Trump’s Draft Amnesty: Unlimited, Forever, and Before a Wall Is Built
A near-final draft of the White House’s unlimited and forever amnesty bill says the administration wants $25 billion for a wall over the next five years, and will not cancel chain-migration or visa-lottery inflows until the last of the 4 million foreigners now in the pipeline have arrived in the 2030s.
The amnesty is dubbed the Security, Enforcement, and Compassion United Reform Effort Act, or SECURE Act. It is based on the SUCCEED Act developed by Sen. Thom Tillis and Sen. James Lankford, and it offers amnesty to an unlimited number of people, without any ending date.
Overall, the amnesty bill implements the desire of American business for a huge, managed supply of young, compliant, non-criminal workers, who also double as consumers. That is very different from progressives’ desire to welcome poor ‘dreamer’ migrants from developing countries, regardless of costs...
The 250-page draft received by Breitbart News matches the one-page description released this week by White House officials.
The Trump amnesty bill requires $25 billion be set aside from 2018 to 2021 for “tactical infrastructure,” which is a code-word for a wall....
In fact, Democrats who say they will vote for the amnesty and wall also suggest they will try to block subsequent construction of the wall...
The bill technically ends the visa lottery and chain-migration programs which allow diverse immigrants to bring in their extended-family clans of siblings, parents and older children. But the end is delayed until all 4 million people in the pipeline — such as the elderly parents and devout siblings of visa-lottery winners from Pakistan — settle in the United States. The pipeline also includes hundreds of thousands of white-collar professionals.
By welcoming everyone in the pipeline, the bill does not give working Americans even partial relief from the salary impact of mass immigration for 15 years or more...
The amnesty section requires Americans to grant the hugely valuable gift of citizenship to nearly all current illegals who have documents saying they are younger than 37...
The legislation directs the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to operate the amnesty and includes some measures to help screen out fraudulent applicants for the amnesty.
For example, the bill includes a grant of $400 million for a formal bureaucratic process...
But the bill sets no upper limit on Trump’s amnesty, and it does not provide any incentives for officials to fight fraud or minimize the scale...
That lack of any upper limit means the political appointee who runs the DHS will have the power to exceed the reported estimate of 1.8 million illegals by simply directing officials to accept more applications...
The cost of the amnesty is not mentioned in the legislation, although the Congressional Budget Office optimistically estimated that a similar DREAM Act amnesty for 2 million illegals would cost taxpayers $26 billion in just the first ten years. The costs would be high because very few of the illegals have college degrees, many do not speak English, and so cannot earn enough to pay more taxes than they receive in benefits....
The existing population of illegals in the United States is estimated at 12 million, but it may be higher, and it is growing every day as migrants head north in the hope of buying documents and applying for the amnesty...
Moreover, the bill handcuffs DHS agents from deporting any younger illegals until the illegals file for the amnesty. That provision means the DHS agents cannot deport young illegals — even if they have just climbed over the border fence — until the DHS secretary can start accepting applications.
But the business community will have little reason to defend Trump, partly because they have gotten their double-shot of tax cuts and cheap labor. In fact, the legislation does not sunset the amnesty, meaning it can be quietly expanded with a few legal tweaks that can be attached to any of the myriad obscure bills annually passed by Congress.
In 1986, Congress expected that 400,000 farm workers would apply for green cards –but officials eventually handed out 1 million green cards. If the same pattern applies to the estimated 1.8 million recipients, Trump’s amnesty will be given to 4.5 million illegals — or more than one year of births in the United States.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates the current resident population of ‘dreamer’ illegals to be 3.25 million — not counting younger, more recent child-illegals who will age in and drive the total closer to 4.5 million.
That bigger-than-expected total would be a disaster for the GOP but a boon for business because it will head off the labor shortages which allow Americans to get higher wages....
The legislation says illegals must meet several tests, such as steady work and validated education levels. But the education standards are extremely low, suggesting that nearly all illegals will meet the test...
Illegals will be allowed to become citizens after 12 years, giving Democrats a huge electoral boost in the 2030s when nearly all of today’s GOP legislators have retired...
Even without citizenship, the population of several million legalized illegals will provide an immediate gain for Democratic Party, partly because they will be counted in the 2020 census and will shift a few more House seats from GOP-dominated areas into Democratic-dominated areas....
The draft amnesty will also serve as complete proof in November that Trump’s voters’ wrongly placed their trust in his August 2016 promise to block any amnesty:
He said:
For those here illegally today who are seeking legal status, they will have one route and one route only. To return home and apply for re-entry like everybody else under the rules of the new legal immigration system that I have outlined today …
It’s our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us …
Anyone who tells you the core issue is the needs of those living here illegally has simply spent too much time in Washington.
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 roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants (including roughly 750,000 working-age migrants), 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....
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.
