How important is it to you to see rising wages and more opportunities for American workers?
Many Americans hear that the economy is booming, unemployment is at all-time low and that it’s an employee’s market. Our job market is the tightest it has been in decades.
So why would we ruin these gains by bringing in thousands of cheap guest workers?
If you violate federal immigration laws and settle in New York, the state will give you a driver’s license (and lots of other benefits too).
If you work at the New York Department of Motor Vehicles and you comply with a request for information from either Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), you could be charged with a Class E felony, be locked up for as long as five years, and forfeit many basic rights, including the right to vote.
Candidate Joe Biden was harshly critical of Donald Trump’s handling of immigration policy and border enforcement. He was even critical and apologetic about the Obama administration’s record on immigration, in which he served as vice president, even though President Obama’s supposed toughness on immigration was vastly hyped.
As we approach the 100-day mark of the Biden administration, let’s imagine the unthinkable for a moment.
As hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens pour through our borders, we have a president who by his actions encourages it.
Not only has the rule of law collapsed, but the crisis has the potential to completely alter the nation’s prospects, from the sustainability of the American middle class to the sustainability of the American environment.
President Biden is breaching his fundamental responsibility to control the borders of the United States. He refuses to enforce the law in the interior, at the border, or permit cooperation between states and the federal government. He encourages illegal immigration by incentivizing it at every level. He is expanding non-immigrant visa programs and encouraging the replacement of American workers with “temporary” foreign workers.
Rather than address any element of the ongoing Biden border crisis, House Democrats spent their time moving legislation that only worsens the already grave situation at our southern border. The NO BAN Act jeopardizes our national security and public health, while the Access to Counsel Act further overwhelms our immigration courts and creates unnecessary burdens to already strained immigration authorities. Passage of both bills reveal how detached House Democrats are from properly addressing the nation’s most pressing immigration matters.
Two weeks ago in this space, FAIR boldly claimed that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had effectively abolished the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
We now must confess that we were premature in that declaration. Mayorkas was not finished. He still had more to do to make sure that our immigration laws are never enforced.
Open borders non-governmental organizations (NGOs) significantly influence the Biden administration’s immigration policies and priorities.
Recently, top administration officials met with dozens of immigration activists who have ties to NGOs such as Pueblo Sin Fronteras — a group that orchestrated the several thousand-person caravans in 2018 and 2019.
Grizzled political veterans like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have learned that the best way to sell unpopular policies is to convince us that everyone else is as unhappy about it as we are. In the sometimes surreal world that exists inside the Beltway, a good piece of legislation is one that leaves everyone feeling like they got a raw deal.
Occasionally, on matters where public opinion is pretty evenly divided, a compromise that gives everyone a little of what they want in exchange for a little of what they don’t want has some merit.
Last month, President Biden requested $13.6 billion in emergency funding to deal with record levels of illegal immigration. There is no disputing that the situation at the border constitutes a national emergency, but it is an emergency almost entirely created by the president’s own policies. As such, giving the Biden administration more money, without conditioning it on radically altering the policies that created the emergency, would only exacerbate the border crisis while plunging the nation $13.6 billion deeper into debt.