declared:
My statement for press: "This bill is awful policy. It slashes legal immigration in half. It mandates local law enforcement spend 10s of billion to round up as many undocumented immigrants as possible. It is poison pills and unserious. And I am most disappointed in @RepMcSally." https://t.co/oUlm3KMr88
— Todd Schulte (@TheToddSchulte) January 10, 2018
Breitbart has posted an extended description of the legislation here.
Trump’s endorsement of the legislation comes one day after he said he would delegate the drafting of a bill to House and Senate Republicans and Democrats. In his White House meeting, as he sat across the table from Goodlatte and McCaul, he said:
I think my positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with. I am very much reliant on the people in this room. I know most of the people on both sides. I have a lot of respect for the people on both sides. And my — what I approve is going to be very much reliant on what the people in this room come to me with. I have great confidence in the people. If they come to me with things that I’m not in love with, I’m going to do it because I respect them.
Trump had earlier warned Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin that he was willing to oppose some of the Democrats’ proposals.
But you’re going to negotiate. Dick, you’re going to negotiate. Maybe we will agree and maybe we won’t. I mean, it’s possible we’re not going to agree with you and it’s possible we will, but there should be no reason for us not to get this done.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes 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 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.
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.
Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a large percentage of the nation’s annual income has shifted to investors and away from employees.
But Americans’ wages are rising because employers have started offering higher wages to attract employees from other companies. That consequence of Trump’s immigration-enforcement policy is likely to have an impact in November.
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