On last night’s show, Levin said that Waxman is afraid that the Republican Party may return to its roots and “embrace the reason people sneak into this country in the first place: liberty, not government!”
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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Guillermo AriasSeveral influential conservative Republicans on Wednesday put House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders on notice that immigration reform legislation is dead because they don’t trust President Obama to honestly implement any new legislation they might pass.
“Until we have that trust, there will be no immigration reform,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador, an Idaho Republican who backs reform including helping the 11 million illegals in the United States to stay.
Labrador said that it was a mistake for the GOP to get caught in a pre-election fight on the issue before the president can prove he will enforce current immigration laws and the GOP wins the Senate so that the party can offer a united front.
“The problem we have is really a problem of trust with this administration,” he said. “The president has lied and lied.”
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Photo Credit: National Review People come to America because it is a remarkable oasis of freedom, prosperity, and opportunity. Conservatives recognize that the principal reason for our unique abundance is our constitutional restraint on the power of government. As Thomas Jefferson said, “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
Maintaining this system requires the public to support limited government. In a new report, Eagle Forum details how immigration is fundamentally changing the electorate to one that is much more supportive of big government.
By itself, the annual flow of 1.1 million legal immigrants under the current system will create more than 5 million new potential voters by 2024 and more than 8 million by 2028. Congressional Budget Office projections indicate that under the Senate Gang of Eight’s S.744 bill, the total additional potential voters would rise to nearly 10 million by 2024 and 18 million by 2028. The influx of these new voters would reduce or eliminate Republicans’ ability to offer an alternative to big government, to increased government spending, to higher taxes, and to favorite liberal policies such as Obamacare and gun control.
There is nothing controversial about the report’s conclusion that both Hispanics and Asians, who account for about three-fourth of today’s immigrants, generally agree with the Democrats’ big-government agenda. It is for this reason that they vote two-to-one for Democrats.
The 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey found that 62 percent of immigrants prefer a single, government-run health-care system. The 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that 69 percent of immigrants support Obamacare. Pew also found that 53 percent of Hispanics have a negative view of capitalism, the highest of any group surveyed. This is even higher than the 47 percent among self-identified supporters of Occupy Wall Street.
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Speaker John Boehner’s leadership team introduced the principles at their annual policy retreat here. Top Republicans circulated a tightly held one-page memo titled “standards for immigration reform” toward the tail-end of a day that include strategy conversations about Obamacare, the economy and the national debt.
In the private meeting where the language was introduced, Boehner (R-Ohio) told Republicans that the standards are “as far as we are willing to go.”
“Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that for her caucus, it is a special path to citizenship or nothing,” Boehner said, according to a source in the room. “If Democrats insist on that, then we are not going to get anywhere this year.”
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Photo Credit: Gun Owners
And, this morning, shortly before 9:00, MSNBC commentator Dick Gregory announced that House Speaker John Boehner, the day before, had told a private meeting of reporters that he had been talking with Barack Obama “a lot” about pushing immigration reform.
It’s pretty clear why Barack Obama wants a bill which would either legalize or grant citizenship to as many as 11.5 million people who, according to Latinos expressing their opinions in a Pew poll, would cast 88% of their votes for liberals like Barack Obama.
It’s also clear what Speaker Boehner has in mind: If he sabotages his own party, the liberal media will throw him a “doggie treat.”
But, for other House Republicans, the advantage of having an Obama/Boehner knife in their back is a little less clear.
A note on why gun owners have “skin” in the immigration game: By turning a net 8,000,000 people into an “Obama army,” even “legalization” without immediate citizenship would fundamentally change electoral politics for the 2014 elections.
This is why, along with gun control, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made immigration “reform” his central priority.
The anti-gun Bloomberg knows that “legalization” of persons unlawfully in the U.S. will create an “Obama army” which will transform the 2014 elections and achieve the almost impossible task of delivering the House and the Senate to the party of gun control.
With Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in power in 2015, the “Obama army” will then get their “citizenship” reward — and gun control will advance.
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Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin, AP
House Republicans should reply to the president’s immigration effort with a simple message: Our first duty is to help struggling Americans find good work and rising wages.
The president’s own economic adviser, Gene Sperling, recently noted that there are three unemployed people for every job available. Wages today have been flat since 2000. Last year, a record one in five American households received food stamps.
This is a national emergency.
So what is the president’s proposal? With three job seekers for every open job, he proposes doubling the number of guest workers entering every year, granting immediate work permits to millions of illegal immigrants, and tripling the number of new immigrants granted permanent residency over the next decade.
Today, the U.S. admits 1 million immigrants a year. The plan supported by the president and Senate Democrats would increase that to 3 million a year, or 30 million largely lower-skill immigrants over the next 10.
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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya
The Republican governor has routinely touted immigration as a powerful potential force for growing Detroit’s economy, saying immigrant entrepreneurs start many small businesses and file patents at twice the rate of U.S.-born citizens.
“Let’s send a message to the entire world: Detroit, Michigan, is open to the world,” Snyder said at a news conference.
The proposal involves EB-2 visas, which are offered every year to legal immigrants who have advanced degrees or show exceptional ability in certain fields.
But the governor’s ambitious plan faces significant hurdles: The visas are not currently allocated by region or state. And the number he is seeking — 50,000 over five years — would be a quarter of the total EB-2 visas offered.
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The net effect of this legislation will be to provide “amnesty” for millions of immigrants who ignored our laws to settle in this country. It is a way of rewarding lawbreakers while insulting the Americans who dealt with the arduous process of legally becoming a citizen.
Each year, 1.2 million individuals legally become United States citizens. This legal immigration process should only be expanded if our country needs to import a larger talent pool of workers in certain types of industries, such as healthcare.
House GOP leaders claim that they need to take action on immigration since it is a supposedly pressing issue impacting the country. However, new poll numbers show that Americans are much more concerned about other issues. In fact, according to a new Gallup poll, immigration reform ranks at the bottom of the list of top priorities. The poll showed that only 3% of Americans listed immigration reform as a top priority for 2014.
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Photo Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The debate will include a panel of legislators, an outside expert, and an open mic, allowing members to comment on a one-page set of “principles” that likely will be released at the event, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
The format will put Speaker of the House John Boehner and immigration advocate Rep. Paul Ryan in the driver’s seat. But a new poll that shows increased voter hostility to an amnesty is highlighting the difficulty that they face in trying to satisfy both their November voters and their business donors.
The new Quinnipiac University poll shows that both independent and GOP voters have swung sharply against an immigration amnesty since last May.
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Photo Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez MonsivaisPresident Obama and first lady Michelle Obama Friday met with protesters calling for the Republican-led House to take up immigration reform, drawing attention to advocates refraining from eating while the legislation sits on the back burner in the lower chamber.
“The president and the first lady are visiting individuals taking part in Fast For Families on the National Mall and offer their support for those who are fasting on behalf of immigration reform,” said a White House official.
“Since Nov. 12, immigration activists comprising Fast For Families have abstained from all food except water and are calling for the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives to take up action on comprehensive immigration reform,” the official added.
A White House official said Obama told the protesters that the American public was behind their cause.
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