The Senate has released its long-awaited “border” bill that reportedly increases the inflow of legalized immigrants into Americans’ communities, workplaces, and schools.
Titled ‘‘Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024’,” the 370-page bill was released at 6:40 p.m. on Sunday.
It is accompanied by a multi-billion dollar appropriations bill intended to fund the resources needed to register, release, transport, and house migrants in Americans’ coastal cities and inland communities.
The bill is being marketed as a “national security” bill as it seeks to overcome opposition by Republican legislators whose election depends on the enthusiastic turnout of ordinary populists who are worried about migration’s lawlessness, pocketbook damage, crime, overcrowding, and chaotic diversity.
However, Democrats are touting the bill as a fix for President Joe Biden’s terrible poll numbers in the 2024 election.
The establishment authors of the bill have largely hidden its contents — along with many possible loopholes, exceptions, modifications, and caveats that can turn apparent restrictions into government-funded welcomes.
The bill was assembled behind closed doors by a tight circle of establishment advocates — and their business donors. They include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who appointed three senators to negotiate a plan with the White House.
The three senators were Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ).
The White House side was advised by Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Mayorkas is a skilled lawyer who has cut numerous loopholes in the nation’s border laws while arguing that the crush of migrants will be easier to manage if the migrants are let in by legal pathways. He has also argued that Americans have a moral duty to accept migrants and that Americans “need” more migrant labor to fill jobs created by investors.
The bill is being marketed as a way to curb border chaos — and as a national security push — because advocates need to provide cover for pro-establishment Republican senators who want to support the bill despite public opposition. “For five months, my Republican colleagues have demanded — and I think rightfully so — that we address this border crisis as part of a national security package,” Sinema told CBS on Sunday. “I agree: The crisis on our border is a national security threat.”
"I don't know what Speaker Johnson will do" when the border security bill gets to the House, @SenatorSinema says. When asked if Johnson can be persuaded to support the bill, Sinema says, "I think everyone has an opportunity to be persuaded...I simply mean: Read the legislation." pic.twitter.com/vNdz2SuVbW
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) February 4, 2024
Breitbart News has highlighted many of the critical issues that will be carefully read before Schumer’s rush to a scheduled vote on Wednesday.
Central Issues:
Will the bill reduce the inflow of migrants — or just legalize much of Biden’s illegal migration?
Each year, Congress allows one million legal immigrants and roughly one million temporary workers to enter the country. That inflow is huge compared to the American population, which includes roughly 3.6 million births each year.
The bill reportedly includes some token curbs on Biden’s illegal parole migration, which imported roughly one million migrants into 2023 despite laws limiting the inflow.
This provision may be a sneaky way of expanding the parole inflow, which was limited to roughly 15,000 people a year under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
So the bill may tout minor curbs on migration while actually legalizing Biden’s current inflow of migrants via parole. These include the CPB-One border cellphone app for migrants at the border, the “CHNV” program which allows 30,000 migrants to fly in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and the family reunification programs that allow chain migration migrants to move into the United States in greater numbers than allowed under existing regulation.
Will there be a provision to ensure that parole migrants leave the country after two years, or will it include various legal loopholes to help them get green cards, bring up their families, and win citizenship?
If the parole workers are forced to leave after a period of work, this giveaway would be a gift of cheap labor to companies seeking to suppress Americans’ wages.
The parole workers would be welcomed by some Republican legislators because it ensures that donors get cheaper labor without also giving new voters to Democrats. In the early 2000, President George W. Bush pushed this plan via his “Any Willing Worker” program. Democrats shot the program down then — but may support a new version to help Biden get through the 2024 election.
If the parole workers can stay, the border management would dramatically expand legal migration from its current level of one million people per year, much to the disadvantage of American families.
The advocates say the bill ends “catch and release.”
But Sinema said that migrants with children will not be detained at the border. So this supposed curb would be a rollback of current law, which requires that all migrants seeking asylum be held until their asylum pleas are decided. This is a huge court-created loophole that has long been exploited by men who bring their children — and sometimes, other people’s children — to walk out of detention.
Sinema also said that migrants would be released under electronic surveillance. This is a critical issue because supervised release allows migrants to get the jobs they need to pay back their high-interest loans to the smugglers and cartels. If migrants are not released, few will risk taking out loans and mortgages to make the trek, and the number at the border will crash.
Biden’s administration is ignoring the “shall” detain law under its claim that Congress does not provide it with enough funding to detain the migrants. But the administration also transfers billions of dollars a year to transport and house the migrants who should be detained by law.
Does the legislation overturn court-imposed loopholes, such as the Flores decision?
Much of the nation’s border laws are set by judges. This allows pro-migration groups to break or loophole laws that block the inflow of migrants. For example, California judges say the border agency cannot hold migrants for more than 21 days. But 21 days is too short a time to fully process asylum claims, ensuring that few migrants can be held — as required by Congress’ law — until their claims are decided.
Does the bill curb the abuse of asylum laws?
The advocates say the bill tightens rules for awarding asylum. Perhaps, but it may not curb the alternative “Convention Against Torture” sidedoor that allows migrants to live and work in the United States.
Also, advocates claim the bill is intended to accelerate the process of deciding asylum claims. So if new curbs reduce the approval rate by 50 percent, yet also double the number of processed claims, the number of economic migrants who get asylum will remain at the current level.
Biden’s border chief has established a process, dubbed the “Asylum Officer Rule,” that allows low-ranking government officials to award asylum — and citizenship — during a brief review at the border. The rollout of this new process has been stymied by multiple factors, but if it is approved and funded by Congress, it would allow Biden’s deputies to hire pro-migration advocates who will rubber stamp a myriad of asylum claims without oversight by the nation’s corps of asylum judges.
Does the bill expand white-collar migration into middle-class jobs?
The bill reportedly includes a gift of 50,000 extra green cards per year. This giveaway would be a gift to Fortune 500 to pull in more foreign workers via the various visa worker programs that displace American graduates. The programs — including the H-1B worker program, the L-1 company transfer program, and the E-2 program for foreign business management programs — allow companies to pay imported workers with offers of American citizenship. This pay-with-citizenship system is now used to keep roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates in a very wide variety of white-collar jobs sought by U.S. graduates, including scientists, computer experts, and journalists.
The bill reportedly allocates 250,00 work permits to the adult sons and children of foreign visa workers. This would be a new giveaway to the visa workers who bring their children to the United States and a new hit to American graduates. Each year, roughly 800,000 Americans graduate from four-year colleges with skilled degrees — and they will lose out when visa workers can quietly steer Fortune 500 jobs to the adult sons and daughters.
The border “Shutdown” trigger
The bill’s advocates are touting a support border-shutdown trigger in the legislation. This is catnip for establishment reporters because it offers them a one-line summary of the legislation that makes Biden look good.
This trigger would happen if 5,000 migrants arrived each day for a week, or if 8,000 arrived in one day. But the terms and conditions may make this shutdown feature toothless.
Worse, the trigger may make it more difficult than under current law for the president to shut down the border in an emergency. If so, that bill would allow Biden to keep importing illegals — while making it more difficult for a future president to slow the inflow.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on extraction migration to grow the economy after allowing investors to move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.
The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.
The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced native-born Americans’ productivity and political clout, reduced high-tech innovation, crippled civic solidarity, and allowed government officials to ignore the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The colonialism-like policy has also killed many thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.
