This
election can also bring a radical change to America. Already during
the last presidential debate, Joe Biden stated that "within 100 days, I'm
going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over
11 million undocumented people."
BLOG EDITOR: THE REAL NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IS FAR CLOSER TO
40 MILLION. NOW DO THE MATH ON THE JOBS, HOUSING AND HOMELESS CRISIS.
If a Joe
Biden administration passes another amnesty for illegals, it's all over
By Shama Tobin
An
election can bring change. No, an election can bring a radical change.
In
December 1998, Venezuela turned toward socialism by electing Hugo Chávez
president. Captivated by his anti-corruption and anti-poverty
populist messages, Venezuelan voters handed Chávez a resounding victory with
17% margin. Little did they know that their votes would lead to the
beginning of a long and miserable journey to the destruction of their country.
Twenty
years later:
- Venezuela is one of most
corrupt countries in the world, ranked 176 out of 180 countries.
- Nearly 90 percent of
Venezuelans live in poverty.
- GDP per capita dropped
by 38%, from $4,121 in 1999 to $2,547 in 2019.
- The inflation rate skyrocketed,
from 24% to 19,990%.
- The richest 10% had 61% of
the nation's wealth, up from 36% in 1999.
- Over four million Venezuelans,
around 13 percent of the country's population, had flown out of
the country.
This
election can also bring a radical change to America. Already during
the last presidential debate, Joe Biden stated that "within 100 days, I'm
going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over
11 million undocumented people."
This
election could give
Democrats control of the Senate and the House. And just as Obamacare
was signed into law about 14 months after Obama got elected in 2008 and the
Democratic Party remained in control of both houses, if Biden wins and the
Democrats control both houses, an amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens could
become law within the next two years. If that happens, it will be
the beginning of a disheartening journey to America's destruction.
An
overwhelming proportion of the 11 million newly legalized citizens could be new
voters in 2024.
"We owe them," said
Biden during the debate.
Translation:
"We own them."
About 80% of the
11 million illegal aliens were from Mexico, Central America, and
Asia. Traditionally, an average 67% of
American citizens these regional groups voted Democrat. Given that
the Democratic Party is the one that grants them their citizenship, it is
entirely reasonable to assume that at least 80% of the newly legalized voters
will vote Democrats in every future election.
Thus,
with a stroke of a pen, the Democratic Party could immediately own about 8
million new voters. To put that into perspective, that is nearly
5.9% of total votes in the 2016 election.
This
would create a permanent one-party rule in which Democrats would control both
houses and the presidency. Many voters in this election may not
realize it, but Trump could be the last Republican president in the foreseeable
future.
The
table below presents some of the critical states with their corresponding numbers of illegal aliens,
the number of Senate seats currently held by the Republicans, the vote gaps in
the last closely contested Senate races, and the vote gaps in the last
presidential election.
An
amnesty that will bring at least 80% of the illegal aliens into a loyal
Democratic voting bloc will turn Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina,
Pennsylvania, and Texas from battleground or red states into solid blue
states. The newly legalized Democratic voters will outnumber the
vote gaps in the presidential election in those states. And there is
no way for Republicans to ever win the White House again, at least for the
foreseeable future.
The
vote gaps in the last closely contested Senate races in those states were far
less than the potential number of newly added Democratic
voters. Hence, an amnesty will enable Democrats to easily flip at
least nine Republican-held Senate seats in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas. This will ensure a
Democrat-controlled Senate for years to come.
The
Democratic Party will also be able to take control of the House and retain the
majority without much trouble by winning more seats in Texas, Florida, Georgia,
North Carolina, Arizona, and California. The latter has 2.2 million
illegal aliens, the largest among all states. (ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY
GENERAL, LA RAZA FASCIST AND M.E.Ch.A. SEPARATIST XAVIER BECERRA THERE ARE MORE
THAN 10 MILLION ILLEGALS IN CA ALONE)
With
the Democrats' inclination to pack the Supreme Court, the permanent one-party
rule could turn the Court into the Democratic Party's arm and thus create
absolute control of the three branches of American government.
