The Trump Administration is sending National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in response to a spike in border apprehension numbers combined with news of a caravan of more than 1,000 Central Americans making its way through Mexico to the Southern border. But only reforms from Congress can truly stop border surges.
The Goodlatte bill would close the asylum loopholes that open-borders organizers of the caravan hope to exploit. Since 2009, merely claiming a "credible fear" is usually enough to be released into the U.S. indefinitely, and frivolous claims have overloaded the system to the point that applicants with legitimate claims wait years to have their cases heard.
The New York Times rightly celebrates the "confounding" discovery that millions of working-age Americans aren't lost causes after all. But there is a downside: if we aren't going to give up on these Americans, we've lost a major justification for continued record levels of immigration.
Once again, we dodged a last-minute push to include a no-strings amnesty for DACA recipients in the $1.3 trillion spending package that will fund the government through the end of September. But lawmakers couldn't resist a push by business groups to increase the number of H-2B visas issued to foreign workers in 2018.
Terms like "chain migration," "amnesty" and "Dreamers" aren't going to go away - short-hand descriptors are necessary, if not always of equal value - but we should understand the underlying policy. The differences between "chain migration" and "family-based migration" (or between "Dreamers" and "DACAs") are significant beyond mere ideological virtue signaling.
Barbara Jordan is a true hero of the Civil Rights Movement, an icon of American politics, and a guiding light to those who continue to fight for immigration reforms that put the interests of the American people first. Susan F. Martin, professor emerita at Georgetown University and former staff member of the Jordan Commission, wrote a piece last week attacking President Trump for a letter the White House put out praising Jordan's work. Martin was aghast that Trump would "intimate" that he and Jordan held similar policy positions on immigration. President Trump is a political lightening rod, no doubt, even more so than other modern Presidents, but in attacking him Martin misrepresented Barbara Jordan's views on immigration and the recommendations of the Jordan Commission.
NumbersUSA has no choice but to oppose what is being suggested as the White House "framework" for a mass amnesty. The plan seems eerily similar to the blueprint used for the 2007 Bush-Kennedy amnesty, which appeared to end chain migration, but wouldn't actually end it for 17 years. NumbersUSA mobilized our huge grassroots army to defeat the 2007 amnesty, and we will do the same if this plan is proposed next week. Americans must demand that the House pass the Goodlatte bill to help block the damaging proposal the White House seems ready to press the Senate to approve.