George W. Bush Center: Amnesty for Illegal Aliens ‘Essential’ to Securing Southern Border

Former President George W. Bush’s public policy organization states that amnesty for illegal aliens is “essential” to securing the United States-Mexico border as illegal immigration continues to soar under President Joe Biden’s administration.

In an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News, the George W. Bush Center’s Natalie Gonnella-Platts and Jenny Villatoro write that a massive amnesty for most of the nation’s 11-to-22 million illegal aliens is necessary as part of a broader border security initiative.

“Immigration reform in the United States is essential to assuring that we have a secure and efficient border, a system flexible enough to handle changes in migrant flows, and the capacity to treat each migrant with dignity,” the Bush Center executives continue:

Any comprehensive plan on Central America and immigration reform should address gender inequity and gender-based violence.

…

How can anyone be expected to thrive when her day-to-day priority is simply to survive? The United States needs to recognize that gender-based violence and gender inequity drive migration.

The op-ed is part of a larger amnesty coalition where Bush has lobbied Republican lawmakers for months to craft an amnesty for illegal aliens with the Biden administration — including increases to legal immigration levels beyond their already historically high rates.

The lobbying has been in coalition with corporate interests such as the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, the Texas Association of Business, and taxpayer-funded refugee contractors.

Bush’s plan is merely a revitalization of his highly unpopular “Any Willing Worker” policy from the early 2000s, where his administration sought to open the nation’s borders to millions of illegal aliens willing to take low-wage jobs from Americans while increasing legal immigration to drive down U.S. wages in the labor market.

The amnesty coalition is hugely opposed by Republican voters, polling has shown.

A Rasmussen Reports survey released this week reveals that 83 percent of likely Republican voters support nationwide mandatory E-Verify to ban employers from hiring illegal aliens for U.S. jobs and 72 percent said they oppose amnesty for illegal aliens, including 52 percent who said they are “strongly opposed” to such a plan.

Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.

Similarly, peer reviewed research by economist Christoph Albert acknowledges that “as immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in U.S. data.” Albert’s research also finds that immigration “raises competition” for native-born Americans in the labor market.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.