At least one GOP Senator is working with pro-migration Democrats to draft a border bill for 2025, a report in Axios.com. detailed Thursday.
Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin told the outlet his “serious” project could replace the fast-track reconciliation bill that is now expected to massively fund border security and enforcement in early 2025.
“If we can do border separately — without reconciliation — then [President Donald Trump is] okay with” a single reconciliation bill for tax cuts, Mullin told Axios.
The details are “very secret,” he said.
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Several pro-migration Democratic Senators are working with Mullin. They include Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), according to Axios.
Kelly told Axios that the Mullin bill must include their version of “immigration reform.” That is an establishment euphemism for amnesty, more legal migrants, and more federal support for migrants. “If there’s willingness [by Mullin] to work in a bipartisan way to do some stuff, not only on border security, but on immigration reform, I think it would be great,” Kelly told Axios.
The Mullin bill may replace a reconciliation bill that is expected to provide massive spending for interior enforcement, border security, and repatriations.
RollCall.com described the fast-track reconciliation bill on December 9: “Senate Republicans are planning as much as $85 billion for border security as part of an initial bill for budget reconciliation, the process that enables the chamber to get around the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a filibuster on legislation.”
The article added:
Stephen Miller, tapped by Trump to become White House deputy chief of staff for policy, laid out details for congressional action in an appearance Sunday on Fox News, saying incoming Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have pledged to get a border funding package to Trump’s desk “in January or early February.”
“That would mean a massive increase in [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers working on the deportation operation … that would mean a historic increase in border agents, a pay raise for both, full funding for military operations, full funding for ICE beds, full funding for air and marine operations, full funding for all of the barriers and technology you need to ensure there’s never another gotaway entering this country,” Miller said.
Two post-election polls show that voters want Congress to pass an immigration reform bill before any tax cuts.
The polls suggest that GOP voters remember Trump’s 2017 mistake of allowing his establishment allies to vote on a tax bill before an immigration bill. Once the tax bill passed, GOP leaders discarded their promised 2017 immigration bill.
Mullin is an advocate for stringent border security. But he has also supported rules allowing for more legal migration of foreign workers into U.S. jobs. For example, Mullins has supported visa worker programs that allow employers to hire temporary migrants instead of Americans.
Those visa programs are praised by CEOs who can sideline unwanted American workers in favor of cheaper, younger, healthier migrants. The visa programs also allow investors and CEOs to avoid buying the labor-saving machinery that raises the productivity and prosperity of American towns.
In contrast, reconciliation bills cannot be used to raise the current annual inflow of around 1 million legal migrants and one million legal temporary workers.
In Oklahoma, a bipartisan and multinational panel pushed a legal good/illegal bad migration plan in September. But GOP Gov. Kein Stitt immediately downplayed the plan once it was trashed by Oklahoma voters.
In late 2023 and early 2024, the other Oklahoma Senator, Sen. James Lankford, cooperated with a migration-boosting border bill designed by President Joe Biden’s deputies and GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell.
The complex Lankford bill immediately failed once other GOP Senators saw the secret details. But it was used as a campaign billy club against President Donald Trump through the 2024 campaign.
Four Democratic Senators lost their election campaigns in 2024, largely because of the Democrats’ support for more wealth-shifting, wage-cutting migrants.