It is
not a secret that the Democrats want to turn America into a socialist
country. That is evident with their plans on health care, energy,
labor, and immigration. Some voters, especially the independents,
may think this is far-fetched. But once an amnesty becomes law and
subsequently turns millions of illegal aliens into Democratic voters, the
Democratic Party could enact radical bills that would transform the country
(WITH BIDEN’S AMNESTY, 40 MILLION ILLEGALS WILL BE ABLE TO LEGALLY BRING UP THE
REST OF MEXICO. DEM POS LIKE BIDEN AND CLINTON HAVE LONG ADVOCATED CHAIN MIGRATION
TO FLOOD AMERICA WITH MEX FLAG WAVING DEM VOTERS)
Chávez,
and later his successor, Nicolás Maduro, managed to control
Venezuela through essentially a permanent one-party rule via the United
Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). As Venezuela has shown,
socialism imposed with absolute power is a quick recipe for a disastrous
nation. Thus, the Democratic Party's socialism agenda, combined with
a permanent control of the government, could wreak havoc in America.
Obama
once said, "Elections have consequences." Indeed,
Americans may need to thoughtfully ponder before casting their votes for a long
and painful journey to the destruction of their country.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S
BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as
Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
1. Globalism: Google
VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates
around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
2. Hillary Clinton’s Democratic
party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not
a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
3.
Immigration: Maintaining
liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the
most.
IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA
RAZA MEX OCCUPATION:
Your
neighborhood will be next to fall to LA RAZA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/10/america-la-raza-mexicos-wide-open.html
Donald Trump Sidelines
Immigration Economics in 2020 Campaign
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
24 Oct 20201
16:01
Donald Trump’s populist immigration agenda was central to
his 2016 triumph — but he has not focused on the economic impact of immigration
in his 2020 reelection bid despite the huge economic damage it is doing to
blue-collar and white-collar Americans, say immigration activists.
Instead, Trump in 2020 portrays immigration via social-issue
concerns over crime, welfare spending, border integrity, and the federal
government’s inability to get things done. For example, Trump’s August 28 acceptance
speech downplayed the money:
Today America’s borders are more secure than ever before.
We ended catch and release, stopped asylum fraud, took down
human traffickers who prey on women and children, and we have deported 20,000
gang members and 500,000 criminal aliens. We have already built 300 miles of
border wall, and we are adding ten new miles every single week. The wall will
soon be complete, and it is working beyond our wildest expectations.
“I don’t think he’s walking away from populism — he probably is
convinced that he has done a huge amount,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA. “He
signed the executive orders [that blocked border migration]. He’s building the wall. … We have more [migrant] caravans trying to get
to our border, but the Mexican government is stopping them, and that would not
be happening in a [Joe] Biden administration.”
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy at the Department of Homeland
Security, is championing Trump’s 2020 campaign. “Immigration isn’t just
about the rule of law; it is also about the opportunity for Americans to get
jobs that otherwise go to other people — and this president has zeroed in on
that problem,” Cuccinelli told Tucker Carlson October 22. “When COVID did hit
and unemployment spiked, he also in June, as you’ll recall, stopped the entry
of temporary foreign workers so Americans can get back to work in opening up
job slots first.”
Yet the populist jobs-and-wages aspect of immigration is almost
entirely absent from Trump’s 2020 campaign pitch, even in the critical swing
states of Pennsylvania and North
Carolina.
Many polls show that job competition is the populist sweet-spot angle in immigration politics.
Most Americans — of all colors and incomes — feel they should
welcome migrants, even illegal migrants or corporate outsourcing workers. But
the polls also show that lopsided majorities strongly prefer that jobs and
wages go to Americans before companies are allowed to import and hire migrants.
In October, Rasmussen Reports posted polling data showing the public’s lopsided preference for
higher wages over extra immigrants. The poll asked likely voters, “When
businesses say they are having trouble finding Americans to take jobs in
construction, manufacturing, hospitality, and other service work, what is
generally best for the country?”
Sixty-four percent of likely voters said it would be “better for
businesses to raise the pay and try harder to recruit non-working Americans
even if it causes prices to rise.” Just 20 percent said it would be “better for
the government to bring in new foreign workers to help keep business costs and
prices down.”
The crosstabs show the 3:1 electoral power of immigration seen
as a jobs issue: 55 percent of liberals support more foreign workers, and 73
percent of conservatives favor hiring Americans. Swing-voting “others” split 63
percent in favor of Americans and 19 percent in favor of foreign workers, in
part because the pocketbook question complements the public’s widespread desire
to be decent and fair towards racial minorities.
