House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) has announced that he will retire from Congress at the end of his term, leaving the door open for an economic nationalist Republican to take over as Speaker.
Here, Breitbart News looks at Ryan’s pro-immigration, wage-crushing, big business-first record, whereby American workers have been left behind by multinational free trade and mass immigration.
1. Ryan’s Mass Immigration-Packed Omnibus of 2018
This year, Ryan sent President Trump a spending bill that was packed with goodies for big business interests and the open borders lobby. The omnibus spending bill allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to expand the H-2B visa program, whereby low-skilled nonagricultural foreign workers are imported to take blue-collar and working-class U.S. jobs.
Ryan’s spending bill also did not include any border wall funding, while increasing the “Catch and Release” program that allows illegal aliens to be released into the interior of the U.S. Neither did it add any new deportation agents to help deport illegal aliens living across America.
2. Ryan’s Opposition to Trump’s Pro-American Worker Tariffs
When Trump announced he would place tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to help rebuild America’s manufacturing base, which has been devastated by free trade deals like NAFTA and KORUS, Ryan immediately began spouting his opposition to the pro-American worker initiative.
“I think the smarter way to go is to make it more surgical and more targeted,” Ryan said. [Emphasis added]
“What we’re encouraging the administration to do is to focus on what is clearly a legitimate problem and to be more surgical in its approach so that we can go after the true abusers without creating any kind of unintended consequences or collateral damage,” Ryan continued. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, American workers thanked Trump for placing the tariffs on imports, noting how free trade had come at the expense of their manufacturing jobs, as Breitbart News noted.
3. Ryan Using Nikki Haley to Trash Trump’s Popular Immigration Reform Agenda
Breitbart News’ Neil Munro reported in 2016:
House Speaker Paul Ryan used President Barack Obama’s final State of The Union speech to trash Donald Trump’s popular pro-American immigration platform — and to call for a radical, wage-cutting, open-borders plan.
The hit was delivered via the GOP response-speech, presented by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Her speech — which was almost certainly approved by Ryan — dumped on Trump and touts Ryan’s preference for a “any willing worker” economy.
That “any willing worker” term is used to describe nationwide employment rules which would allow any employer to hire any willing foreign workers if American workers decline to take the jobs because the offered wages are too low. President George. W. Bush worked with GOP leaders to push those rules in 2006 and 2007, but saw his poll ratings crash and his plans defeated.
4. Ryan’s Attempt to Slip Amnesty for Illegal Aliens into Year-End Spending Bill
Last year, Ryan attempted to slip an amnesty for illegal aliens into a year-end spending bill, a move that would have attempted to force an amnesty at the expense of American workers or have the federal government shut down.
Just as Trump’s labor market was tightening at the end of the year, securing historic wage gains for America’s workers, Ryan’s amnesty plan would have crushed those salary increases, giving big business an immediate new flow of cheap, foreign workers.
Ryan’s failed secret plan to attach amnesty to the spending bill came less than a month after Breitbart News confirmed that a DACA recipient allegedly murdered a high school student in South Carolina.
5. Ryan’s Refusal to Cut Legal Immigration to Raise American Workers’ Wages
This year, Ryan made a rhetorical shift when he announced that he, like Trump, supports a merit-based immigration system. But, the system Ryan supports does not include actual reductions to legal immigration levels, wherein the U.S. imports more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year.
Instead, Ryan prefers to keep importing millions of foreign nationals every year, but through a merit-based system – a plan that would not raise American workers’ wages, as it would continue flooding the U.S. labor market at the benefit of big business.
Meanwhile, when pro-American immigration Republicans asked Ryan to promote legislation that reduced legal immigration to the U.S., he refused to help the initiative, allowing it to die in the House despite its popularity among the American public and Republican voters.
6. Ryan’s Shooting Down of the RAISE Act
In 2017, there was no legislation that encompassed more of Trump’s economic nationalist agenda than Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) “RAISE Act,” which would have cut legal immigration in half, delivering wage increases for American workers, but also reducing the foreign competition that U.S. workers have had to endure.
From the beginning of the rollout of the RAISE Act, Ryan opposed the plan, favoring the current Washington, D.C.-imposed cheap labor economic model.
“I just think arbitrary cuts to legal immigration don’t take into effect the economy’s needs as the boomers are retiring,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “With baby boomers leaving the workforce, we’re still going to have labor shortages in certain areas and that is where a well-reformed legal immigration system should be able to make up the difference.”
7. Ryan Defending Globalization to American Workers
Breitbart News Political Editor Matt Boyle reported in 2016:
House Speaker Paul Ryan headed to friendly territory in his home district — Wisconsin’s first, which most in state politics expect him to win — to campaign for the final day before blue collar voters who will determine his fate.
But perhaps more importantly than that—Ryan shoring up what is supposed to be his base—Ryan was forced by workers in the two Wisconsin factories he visited on Monday to answer for globalization.
…
In addition to pushing his “A Better Way,” agenda which has come under fire during the primary, Ryan made a direct pitch that the way to keep jobs in America—to prevent outsourcing—is to do tax reform. Ryan said:
This business is taxed at the personal level, so their top tax rate here is 44.6 percent. You know what the companies doing this in other countries are taxed at, like the Canadian companies that produce the same kind of stuff? They’re taxed at 15 percent. China is at 25. Ireland is 12.5. England is 15. The average in the world is about 23. So when we tax our American made products, our American manufacturers much higher tax rates than our foreign competitors are taxing theirs, they immediately lose. So one of the things we are trying to do is make it so we are in a better position to keep jobs here in America, to keep manufacturing here. So we have proposed a complete overhaul of our tax system to number one get those tax rates down to about the average, 25 [percent]. Number two, we want to give businesses the incentive to hire more people and to build more buildings and to buy more machines.
8. Ryan Squeezing More Imported Foreign Workers Out of Trump Administration
Last year, Ryan was effective in squeezing an additional 15,000 imported, cheap foreign workers for his big business donors out of Trump’s DHS chief at the time, Gen. John Kelly. The H-2B visa, which the foreign workers use to enter the U.S., has proven to be used as a cheap labor visa whereby businesses can readily import low-wage workers rather than having to find American workers to hire.
9. Ryan Falsely Claiming He Passed Legislation to Pause Somali Refugee Program
Breitbart News’ Julia Hahn reported in 2016:
During the interview, O’Reilly criticized Ryan for failing to message on immigration controls and asked Ryan specifically about the Somali refugee crisis in Minnesota.
O’Reilly: “We have a Somali problem up in Minneapolis-St. Paul. [We] have a problem there and those are refugees from Somalia. And if, God forbid, some refugee comes in and blows people up, it’s going to be grisly.”
Ryan replied by explaining that he passed a bill to pause the refugee program. Ryan said: “Right. Right. That’s why– just so you know that’s why we passed a bill pausing this refugee program, because we don’t think the refugee program works. That’s why we don’t want it to continue right now.”
However, Ryan did no such thing. The bill Ryan championed did not in any way pause the Somali refugee program– it applied solely to refugees from Syria and Iraq.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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