Heritage, CIS, and others will be examining the assumptions behind the Congressional Budget Office projections of the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill’s budget impact, but why not start by just assuming, for the sake of argument, that all the CBO assumptions are plausible and their calculations correct? If so, the bill will fail on its own terms.
One of the most interesting elements of the Senate’s immigration reform debate is the contrast between the many who tell family stories as they urge passage of the legislation and the few who warn that the bill could have devastating consequences for young Americans. Vermont independent Bernie Sanders took to the floor again Tuesday. He defended the interests of young job-seeking Americans, saying they are being trampled in the rush to satiate employers’ appetite for foreign workers.
Said Sanders:
Yesterday on the Senate floor, Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) gave a speech that was a fine illustration of how the emotion of immigration complicates the job of policy-making. The emotion was especially poignant in the last 400 words of her 2,300-word speech, in which she told her family’s own story and projected it onto the current policy debate. I reproduce her comments here as she actually delivered them, not as they appear in the Congressional Record, which apparently relied on a written text. Then I offer a brief comment.
Reporters Eric Lipton and Julia Preston of the _New York Times_ produced a fine story from South Texas for the Sunday paper, putting the surge in illegal immigration in the context of the immigration reform debate in the Senate.
But it seems to me they buried the lede, placing it at the mid-point of the story with this remarkable revelation about the state of border security in the Rio Grande Valley. Lipton and Preston reported:
Sen. Lindsay Graham’s (R-S.C.) absurd notion that Latino voters will flock to Republican candidates if they embrace amnesty and “comprehensive immigration reform” has been once more refuted, this time in Massachusetts. On Friday, _El Planeta_, the state’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, endorsed Democrat Ed Markey, a long-serving member of the House who only occasionally actually sets foot in his district, over Republican newcomer and fellow Latino Gabriel Gomez, son of Colombian immigrants, who often gives his campaign speeches in Spanish followed by an English translation and who is an enthusiastic supporter of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill.
From Friday’s _Boston Globe_:
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) says that illegal aliens must pay back taxes. Most Americans would agree with that.
However, Hatch doesn’t call for employers who hire illegal aliens under the table to pay back taxes. Almost all Americans would disagree with that.
Here is what Hatch is quoted as saying about illegal aliens paying back taxes:
The _New York Times_ published a remarkable editorial on Sunday. It made me wonder if the editorial board is beginning to feel that U.S. immigration policy-makers and business leaders should be more concerned with the fate of American workers and less interested in expanding the alphabet-soup of visa categories that every year brings hundreds of thousands of lower-wage foreign workers to every level of the American economy.
Here is an excerpt from the editorial:
I suppose it was inevitable.
DHS announced today that Syrians who arrived in the United States before today and those who will arrive in the United States in the next few hours (before midnight) are to be granted Temporary Protected Status and allowed to work — no matter how they got here or what their visa status.
Senator Rubio’s people need to talk to Senator Rubio’s people about the senator’s principles regarding character assassination.
The past 48 hours have made clear that there is a severe disconnect between what the senator claims to believe and what his supporters are saying in their attacks on organizations critical of the Senate immigration reform bill.
There was Rubio on ABC’s This Week program Sunday, taking the principled stand. He expressed both understanding for those who criticize the bill and dismay at the attacks on them.
While Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was using the Democrat majority Thursday to shut down a Republican effort to toughen the immigration reform bill, Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) was using the Republican majority in the House to tout a fix for problems he has with the Senate bill.
“Unfortunately, the Senate bill actually weakens interior enforcement in many areas or is simply ineffectual,” Goodlatte said at a hearing on legislation called the Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement Act, or the SAFE Act.