This populist focus is underlined by the coronavirus crash — and
the Rasmussen poll also shows it is very popular among the many white-collar,
middle-class, swing-voting men and women that
Trump needs to win in 2020.
Trump is a businessman who understands how the supply
of labor is related to wages.
He also knows that a politically
useful share of voters really hates the H-1B
outsourcing visa. In 2016, he promised to shrivel the H-1B
program, and, finally, in late 2020, he
announced strong— but legally vulnerable — rules to reduce the inflow of visa workers. He also staged an August press
conference to show himself saving roughly
200 Americans’ jobs from H-1B outsourcing by the CEO of the Tennessee Valley
Authority.
Partly because of Trump’s lower-immigration policies, household
incomes rose by seven percent in 2019, aided by a 2.5 percent growth in
median personal income. That growth has helped him win more support among younger Hispanics and African Americans
and among his base of working-class white Americans. For example, Trump
won strong applause at an October 13 rally in Pennsylvania when he said, “in 2017, I proudly signed a historic executive order, making
it official government policy to buy
American and hire American.”
Estb. media focuses on blue-collars in
swing-state Penn., but Trump set himself up to win many white-collars who fear
losing their careers to Fortune 500 outsourcing of jobs to India's myriad visa
workers.
But his estb. advisors may block the play.#H1B https://t.co/414qSMw7N8
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) September
29, 2020
But Trump the politician also knows that business groups,
donors, and investors really want more of the immigrants and visa workers who
provide them with cheap, compliant, stock-boosting labor. “In perhaps no
area did the Washington special interests try harder to stop us than on my
policy of pro-American immigration,” Trump said in his August 28 acceptance speech.
Trump’s 2020 reluctance to mention the money in immigration was
underlined by his response in an exchange over amnesty during the October 22
presidential debate.
Trump talked about how his energy policy has helped raise wages
for black and Latino Americans, how his tax policy has boosted Americans’ 401K
accounts, how minimum wages should be tuned to each state’s economy. But Trump
ignored the issue of wages when Joe Biden said Americans owe an amnesty to at
least 11 million illegal migrants:
Biden: Many of them are model citizens. Over 20,000 of them are
first responders out there taking care of people during this crisis. We owe
them, we owe them
Trump: He had eight years to do what he said he was going to do
and I’ve …. got rid of catch and release, we got rid of a lot of horrible
things that they put in and that they lived with but he had eight years he was
vice president … It just shows that he has no understanding of
immigration or the laws. Catch and release is a disaster, a murderer would come
in, a rapist would come in, a very bad person would come in. We would take
their name, we have to release them into our country and then you say they come
back. Less than 1 percent of the people come back.
At an October 15 town hall event, Trump was asked what he would do to help the roughly 700,000 younger
illegals who got work permits from President Barack Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty.
He repeated his support for the illegals. “We’re going to take
care of ‘dreamers.’ It’s working right now; we’re negotiating different aspects
of immigration and immigration law,” as he zig-zagged through his pro-migration
and anti-migration worldview.
Trump zagged towards disease, crime, chaos, borders, and
foreigners:
We’ve built now over 400 miles of border wall on the southern
border. Mexico is working very closely with us. We have the strongest border
we’ve ever had. … Mexico is heavily infected, as you know, and we’ve made it
very, very difficult to come in because of the pandemic and other reasons, and
crime. But we have a very strong border right now, and we have to keep it that
way … The fact is we got rid of catch-and-release [at the border], which is a
disaster. You know, if you catch somebody — they could be a murderer, they
could be a rapist — I was forced to release them into our country. These are
the laws that I inherite!. We ended that program.
Trump’s comments were a mirror-image of Democrats’
don’t-mention-the-money insistence that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants,
that diversity is strength, and that equality is threatened by xenophobia and
racism.
Yet Trump also zigged towards orderly, managed, clean,
high-quality migration:
We want people to come into our country. They have to come in
legally, but we are working very hard on the DACA program. And you will be — I
think — very happy over the course of the next year because I feel the same way
as you do. … But we want people to come into our country. But they have to
come through a merit system, and they have to come in legally, and people are
very, very happy with it. You haven’t heard any complaints about that.
