Mark Krikorian: The Amnesty Bill Trump Offered Is Fatally Flawed and a Sell-Out on Many Crucial Points

Mark Krikorian is a guy I trust, so if he says this proposal was hot garbage with a side of sell-out the rubes, then it was indeed hot garbage with a side of sell out the rubes.

[T]he issue is the size of the amnesty, or rather the universe of people who would be amnestied. If -- as the White House promised just days ago -- the amnesty were confined to those who now actually have DACA work permits (or even those who had them but didn’t renew), administering the amnesty would be relatively straightforward. All those people are already in the DHS database, and even if they were all re-examined as part of the amnesty process (to weed out the fraudsters that snuck past Obama’s eagle-eyed DHS), it could still be done relatively quickly and with minimal disruption of the work of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS component that deals with green cards, work permits, and the like.

But going beyond DACA beneficiaries to those who could have applied but didn't is a different thing. It's not just a difference in degree, but in kind. A whole new process will have to be set up for the 1 million additional people who would be expected to apply. The other work of USCIS would grind to a halt, delaying other legal immigration applications, as happened when DACA was originally implemented (and remember that Obama's DACA amnesty was smaller than what Trump is proposing). In addition, there would be an opportunity cost, with USCIS unable to pursue many urgently needed administrative reforms....

Then there's the legal immigration "cuts." The outline says that no new applications for the visa lottery and the chain-migration categories would be accepted, limiting family immigration to spouses and minor children. Great! But it also provides for the continuation of those categories (and reallocation of the lottery visas) until the admission of all 4 million people on the current chain-migration waiting lists. This is the same gimmick that was in the Hagel-Martinez amnesty bill in 2007 -- and the estimate at the time was that it would take 17 years before all those people got their green cards. In other words, legal immigration would not actually be reduced until after President Kamala Harris’s successor took office.

[T]o wait almost two decades before there's any reduction in legal admissions is absurd. First of all, if we're going to amnesty close to 2 million illegal aliens (and maybe more, since past estimates have proven so woefully wrong), that needs to be offset by immediate reductions elsewhere. What's more this would be yet another example of the other side getting what it wants up front, with promises of things we want in the future. As Popeye's friend J. Wellington Wimpy might have said, "I will gladly reduce immigration on Tuesday for an amnesty today."

Well, I've always suspected Trump would be a weak sister on immigration. Yesterday I gave him the benefit of the doubt, waiting for people I trust to weigh in.

Now they've weighed in, and it appears that I won't be trusting Trump -- or even Steven Miller -- on this issue in the future.

Schumer has now rejected this offer, but that doesn't mean that there's no damage done: This offer, as weak as it is, now becomes the negotiating floor for future Democratic demands. This is where we start from -- and God knows where we finish.

See AllahPundit, who turns out to have been right to deem this a sell-out (even if he didn't have the evidence to base that on, his instinct was right), and how the left will likely become more brazen in their insistence that the US is now officially an Open Nation where everyone is a citizen if they want to be.

This weak, concede-everything-up-front-and-beg-for-reciprocal-concessions in seventeen years just about concedes that we are now officially an Open Borders land-space, and no longer an actual sovereign nation.

posted by Ace at 05:54 PM

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