Democratic leaders are holding the 2018 federal budget hostage to their demand for a cheap-labor amnesty — but are also obscuring their very unpopular demand behind a barrage of subsidiary demands, according to GOP politicians.

Those other demands include easily resolved disputes over money, such as spending caps, parity between domestic and national security spending, funding for the CHIP health insurance program, and disaster aid for Texas and Puerto Rico.

According to Politico:

“[R]ight now, the Democrats are holding that deal hostage for a DACA negotiation. … I think that’s going to make the Jan. 19 date pretty hard to hit,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Monday. “They’re just not agreeing to the spending caps … They’ve made a decision not to go forward on that until we get closer or get a DACA deal.” Added a White House official: “I’m pessimistic that we’ll get a [budget] caps deal by the 19th… because I think the Dems are going to slow-walk this discussion until they get DACA in place, and I don’t think we will have a deal on DACA by Jan. 1″ … [Sen Dick] Durbin said Democrats would like to have a DACA deal as part of any spending agreement, along with a whole host of items: “There are many elements that we want to have included in any final agreement. DACA is one of them, [children’s health insurance] is one of them, community health care clinics and a number of things,” the Illinois Democrat said.

Dems' budget "slow walk" kind of a brilliant strategy, if true, no? Allows press to pretend any shutdown is about lots of issues (caps, CHIP, etc.) when really it's all about DACA.

Also suggests Dems know they can't win shutdown over just DACA. https://t.co/VhRcU8SzD3 — Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) January 9, 2018

The Democrats are being aided by GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is the leading GOP advocate for mass, cheap-labor immigration. On Monday, he described the shutdown threat to reporters but lowered the Democrats’ shutdown-or-amnesty demand to a one-year extension of the DACA amnesty. According to Roll Call, saying:

“We’re all going to win or we’re all going to lose,” Graham told reporters. “We’re not going to shut the government down, and if we can’t reach a deal for the DACA-plus population for, you know, reasonable border security and diversity lottery changes, we’ll find some way to fund the government,” Graham said. “We’ll probably extend the DREAM Act kids, the DACA kids, for a year,” Graham said of what could happen without a broader agreement.

RollCall also reported:

“Whether it’s done with the spending bill or done in advance of the spending bill, but it has to be done before the spending bill is taken up,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said. “It’s not something where we’ll deal with all the other stuff and deal with DACA later.”

Any temporary or permanent amnesty would be a huge defeat for Trump and his voters — whether it covered the 3.25 million ‘dreamer’ illegals or the 670,000 ‘DACA’ illegals. It would be a defeat because most Hill politicians would expect it to be repeated every year, making any “temporary” amnesty into a permanent political fact and proving that business groups can raise the supply of imported labor whenever Americans’ wages start to rise.

“It would be catastrophic for the nation and the Republican party,” said Bill Gheen, founder of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC. Republicans “are dead political meat once the amnesties illegals start legally voting … They are not only going to vote 90 percent Democratic and many will be Democratic machine-operatives.”

Trump will also lose if the amnesty becomes law, “there are a lot of people who won’t be there for him anymore,” said Gheen. “Trump would be supporting legislation that would prevent anyone like him from getting elected again.”

But business-first Republicans can support an amnesty, he added. “The sellout Republicans know that if DACA gets through, their family can live in gated communities for years,” he said.

Democrats have to hide their demands for an amnesty because the issue is political poison.

Polls show that Trump’s American-first immigration policy is very popular, even as industry-funded “National of Immigrants” polls also show that most Americans want to be nice to immigrants, both legal and illegal.

For example, a poll of likely 2018 voters shows two-to-one support for President Donald Trump’s pro-American immigration policies, and a lopsided four-to-one opposition against the cheap-labor, mass-immigration, economic policy pushed by bipartisan establishment-backed D.C. interest-groups.

The results from the priorities poll are very different from the “Nation of Immigrants” polls pushed by business and progressive outlets. Business groups and Democrats tout the misleading, industry-funded “Nation of Immigrants” polls because they which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants, including the roughly 670,000 ‘DACA’ illegals and the roughly 3.25 million ‘dreamer’ illegals.

NEW this morning – @CNN Poll: All-time high support to allow Dreamers to stay in the US: 83% support, only 13% oppose.https://t.co/DGI2xu4p7d — Todd Schulte (@TheToddSchulte) December 19, 2017

Support for pulling back from record immigration levels has long been under-reported but helps explain Trump's 2016 victory. https://t.co/NxbbcQcgfL — Roy Beck (@RoyBeck_NUSA) January 3, 2018

Similarly, other polls show that the public — and the Democratic base — strongly object to any government shutdown to help illegals.

In December, Trump used those polls to force the Democrats to back off from their public amnesty-or shutdown threats, so prompting the Democrats to embrace their new stealth amnesty-or-shutdown policy in January.

The public’s support for Trump’s low-immigration/high-wages strategy will also rise throughout 2018 — helping him win the November elections — as companies step up their competition for workers by offering higher wages. The New York Times reported:

“There are no Americans out there to take the jobs,” said Mark Drury, a vice president at Shapiro & Duncan, a Washington-area plumbing, heating and cooling firm. The company and its competitors have resorted to poaching each other’s project managers, engineers, welders and plumbers.”

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 work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via 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.

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