In reality, there are many loud complaints in many states about
the damage done by white-collar “merit” migration, said Kevin Lynn, founder
of U.S.
Tech Workers. “Everyone knows what is going with immigration — the good, the bad, and the ugly,” said Lynn.
“The large-scale importation of these routine [H-1B] tech
workers has a harmful effect on American workers, and the president is not
alone in not appreciating that,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the
Center for Immigration Studies. “This is one area of immigration where the
president’s views are completely
consistent with those of the swamp.”
“The president thinks that white-collar immigration is perfectly
okay and nobody he knows is against it, even though he’s got supporters who are
concerned about it. He only talks about it in very narrow contexts. [For
example], he imagines that the H-1B replacement of American workers is some
kind of aberration that doesn’t need to happen if everybody follows the rules,
when in fact that’s not the case. … He sees the issue of the TVA [in 2020] and
the Disney tech workers [in
2016] as special cases, as mistakes,
as exceptions to a positive phenomenon rather than examples of a real problem.”
“The president is not an immigration restrictionist,” Krikorian
said. “I don’t think this is a casual thing that he doesn’t care about and can
be easily swayed out of. I think that he has internalized the lobbyists’
malarkey that [immigration and visa workers are] necessary for American
economic growth and progress. I am skeptical that anything is going to talk him
out of it, as if somebody from Goldman Sachs had called him up and say, ‘Hey
Donnie, this is what we’re going to do.’”
For the political and corporate elites who mix with Trump, “it
is [a belief that] is just in the air, just an assumption that they all share;
it is part of the zeitgeist, not some specific policy recommendation that
they’re demanding that he follow,” Krikorian said.
Other observers offer a less charitable explanation for Trump’s
mixture of visceral opposition to illegal, uncontrolled migration and his
establishment-like acceptance of controlled migration.
Trump thinks many of his supporters oppose migration for racial
reasons, says author and reporter Salena Zito. “Voters don’t hold the
racial resentments and fears Trump seems to think they do … [but] Trump seems
to think his base is racist. Forget the fact that the media thinks they
are, Trump campaigns as if they are,” she wrote in 2018.
“Despite mocking academia and the media as biased, the president
seems to have fully bought into their [racist] caricature of the Republican
voter,” said Musa al-Gharbi, a non-progressive
professor at Columbia University. “He
keeps giving his voters what he thinks is red meat, and [middle-class whites]
continue to recoil in horror and abandon him for it.”
“Trump campaigns like a Manhattan liberal[‘s] parody of a
conservative,” said Jane Coaston, a reporter at Vox.com.
A similar view is pushed by Todd Schulte, the director of
FWD.us, a pro-migration advocacy group funded by wealthy, West Coast investors,
“I’ve spent a few years saying this, but there is just near-constant and
overwhelming evidence that his signature issue of 2016–anti-immigrant
demagoguery—has been a huge drag for 3 years,” Schulte tweeted October 11. Schulte declined to comment about the
political power of an immigration message focused on jobs and wages.
Other administration appointees are trying to keep immigration
economics out of the 2020 race — especially any criticism of white-collar
migration via the J-1, H-1B, OPT, L-1 worker pipelines that keep at least 1.3
million cheap and compliant foreign workers in U.S. Fortune 500 jobs. This
quiet group wants to build a high-low coalition of billionaires and
blue-collars, so it keeps Trump far from polling data or the policy options
that would guide him to win more votes from blue-collar minorities and
white-collar suburbanites voters, reformers tell Breitbart News.
The inflow of India's visa-workers creates
a huge 'bonded labor' workforce that empowers Fortune 500 CEOs & shrivels
professionalism, say US/India tech-professionals.
"We’ve lost our competitive, innovative advantage because of it,"
says US manager. #H1Bhttps://t.co/EgkcLsf4Xm
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) May 21,
2020
And the establishment media does little or nothing to show Americans the economic impact of immigration, said
Lynn. “There is no pressure being brought on Trump to look at broader
immigration issues,” he said.
“The media listen to the corporations that buy their
advertising,” Lynn said. “The reporters know what will and what won’t get
published. It is only the stray article that speaks to the economic impact of
unbridled immigration, to the impact of displacing native workers because of
the non-immigration visa programs.” Instead, the vast majority of media
coverage is about migrants’ and employers’ interests, not about Americans seeking jobs
and wages.
