As a group of eight Senators visited the United States-Mexico border this week, some promoted slipping amnesty for millions of illegal aliens into legislation geared at cutting illegal immigration.
The group — led by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and joined by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Jerry Moran (R-KS), James Lankford (R-OK), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Chris Murphy (D-CT) — toured El Paso, Texas as more than 200,000 border crossers and illegal aliens have been apprehended at the city’s border station over the last four months.
Randy Clark
During news conferences and panels with local officials, the Senators gave few details on what a bipartisan Senate plan to reduce illegal immigration would entail. Cornyn, for instance, simply suggested that the U.S. needs a “safe, orderly, humane, and legal” process for migrant arrivals.
Murphy, likewise, noted gridlock in Washington, DC, but offered little insight into what Democrats would be willing to support to get illegal immigration levels down from their current record-high.
“This system isn’t working any longer,” Murphy said. “And it’s time for us to come together, Republicans and Democrats, and find a better path forward.”
Among the platitudes, Sinema and Coons suggested that a Republican-Democrat plan in the Senate would hopefully include some form of amnesty for millions of illegal aliens — taking from a defunct amnesty proposal by Sinema and Tillis last year that never gained traction.
ABC News reports:
An 11th-hour proposal, led by Sinema and Tillis, would have provided tens of billions for border security and asylum request processing, as well as a path to citizenship for Dreamers. But it never came to the floor during the lame-duck session before the last Congress ended. [Emphasis added]
Sinema, during Monday’s border visit, sought to breathe new life into that proposal, suggesting it would serve as a framework for bipartisan conversations moving forward. [Emphasis added]
Coons, similarly, called the failed Sinema-Tillis amnesty a “good start” in an exchange with the Washington Post, stating the group of eight Senators “have to try” to broker an immigration deal this Congress.
Texas Department of Public Safety
Such an amnesty would come as President Joe Biden blows the lid off a little-known parole program, intended for narrow use, that will resettle tens of thousands more border crossers into American communities every month in addition to the hundreds of thousands released monthly into the U.S. interior.
Proposals in Congress have omitted benefits for Americans and ignored the economic consequences of mass immigration to the U.S. in favor of hyper-focused legislation pertaining to the southern border.
In terms of housing, mass immigration has helped drive up rents and given would-be first-time homeowners more competition. In El Paso, where illegal immigration has flooded the city’s streets and shelters, housing prices are expected to grow more than five percent this year.
For U.S. wages, mass immigration has a crushing impact, as the nation’s labor force is artificially inflated with tens of thousands of working-age border crossers every month who are rewarded work permits to take American jobs while awaiting their immigration hearings.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
