Establishment GOP Senators are trying to assemble a cheap-labor amnesty for young illegals which will not protect Americans workers from unscrupulous employers, nor reduce the huge annual inflow of migrants and workers, according to a report in Politico.

The site reported:

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, has convened a working group on immigration that includes himself and GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma, as well as other lawmakers. Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Jeff Flake of Arizona also are among the Republicans who have been engaged in the talks, according to sources. “There’s a solution to be had there,” Cornyn said. “But we just need to get on with it.” … some outlines of an agreement are becoming clearer. For instance, the senators have all but ruled out including a mandatory workplace verification system known as E-Verify in a final DACA agreement, according to multiple lawmakers engaged in the talks.

E-Verify is the government database which companies can use to verify the legality of a job-applicant. Immigration reformers say the job-magnet for illegals must be turned off by requiring all employers use the E-verify system for all job applicants.

w/o E-Verify, there is little pretense that deal makers see controlling illegal employment/immigration as a goal. https://t.co/dlzRIERIZw — Roy Beck (@RoyBeck_NUSA) October 24, 2017

The Senators are considering vague “beefed-up border security provisions,” but the article did not say if the GOP Senators plan to support the construction of the border wall.

The GOP group is responding to pressure from Democrats and business groups who want the federal government to extend President Barack Obama’s so-called “DACA” amnesty for the 700,000 to 3 million younger illegals. Democrats and business groups also want to block an immigration reform which would reduce the number of immigrants and drive up Americans’ wages.

Instead of merely blocking the latest amnesty threat, immigration reformers are working President Donald Trump to win a major reform that will reduce the annual number of immigrants, and so help raise wages, high-tech investment, and productivity.

Trump has begun by winding down Obama’s DACA amnesty, and so the 690,000 DACA beneficiaries will start losing their work-permits March 5. The gradual loss of the illegal-immigrant workforce will open up hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans, and force companies to compete for workers by offering higher pay.

On October 8, Trump also released his popular principles for vetting any congressional amnesty deal. According to the letter which Trump sent to leaders in Congress:

As President, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution, which makes clear that all legislative powers are vested in the Congress, not the President. I, therefore, tasked the relevant executive departments and agencies to conduct a bottom-up review of all immigration policies to determine what legislative reforms are essential for America’s economic and national security. Rather than asking what policies are supported by special interests, we asked America’s law enforcement professionals to identify reforms that are vital to protect the national interest. In response, they identified dangerous loopholes, outdated laws, and easily exploited vulnerabilities in our immigration system – current policies that are harming our country and our communities. I have enclosed the detailed findings of this effort. These findings outline reforms that must be included as part of any legislation addressing the status of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients. Without these reforms, illegal immigration and chain migration, which severely and unfairly burden American workers and taxpayers, will continue without end. Immigration reform must create more jobs, higher wages, and greater security for Americans — now and for future generations. The reforms outlined in the enclosure are necessary to ensure prosperity, opportunity, and safety for every member of our national family.

The only pro-American members of Grassley’s group are Grassley and Perdue.

Grassley is a strong critic of the many federal programs which allow companies to import white-collar and blue-collar workers for jobs in the United States. The programs include the H-1B, L-1, OPT, TN, H-2A, H-2B, which collectively import roughly 700,000 workers per year.

Perdue is promoting his wage-boosting RAISE Act. His poll-tested RAISE Act would help Americans by focusing on the core issue — the number of migrants who enter the country every year to compete against Americans for decent wages. The RAISE Act, which is co-sponsored by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, would reduce immigration numbers by reducing the huge chain-immigration inflow.

Politico, however, suggests his reforms are opposed by the other Senators, saying:

Ideas that do remain in contention among this circle of Republicans include beefed-up border security provisions, limiting some chain migration and measures that one senator described as a “down payment” on shifting the U.S. immigration laws into a merit-based system, according to GOP senators.

Perdue’s focus on number and chain-migration is likely unpopular among the remaining Senators in Grassley’s group, all of whom are pro-amnesty and pro-cheap labor, even though that combination is very unpopular among voters.

For example, Tillis is an aggressive advocate for business’ greater use of cheap-labor migrants and has recruited Lankford to push his SUCCEED amnesty for at least 2.5 million illegals.

Lankford has damaged his own standing with awkward statements, including his declaration that the American economy gains when migrants compete against Americans for good jobs:

The job issue is an interesting issue, because those individuals are already in the job market. Many of these DACA students are actually DACA young adults, they already have access to the job market right now because they’ve been given deferred action. So they are in higher education, they are in the job market, they are currently a part of our economy, currently. That continual competition in our economy doesn’t hurt us, that continues to help us. It actually hurts us to put those individuals out of the economy.

The Tillis-Lankford bill does include a token curb on chain migration by delaying naturalization for 15 years. Democrats, however, will work to reduce the delay and are already pushing the Dream Act, which maximizes chain-migration by allowing naturalization in just three years for illegals who are married to citizens.

Flake has developed his own amnesty bill, but his clout will decline because he announced Wednesday that he will retire from the Senate amid growing home-state opposition to his pro-migrant policies.

Graham is the leading GOP advocates for amnesty and he jump-started the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty to deliver low-wage workers to his home state’s tourism, hospitality, and agriculture industries. Once a DACA amnesty is passed, “we’re going to increase legal immigration so employers don’t have to cheat” by hiring illegals, he said in October 2017. The Politico article notes that Graham wants the nation’s immigration system to help companies, not to help raise Americans’ wages.

Cornyn is pushing a weak border security bill while opposing the E-Verify bill that is bitterly opposed by the farming industry. The food industry is facing tough competition from overseas — and future competition from urban “vertical farm” companies. So it is pushing for cheap immigrant labor via a new H-2C guest worker program instead of investing in labor-saving-productivity boosting, American-made, farm machinery.

According to Politico:

“There are large segments of some important sectors, like agriculture, where we need to do E-Verify with [another] immigration reform to make sure that there’s an adequate legal workforce,” Cornyn said. “And if we start adding too much stuff to the DACA-border security approach, then we get back into comprehensive immigration reform and nothing happens.”

Pro-American reformers worry that Cornyn’s border bill could serve as a fake-tough security measure to muffle public opposition to an amnesty.

The Politico article does not discuss the Democrats’ risky political strategy of favoring migrants over Americans. In 2014, that pro-migrant, pro-business policy helped the Democrats lose nine seats in the Senate.

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing almost 2 million work-permits to foreigners, by providing work-visas to roughly 700,000 temporary workers and doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It 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 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.

Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most Americans also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with illegals.

Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a growing percentage of the nation’s annual income is shifting to investors and away from employees.