Without public pressure, “events are pretty much on autopilot,
which means more immigration and more displacement of Americans and more
offshoring [of jobs].”
Trump’s reluctance to focus on economics is pressuring reformers
to make alternative appeals.
For now, reformers — aided by a growing number of activist white-collar professionals
— are assembling the evidence to show the variety of damage caused by the
visa-worker pipelines.
These pipelines undermine U.S.
innovation, threaten Americans’ economic and
healthcare privacy, cause workplace
discrimination, fatten coastal states, impoverish inland states, distort university enrollment, shrink the domestic supply of skilled labor, expand illegal immigration, displace American healthcare graduates, create new labor markets
where Americans cannot get jobs, threaten free speech online, and deny vital opportunities to young American graduates of all
backgrounds and colors.
Yet Trump can be persuaded to focus on the economic impact of
migration on Americans because he “responds to what he feels pressure on,” said
Lynn. For example, Trump improved his NAFTA-replacement deal with Mexico and
Canada when left-of-center unions pressured him, he said.
After a careful online ad campaign
that spotlighted the huge salary paid to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s CEO,
Trump also intervened to save 200 Americans’ jobs in one tiny corner of the vast
600,000-job H-1B outsourcing program. He touted that paycheck-politics success
in his White House speech announcing his acceptance of the GOP nomination:
When I learned that the Tennessee Valley Authority laid off
[200] hundreds of American workers and forced them to train their lower-paid
foreign replacements, I promptly removed the chairman of the board, and now
those talented American workers have been rehired and are back providing power
to Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and
Virginia. They have their old jobs back, and some are here with us this
evening.
“I think that they should be shouting that from the rafters,”
said Lynn. “But,
they’re not.”
If Trump touts the immigration-economics policies that avoid
racial conflicts and help blue-collar and white-collar employees, Lynn said,
“he could own labor … [and] he would win this election handily.”
Trump curbs the #H1B outsourcing program with two agency rules raising pay & shrinking
the staffing industry.
Expect lamentations & lawsuits from the Fortune 500 and subcontractors.
It's all about CEOs vs professionals, not about immigration. https://t.co/kdVaJJT9Cs
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) October
6, 2020
Trump vs. Biden: Amnesty
Both favor it, neither says it, but the difference is between 1.8
million aliens or 11 million (-plus?)
Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have come out in support of
an amnesty for some number of illegal aliens in the United States — although
neither has admitted as much.
- As part of his
January 2018 "Framework on Immigration Reform & Border
Security", the president proposed an amnesty for 1.8 million aliens
who are DACA recipients and aliens who would otherwise be DACA
eligible except for the temporal constraints on that administrative
action. In exchange, the president sought several key reforms in our legal
immigration system. Congress has failed to act on Trump's proposals.
- Biden, on the
other hand, has promised to work with Congress on an amnesty leading to
citizenship for nearly 11 million aliens unlawfully present in the United
States on his campaign website, with few strings attached.
- Pursuant to his
plan, those aliens would have to register, pay any taxes due, and pass a
background check. Given the fact that the former vice president has
promised a 100-day moratorium on removals at the start of his term, and to
deport only aliens who have committed felonies in the United States
thereafter, it is doubtful that the unspecified background check would bar
many aliens who are currently removable on criminal grounds.
- A companion
campaign document — the "Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce
Recommendations" — is less clear with respect to that amnesty,
suggesting that the Biden-Harris administration would at least initially
grant an administrative amnesty to aliens unlawfully present in the United
States before seeking legislation to formally legalize those nearly 11
million aliens.
- Given the
former vice president's statements, and his vow to curb immigration
enforcement if elected, it is possible that Biden could institute a de
facto amnesty of the vast majority of aliens illegally present in the
United States, even before implementing any administrative or legislative
one.
- Left unclear is
whether the Biden administration would limit any amnesty to "nearly
11 million" illegal aliens, or whether it would ultimately apply to a
larger number, assuming that there were more such aliens in the United
States. In Thursday’s debate, he raised the number to "over 11
million", without setting a ceiling. Nor has Biden proposed a cut-off
date for any such amnesty, meaning that a wave of aliens could seek to
enter illegally up to (and perhaps after) the implementation of that
amnesty, to take advantage of those benefits.
