A White House spokesman is denying reports that President Donald Trump called GOP legislators to encourage an amnesty-for-border-wall swap in the March 23 omnibus funding bill.
“Just talked to the team,” deputy White House press sectary Hogan Gidley told Breitbart News. “FALSE.”
Reports describing the calls rocketed around Washington D.C. late Thursday evening, accompanied by angry comments from the presidents’ supporters.
“As soon as the Democrats take control of the House — which they will if the Republicans do this [reported offer] — the Democrats will come back and take the [construction] money,” said one source. The fiasco would leave Americans replaying the 1986 amnesty, which gave citizenship to at least 10 million foreigners by the 1990s in exchange for a broken promise of border protection, the source said.
Trump’s offer would be a crippling blow to the GOP, said another person who heard multiple reports of the calls. Trump is “focused on the shiny object” of the border wall, even though any Democratic majority in the House or Senate will block funding and prevent the legal reforms needed to end the catch-and-release policy caused by migrants overloading the asylum courts, the source said.
Any bad deal “will depress our base and that is a recipe for further losses” in November, which would ensure subsequent impeachment by a Democratic-run House, the second source said.
According to the reports, Trump urged Republicans to set up a deal with Democrats that would fund wall construction for several years — even though Trump is on track to get roughly $1.6 billion in 2018 appropriations for the border wall in the March 23 omnibus bill.
To get Democratic approval for multi-year funding, the reported offer would approve amnesty and citizenship for a large number of illegals — starting with the 680,000 illegals in the expiring DACA amnesty. It would also start an avalanche of subsequent chain-migration, and abandon the popular immigration reforms which helped Trump win the 2016 presidency — and which may help him win the 2018 midterm elections.
Those popular reforms include ending the visa lottery, winding down chain migration and closing up legal loopholes in the border wall.
The Trump reforms are valuable because they would reduce the annual inflow of 1 million legal immigrants. That government-delivered labor supply drives down Americans’ wages, spikes real-estate prices, reduces company spending on wage-raising technology and training, and also provides immigrant manpower for intermittent Islamic terrorism.
The annual inflow of 1 million legal immigrants is far more important economically than the much smaller inflow of roughly 250,000 illegal immigrants.
Even more importantly, Trump’s immigration reforms would also force the increasingly elitist Democratic Party to refocus their platform to help blue-collar Americans and native-born Americans. That would be a huge shift because the Democratic party is now betting its future on a high/low combination of like-minded university and business elites ruling a fractious coalition of government-dependent immigrants, minorities and poor.
So far, Trump’s reforms have been blocked by the backroom alliance of business-first Republicans and pro-migrant Democrats.
On February 15, for example, nearly all Democrats — plus 14 Republican Senators — voted against Trump’s reforms. In a second vote, eight Republican Senators and nearly all Democrats voted for a double-amnesty that would have given citizenship to at least 3 million illegals and also directed federal officials to reduce the priority of repatriating illegals who hold jobs in the United States.
The immigration dispute is now heading for the 2018 midterms, even as Democrats try to distract voters with moderate-sounding candidates, while business-first Republicans try to get voters focused on taxes, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi or the relatively minor issue of illegal immigration.