Biden's Mass Amnesty

FAIR's Matthew Tragesser, Spencer Raley, and Preston Huennekens discuss President Biden's bill proposal which would be the largest amnesty proposal in U.S. history.

Show Notes

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The Federation for American Immigration Reform's podcast bringing you the most important updates about U.S. immigration. Featuring special guests including members of Congress, journalists, and experts in the field.

Intro:
Today on Understanding Immigration, Biden’s mass amnesty.

Matthew:
Welcome back to another episode of FAIR’s Understanding Immigration podcast. This is Matthew Tragesser with FAIR’s media shop and I’m joined as always by Preston Huennekens from our lobbying team and Spencer Raley our research director. Today we'll be discussing the concept of amnesty- what it is, President Biden’s own amnesty proposal and the effects that his amnesty could have on the U.S. Now normally we'd start the episode with more recent immigration news stories but there's simply too much to talk about with this topic today. We're gonna dive right into it and talk about this concept of mass amnesty. So, Preston let's start off with you. What exactly is an immigration amnesty and what are some concerns with it?

Preston:
So pretty much whenever we talk about an amnesty in the sense of immigration, we're talking about broadly putting illegal aliens on either a pathway to citizenship or just giving them some sort of legal status that ranges from giving them green cards but also, we consider DACA for instance to be an amnesty because even though the 700,000 or so DACA recipients don't have a path to citizenship, they still have work authorization documents. They have they have work permits, they're able to attend American universities, they're in no fear of being deported without having committed some sort of felony, things of that nature. So, in that sense, amnesty essentially comes down to giving any kind of legal recognized status to illegal aliens and we're going to get into this obviously later in this episode but there are there are obvious consequences to this. We know that in many cases the, especially legislatively, the purpose for giving amnesty didn't really shake up in the end. This happened with IRCA and again, I’m not going to get into this right now, we're going to be talking about this, but it erodes our national laws. We have these laws and if we're not enforcing them, then Congress should just have the courage to get rid of them, that citizenship is that unimportant in the sense that it can just be given away to people just because they came here and have been here for a number of years and I think that's really the biggest issue with amnesty and that's why so many people across the United States don't support it.
Matthew:
That really is a strange phenomenon, I mean I’ve never over the years, looking at this issue I’ve never understood like you said that it's… why reward those who have not only entered the country illegally but probably are working here illegally as well? And it is very hard to get citizenship. People from all around the world apply every year, get denied, save up a lot of money for it and it's really, it's a special thing to acquire and just to hand it out like that to people that are here who've not only broken federal and immigration laws, it's really just bizarre to me. But Spencer I want to talk to you about this more in depth now, I know you just recently released a really comprehensive report on the history of amnesties. Can you touch on what we've seen historically when an administration or a certain group of lawmakers attempt to actually pass an amnesty? I know in some cases there have been amnesties that have been passed, other times it's kind of like a proposal but nothing comes with it, but can you talk about kind of the history with this and what we've seen previously?

Spencer:
Yeah absolutely, thanks Matthew and first of all the title of our report that you mentioned is America Last: How the Biden Amnesty is Worse Than Every Other Amnesty Attempt in U.S. History. And we're not just being hyperbolic here, what we did in the report is we compared the Biden amnesty to essentially every other amnesty or quasi-amnesty that occurred in the United States, like Preston mentioned we've only ever had one real amnesty in the United States and I’ll dive into that in just a second but there have been a lot of these efforts that weren't strictly speaking amnesty by the legal definition, but it served the same purpose, it gave work authorization such as DACA, it incentivized future illegal immigration by providing protections against deportation. You've seen failed efforts like the infamous Gang of Eight that occurred in back I believe in 2013 that would have given amnesty to a large portion of illegal aliens and in return supposedly would have offered reforms and additional border security, which of course, there were mechanisms put in place to ensure that the amnesty happen, but no mechanism to ensure that the additional border security happened. It was kind of a “dude trust us” situation. But to touch a little bit on the one actual amnesty that has taken place in the United States that believe it or not occurred under President Reagan who put together the Immigration Reform and Control Act or better known as IRCA in 1986. And what this did is it offered amnesty to most illegal aliens who met conditions such as English proficiency and a clean background record, they were never convicted of a felony, or I believe three or more misdemeanors and in return, again was supposed to include a significant increase in immigration enforcement mechanisms such as additional border security, more border patrol agents, and a crackdown on employers who would hire illegal aliens. Again, this never happened, once open borders proponents got what they wanted they reneged on their promises to enforce immigration laws and to put measures such as E-verify into place not only that, they fought against any action that ever came to fruition that would deport the illegal aliens that didn't meet the qualification for amnesty. On top of that, that program was completely wrought with fraud, with some organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies estimating that as many as 25% of all applicants had fraudulent information on them. And again, how would you put in place a mechanism to ensure that illegal aliens are putting accurate information on their applications? I mean we don't have a federal database that contains info about illegal aliens that can be used for verification and since many of these individuals don't have documentation that would show when they came to the United States, for example, or information about their criminal background or some sort of verification that they can actually speak a certain level of proficiency of English. It makes sense that all you do is throw on some fraudulent information and hopefully get your get your amnesty as a result. So, this led to a lot of criminals that should have been deported not being deported, it led to a lot of people who didn't meet the other basic qualifications receiving amnesty that shouldn't have. And I'd say probably the most high-profile case of this would be when one of the ring leaders of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing falsely claimed that he was a seasonal agricultural worker when in reality he was actually driving a taxi cab in New York City, receiving amnesty based on his false information. And once he received that amnesty he started freely traveling outside the United States to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places in the Middle East to receive terrorist training and then organize the tragic 1993 WTC bombing. So, while that may be an extreme example, these are the type of things that amnesty can lead to. It takes away a lot of the safeguards that really make the foundation for why we have regulations and requirements or to receive citizenship in the United States like you mentioned Matthew that's a very important privilege, to gain citizenship in the greatest country in the world. And so, when we simply start handing it out, not only does it cheapen the value of that citizenship, it takes away a lot of safeguards and at times can even place American citizens in dangers and if nothing else what we what was just a recurring theme every with every single amnesty that we looked at is that it's extremely expensive, it cost taxpayers a lot of money, and it cost taxpayers a lot of jobs. And it allows the illegal aliens of today to determine the legal immigrants of tomorrow because once they receive that amnesty, they can sponsor their family members to come the United States, and of course those family members can sponsor their family members and so on. And that clogs up the legal immigration system so that those who are putting in the time to come here the right way, have to wait longer or just can't make it to the United States at all.