As I have been
examining the respective immigration positions of the two candidates for
president — the incumbent Donald Trump and the challenger Joe Biden — one major
point that I have thus far not addressed directly is amnesty. Both Trump and
Biden have proposed it (not directly, of course, as it is a program that dare
not speak its name), the former on a "limited" basis of 1.8 million
aliens, while the latter has promised it for upwards of 11 million (and likely
many more).
Amnesty
Generally
"Experts"
will give you different definitions of amnesty, but here is the one that
counts: The granting of immigration benefits (residency, work authorization,
and possibly access to government benefits) to any alien removable under the
Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) who is not otherwise eligible for relief
from removal.
Those experts
and their respective candidates will elide the subject, and contend that any
program that grants those benefits is not amnesty if it comes with strings
attached: Paying back taxes, paying a "penalty" (or what you would
refer to as a "fee"), background checks, and coming forward to apply.
Respectfully,
this is all eye wash.
Every
individual in the United States is required to pay any number of taxes,
including sales tax, state and federal income
taxes, property
tax, Social Security and
Medicare taxes (included
in the "payroll
tax"), etc.
These are not optional.
Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes in
1927 explained that "[t]axes are what we pay for civilized society."
He was echoing former President James Madison, who stated: "The power of
taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of
government." So paying taxes is the baseline for everyone — citizen,
national, and alien — and not a penalty, even if you have failed to do it.
Of course,
millions of people file federal tax returns, but actually pay no tax (or
receive back more than they have paid) — by one
estimate more
than 43 percent of all filers. This is a "feature,
not a bug" of
our tax system. "By design, the federal income tax always has excluded a
significant fraction of households through a combination of personal
exemptions, the standard deduction, zero bracket amounts, and more recently,
tax credits."
In 2016, Market
Watch explained:
"On average, those in the bottom 40% of the income spectrum end up getting
money from the government." Most aliens who have entered the United States
illegally, and those nonimmigrants who entered legally and overstayed, are
likely to fall within that 40 percent. As my colleague Steven
Camarota explained
in 2017:
Researchers agree that illegal
immigrants overwhelmingly have modest levels of education — most have not
completed high school or have only a high school education. There is also
agreement that immigrants with this level of education are a significant net
fiscal drain, creating more in costs for government than they pay in taxes.
As for a cash
"penalty" for amnesty, those aliens here illegally have (in almost
every instance) evaded the many fees that U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) charges to provide immigration benefits
(including status) to aliens. Applying for a green card will run you $1,225,
for example. Not to mention skipping the visa fees charged by the Department
of State to
enter as a nonimmigrant if you entered illegally to begin with. Requiring
payment in exchange for amnesty does little more than place aliens in a
position that would have occupied had they not broken the law.
A requirement
that an amnesty applicant have a clean criminal record should require no
explanation, except of course it does. If you run afoul of the law (federal,
state, or municipal) you are sanctioned with a fine and/or jail time. That is
because you have an obligation to obey the law, and the state has an opportunity
to punish you if you don't.
I say
"except of course it does" because the number of crimes that will get
you removed from the United States (listed in sections 212 and 237 of the INA) is actually quite
limited. You would be surprised what aliens can get away with criminally and
remain in good standing from an immigration standpoint.
Of course,
the most recent administrative amnesty (Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals, or "DACA"), isn't even as strict as the INA when
it comes to criminal bars. Specifically, an alien can be granted DACA so long
as he or she has "not been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor,
or three or more other misdemeanors."
"Significant
misdemeanors" are limited to "an offense of domestic violence; sexual
abuse or exploitation; burglary; unlawful possession or use of a firearm; drug
distribution or trafficking; or, driving under the influence", or one for
which the alien was sentenced to 90 days or more (if the sentence is suspended,
even the latter doesn't count).
But under
section 212 of the INA, for example, simple possession (usually a misdemeanor)
will get you removed, although you can still get DACA, no problem. In
fact, USCIS reported in 2018 that: "Of
those individuals whose DACA requests were approved and had one or more arrests
or apprehensions, 53,792 were arrested or apprehended prior to their most
recent approval." Remember all of this the next time someone refers to DACA recipients as
"law-abiding".
