President Trump Will Give Speech on Immigration Plan

kushner trump
AP/Andrew Harnik
Neil Munro

President Donald Trump will soon give a speech on his draft immigration reform plan, GOP Senators told reporters on Tuesday.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior counselor, told a Capitol Hill meeting of GOP Senators on Tuesday that Trump would give a speech on immigration, Reuters reported, citing comments from two Senators who were at the meeting.

“The president is going to be giving a speech on it, maybe as early as later this week,” Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn told the Washington Examiner.

The planned speech is related to the White House’s draft immigration proposal which has been prepared by Kushner. He used the Tuesday meeting to describe the proposal to the GOP Senators.

“Jared had the whole team present together to show the republican senators the WH is unified on the proposal,” said a tweet from Avi Berkowitz, a deputy assistant to the President. “This has been a full team effort.”

The proposal reportedly drops earlier considered methods to reduce future immigration, and it also seeks to shift the inflow of immigrants away from lower-skill blue-collar jobs towards college-grade white collar jobs. The Washington Post reported:

Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers … said the plan would generate $600 billion in economic growth. Hassett said the White House did an informal score and found that its proposal would raise the average salary for immigrants because they would be bringing in workers with more education and skills.

The Washington Post report did not say how the estimated $600 million gain would be distributed among employees, investors, and real estate owners.

White House officials say the draft plan will protect Americans’ wages. “We have a lot of objectives … Number one, [Trump] wants to protect American wages,” White House senior counselor Jared Kushner said April 23.

Officials “said it would cumulatively increase wages in the U.S.,” Politico reported May 5.

Wages are rising across the nation because Trump’s “Hire American” policy is forcing CEOs and investors to hire millions of Americans who were sidelined by President Barack Obama’s high-immigration, l0w-growth economy. The revived competition for American employees is also ending the nation’s long freeze on wages and has delivered a roughly four percent raise to Trump’s base in 2018.

The new bill comes after Democrats opposed and GOP leaders sidelined Trump’s “Four Pillars” immigration plan in 2018.

The Washington Post reported that the new proposal does not include any amnesty offers sought by Democrats.

The White House has not released information about the proposal.

Washington, D.C. sources say they do not believe House Democratic leadership will allow a vote on the draft proposal, but several Democrat Senators might support the proposal in the run-up to the 2020 election.

A primary purpose for the immigration proposal is for Trump to stake out a clear policy for voters to approve or reject in the 2020 election, sources tell Breitbart News.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham is expected to soon introduce a bill that would reform asylum rules and allow border agencies to detain migrants and their children for 100 days, pending the legal review of their pleas for asylum. He said May 12:

We’re going to have a vote, have a hearing and vote in [the] judiciary [committee]. It will be a huge issue in 2020. President Trump is trying to fix a perfect storm of illegal immigration coming from Central America. The Democrats are going to do one of two things — work with us to find a bipartisan solution [or] ignore the problem, and if they ignore the problem, it is going to help Trump. If they work with us, it helps the whole country.

Democrats are readying a pro-migration bill which they will tout in the 2020 election. Greg Sargent, a progressive columnist at the Washington Post, described the bill as an election-year message:

The Democratic vision is that retreating on our international humanitarian commitments to asylum seekers is unacceptable, and that the problem can be managed better, through a combination of addressing home conditions, providing other avenues to apply, and rationalizing the process for arrivals. Providing counsel and better information, increasing their chances of success, would incentivize showing up for hearings.

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