Fourteen of the 23 GOP members who signed the cheap-labor Discharge Petition amnesty in June will be gone from Congress in January.
The group’s wipeout came after they worked with House Speaker Paul Ryan to block the pro-American, compromise immigration reform bill prepared by Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House judiciary committee.
In June, the 23 members used the discharge petition process to push for a Democratic-backed amnesty of at least 3 million DACA illegals. That push gave political cover to Ryan while he created a second immigration bill which successfully split the GOP caucus amid unanimous Democratic opposition to Goodlatte’s bill.
The subsequent November wipeout is being described by establishment outlets as a defeat for “moderates” — even though the discharge-petition group sought no compensating protections or benefits for the blue-collar workers whose wages would be damaged by the flood of amnestied workers.
The business-backed group consisted of “immigration centrists,” the Washington Post claimed.
“House Republicans who lost re-election bids were more moderate than those who won,” said the Pew Research Center, which added:
Among the Republican House incumbents who lost their re-election campaigns, 23 of 30 were more moderate than the median Republican in the chamber.
Pew’s process treats legislators who vote for pro-immigration proposals as liberal even if the legislators’ impact is to lower wages.
The nine survivors of the 23 legislators who signed the discharge petition include five members from dairy districts, where farmers are imperiled because their illegal-migrant workers prefer to work in cities. The Washington Post reported May 21:
Upton, for instance, represents a farm-heavy district in southwest Michigan where apple growers, asparagus harvesters and dairy farmers all rely on immigrant labor. Trips around the district routinely mean talking to farmers who fret over the potential loss of their workforce and constituents who are living in legal limbo …
Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) stands apart from the other signers in many ways: He occupies a safe Republican seat and was among Trump’s earliest supporters in Congress. But his western New York district is home to hundreds of dairy farms that rely on immigrant labor.
“Right now, my dairy farmers are saying to Republicans: You’ve got the House, the Senate, the White House, and you’ve got to give us a legal workforce, and I agree with that,” he said.
Collins, who favors a conservative immigration bill that would set up an agricultural guest worker program, acknowledged that the House may never be able to pass a bill. “But then those of us can go home and say we did our best,” he added. “I fought for you and I’m willing to go against leadership to fight for you, and that’s all you can expect out of me.”
Another dairy-district survivor, New York’s Rep. Elise Stefanik, is pointing the finger at weak GOP support among women.
Farmers are dependent on illegal migrants partly because they bought few European-designed robotic cow-milkers when milk prices were high.
Speaker Paul Ryan is trying to sneak a big outsourcing & amnesty bill thru Congress to aid Irish gov’t. No benefits for young Americans, of course. This ethnic, private, crony capitalist giveaway will crash if even one Senator asks for a fair exchange. https://t.co/Vi3soLWRsF
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) December 8, 2018
During the election, the discharge-signers were heavily supported by the cheap-labor business donors at the Congressional Leadership Fund. The fund’s donors oppose the popular immigration reforms which reduce immigration inflows and so raise Americans’ wages and slow the rising price of real-estate.
But after blocking the popular reform in June, the fund’s donors did not provide enough money to compensate for the resulting political damage in November — or to help save six of the 14 members who lost by 5 points or less.
Five of the 14 existing legislators retired before the election. Three others lost by 9 to 11 points.
After the election, the CLF’s director, Corry Bliss, blamed the GOP’s November defeat on a lack of GOP donations:
If there’s one thing I really wish we could have done, I wish we could have figured out a way to have convinced [pro-migration, anti-gun, liberal billionaire] Michael Bloomberg to give us the $100 million and not the Democrats, and that would have really helped win a whole bunch of seats. You know, in almost every race we were outspent—in 45 out of 52 races CLF participated in—we were outspent by an average of almost $2 million.
Bliss also indicated to Politico that he would reject populist demands by voters during 2020, and instead would try to help win the 2020 election for business by focusing attention on Rep. Nancy Pelosi instead of blue-collar pocketbook issues:
I think every Republican hopes she never retires. And it’s clear that Democrats learned very, very little as she is about to become speaker again. And I think we’re all excited to have her be speaker again and remind the American people what that means. That means raising your taxes, weak on the border, San Francisco liberal values. And we’ll see all these candidates who won—saying they don’t know who she is, or they’ve never met her, would never take a picture with her, certainly not take any money from her—we’ll see who they vote for. I predict a lot of them will follow her every step of the way, and that’ll be a big problem for them in two years. That’ll be one of the reasons we take back the House in two years.
In the United States, the establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees offer.
The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in the coastal states.
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