Trump's
Position
Speaking of
DACA, in January 2018, the White House released its "Framework
on Immigration Reform & Border Security". Don't look for the word
"amnesty" therein, but the president promised to: "Provide legal
status for DACA recipients and other DACA-eligible illegal immigrants,
adjusting the time-frame to encompass a total population of approximately 1.8
million individuals." My colleague Jessica Vaughan, on the other hand, referred to that
as what it is: "amnesty", with a "10-year path to
citizenship."
Considering
the fact that, as of August
2018, there were
just short of 700,000 DACA recipients, this meant that the president was
offering that amnesty to an additional 1.1 million aliens who had not yet
received the ersatz DACA amnesty.
Of course, as
Vaughan and I both explained at the time, there were many
important immigration fixes in Trump's framework, so it would have required a
significant amount of give-and-take from Congress for the administration to
grant that amnesty. Congress failed to take the bait, however, despite the
president's extremely generous offer.
More recently
(last
October), the
president stated that Congress would act on a bipartisan basis to protect DACA
recipients if the Supreme Court allowed the administration to end DACA.
The Supreme
Court refused
to allow DHS to end DACA (yet), so there is no incentive for Congress to act,
and it has failed to do so.
If
re-elected, I have no doubt that the president would push through on his
January 2018 framework, and grant the promised amnesty to those 1.8 million
aliens in exchange for at least some of the immigration fixes therein. And, if
the courts allow DHS to wind-down DACA, that would provide him with a platform
to do so.
Biden's
Position
As I have
previously explained, the former vice-president's immigration proposals are
threaded through two separate documents: "The Biden Plan
for Securing our Values as a Nation of Immigrants" (which features prominently on
the candidate's website); and the "Biden-Sanders
Unity Task Force Recommendations". In addition, Biden mentioned his amnesty plans in Thursday’s
presidential debate.
Biden pulls
no punches when it comes to his amnesty plans (although again, you will not
find that forbidden word in either document and he did not use it in the
debate.
First, he
promises on his website to work with Congress to "[c]reate[] a roadmap to
citizenship for" almost 11 million "unauthorized immigrants" in
the United States. Of course, they would have to register for that amnesty, be
"up-to-date on their taxes", and pass "a background check"
— the parameters of which he fails to define, but, as I will explain below,
would likely be significantly less stringent than the grounds of removability
in sections 212 and 237 of the INA.
The
"Unity" document is similar, but a bit broader in its scope and more
ambiguous in its operation. It states that Democrats will "provide a
roadmap to citizenship for the millions of undocumented workers",
fast-tracking that process "for those workers who have been essential to
the pandemic response and recovery efforts, including healthcare workers,
farmworkers, and others."
Notably
absent from that statement is "working with Congress", or any
legislative proposal to provide that amnesty. It is a notable omission in this
context because that document does state that Democrats will: "Work with
Congress to eliminate immigration barriers, such as the 3- and 10-year bars,
and remove the 10-year waiting period for waivers to the permanent bars that
keep U.S. citizens separated from their families."
Like Supreme
Court Justice nominee Amy
Coney Barrett, I am
a "textualist" and believe that the differences in that carefully
crafted document between the amnesty promise and the "immigration
barriers" proposal is deliberate. Anticipate an administrative amnesty
first, followed (possibly) by a legislative one second.
This is not
the first time I have made this point. On August 12, in a post captioned "With
Choice of Kamala Harris, Biden's Immigration Plans Become Clearer", I explained that I expect the
Biden-Harris administration will use a procedure called "Parole in
Place" (PIP)
to grant immigration benefits (including work authorization) to those
"nearly 11 million" unauthorized immigrants fairly quickly through
executive action.
What would
that administrative amnesty look like? Well, as for the criminal grounds of
removal, the former
vice president has
already vowed that he will not remove any aliens in his first
100 days in office, and after that, only those who have committed (unspecified)
"felonies" (not including DUI, which Biden does not believe is a felony,
presumably even when it is) in the United States.
Not to put
too fine a point on it, but taken at his word, that means Biden would not
deport an alien who committed an offense abroad — no matter how heinous. Child
molesters, murderers, and narco-traffickers will get a free pass, so long as
their offenses occurred abroad.
