Let's state the bottom line about S. 744, the Schumer-Rubio-Obama amnesty bill: This legislation is fundamentally flawed and cannot be amended in any way that makes it acceptable.
The central design of the bill is mass amnesty immediately, enforcement never, gallons of red ink committed to be spent for the rest of the amnesty recipients' and new immigrants' lives, and further opening the floodgates to irresponsible levels of immigration.
This profligate legislation will flood America with foreign workers willing to take American jobs at far lower pay rates than American workers can accept, both at the upper and lower ends of the occupation scale. As Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.) kept noting in the Judiciary Committee, amnesty proponents refuse to talk about the overall numbers of immigrants and temporary foreign workers this bill would admit. But the overall numbers matter if we are to avoid significant labor market disruption by government intervention that harms Americans' quality of life, depresses incomes, and moves our per capita earnings to something more like Mexico's.
Again, S. 744 cannot be salvaged. It is irredeemable. It is irresponsible. It is dangerous. It is effectively a $6.3 trillion-plus tax increase on a struggling U.S. economy and hard-pressed American taxpayers.
Yet, while Rome stands in danger of burning to the ground, the Senate's Neros are busy fiddling. The latest distraction occupying the attention of senators who want to vote for mass amnesty: claiming S. 744 needs tougher border enforcement and a "trigger".
Sen. Cornyn has proposed an "antidote" that is supposed to fix the bill. This provision would add a "trigger" that supposedly satisfies the amnesty first, enforcement never concerns. Unfortunately, no trigger will fix that problem because the gratuitously generous amnesty remains in the bill, trigger or no trigger. The Cornyn provision, in its initial form, has merit, but even if the Gang of Eight allowed it, the RESULTS amendment wouldn't be sufficient. It's still throwing pearls before swine.
Others are fixated on the lack of border enforcement in S. 744. That's certainly a huge problem, because the bill deals only with a few inputs (e.g., buy this equipment, hire this many agents). But the facade of enforcement can't be fixed. There's not enough real enforcement that can be set up at the border to stop the inflow of new illegals, because the bill dumbs down E-Verify and guts law enforcement generally, leaving in place the potent jobs magnet — the incentive of this mass amnesty for future illegal flow — and the insane "if you can get past the border, we won't hassle you" game plan. The USCIS agents' union, the ICE officers' union, and others in law enforcement agree. See here and here.
S. 744 subverts state laws that have resulted in reduction of those locales' illegal populations. Any proponent of S. 744 should be held accountable for willfully and knowingly destroying the little bit of federalism that has been exercised to address immigration-related problems at the state and local level.
Again, the bottom line on S. 744 remains that, triggers or no triggers, this legislation is only shooting blanks on enforcement and border security. It's a win for open borders and cynical politics and a loss for the rule of law and immigration in America's national interest.