And, again,
there are plenty of offenses that are not classified as "felonies"
(regardless of how you define it) that will get you removed from the United
States under the INA. But not if Biden gets his way.
Not that
Biden would even need to bother drafting a PIP proposal to protect those
aliens, as the former vice president has asserted that he will fire any ICE
officer who deports an alien who has not committed a felony in this country. In
his words: "You change the culture by saying you are going to get fired.
You are fired if, in fact, you do that. You only arrest for the purpose of
dealing with a felony that's committed."
Again,
respectfully, it is not only the culture at ICE that would be
"changed" under that sweeping proposal.
Of course,
all of this raises two additional questions.
First, what
happens if the population of "unauthorized immigrants" is larger than
"nearly 11 million"? I note that in addressing the issue in Thursday’s
debate, he vowed to
send legislation to Congress in his first 100 days in office creating “a
pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented
people” (emphasis added), so he has obviously expanded his plans.
Given this,
will there be a cut-off? Given Biden's expressed
distaste for
immigration enforcement, I cannot envision how there would be, or even that it
would make much difference anyway. Coupled with his promises to defang
worksite enforcement,
there would be no impetus for any alien who did not make any arbitrary cut-off
to leave.
Second, what
about "unauthorized immigrants" who enter illegally or overstay
between now and the end of Biden's 100-day moratorium on removals, or even the
point at which amnesty is announced or implemented? Would they also be eligible
for amnesty (legislative, administrative, or through non-enforcement)? Most
amnesties have a cut-off (to prevent a wave of new illegal entrants), but
nowhere in either of Biden's campaign documents is one mentioned, let alone
listed.
Once more, I
have to conclude that this omission is deliberate. But, if it is, Border Patrol
agents and CBP officers at the ports would be left doing nothing more than
patting down migrants for drugs and weapons, and sending them on their way.
Plus, we might as well fire our State Department consular staff — unless we
needed them to check whether a foreign national abroad has committed a felony in
the United States.
Biden has
likely learned from DACA. That was intended as a temporary administrative
action, pending legislation to grant benefits to DACA recipients. The
subsequent legislation has never been passed, but (as Trump's statements show)
support for it has grown as nearly 700,000 aliens have been shielded by that
program. By granting an indefinite administrative amnesty to millions of aliens
in the United States, Biden would be better positioned to push through a much
broader legislative amnesty.
Summary
Both Donald
Trump and Joe Biden have come out in support of an amnesty for some number of
illegal aliens in the United States — although neither has admitted as much.
As part of
his January 2018 "Framework on Immigration Reform & Border Security",
the president proposed an amnesty for 1.8 million aliens who are DACA
recipients and those who would otherwise be DACA-eligible, except for the
temporal constraints on that administrative action. In exchange, the president
sought several key reforms in our legal immigration system. Congress has failed
to act on Trump's proposals.
Biden, on the
other hand, has promised to work with Congress on an amnesty leading to
citizenship for nearly 11 million aliens unlawfully present in the United
States on his campaign website, with few strings attached.
Pursuant to
his plan, those aliens would have to register, pay any taxes due, and pass a
background check. Given the fact that the former vice president has promised a
100-day moratorium on removals at the start of his term, and to deport only
aliens who have committed felonies in the United States thereafter, it is
doubtful that the unspecified background check would bar many — if not most —
criminal aliens.
A companion
campaign document — the "Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce
Recommendations" — is less clear with respect to that amnesty, suggesting
that the Biden-Harris administration would at least initially grant an
administrative amnesty to aliens unlawfully present in the United States before
seeking legislation to legalize those nearly 11 million aliens.
Given the
former vice president's statements, and his vow to curb immigration enforcement
if elected, it is possible that Biden could institute a de facto amnesty of the
vast majority of aliens illegally present in the United States, even before
implementing any administrative or legislative one.
Left unclear is whether the Biden administration would limit
any amnesty to "nearly 11 million" illegal aliens, or whether it
would ultimately apply to a larger number — assuming that there were more such
aliens in the United States. Biden has also not proposed a cut-off date for
any such amnesty, meaning that a wave of aliens could seek to enter illegally
up to (and perhaps after) the implementation of any amnesty, to take advantage
of those benefits.
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