Preston:
And I think one of the biggest things too, Spencer is that the amnesties never solved the problem and that was the biggest issue with the Reagan amnesty is that, he even claimed he's like, “we're signing this today so that we don't have to do this again down the road.” And yet, here we are, we have more illegal aliens living in the country now than we did in 1986. It turns out the enforcement measures that they kind of paraded as being, they said that the i-9 form would completely take away any incentive for employers to hire illegal aliens, which we know is just completely not true, it's a paper tiger you pretty much just take the workers’ word at their value and just file it away. You never have to… and that's E-verify is so important as you'd have to actually take the i9 and check it against something. Because otherwise you could just give them a blank piece of printer paper and say, “oh here are my documents,” and they're like, “all right well sounds good we'll put this in your i9 file and just hope that ICE doesn't come, that worksite enforcement, HSI doesn't come knocking on the door.” So that's the biggest thing is that every time one of these proposals comes around, it never it's always billed as intending to solve the problem and it never, we know that is completely not true, we're just going to be doing this same song and dance 10-15 years from now.

Spencer:
Yeah, I mean if you just look at the statistics you see there's some years where maybe a few dozen employers are prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens. It essentially does not exist and a there have been a number of reporters that have tracked down some of these false documents and went to the IRS and said hey what do you all do about these? Their response has always been, “it's not our job to prosecute that, that's the job of immigration law enforcement.” So, the IRS isn't going to do anything and Homeland Security and HSI and ICE and the rest of the immigration enforcement mechanisms aren't going to do anything. What purpose does that serve? There is essentially no punishment for hiring illegal aliens, so again not only did all of these enforcement mechanisms never take effect, we basically set the precedent for those who are contemplating coming to the United States unlawfully to come here because if enough of us do it they're gonna have to offer another amnesty.

Matthew:
I’m really glad you guys brought this up, I mean it's clear that over time these amnesties really don't bring many positive effects at all to our country and it's kind of the same narrative. It really does nothing good and yet here we are today in 2021 doing the same thing and I will talk about this what the same thing is now, which is President Biden has just introduced a mass amnesty proposal to grant amnesty to some 14.5 million illegal aliens and it's commonly said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results, and here we are. I mean this has to qualify as insanity on the greatest, grandest possible scale. So, Preston, let me direct this to you now, what is involved in this amnesty plan that was released just recently in February? I mean from first glance, when I looked this over, I mean there were some pretty startling details, almost laughable that this is legitimate public policy being introduced I mean can you touch on some of these things in this plan?

Preston:
Yeah, it's a very long bill, so without completely boring the listeners at home, this is essentially what it does: it grants a pathway to citizenship pretty much for every single illegal alien in the United States, unless you have three or more serious felonies, you qualify for this, and that's an enormous number of people. Even further, it allows illegal aliens that were removed under the Trump administration, so between 2017 and January 2021, anyone that was removed during that time period is able to come back to the United States and potentially receive a pathway to citizenship. But what's insane about that proposal as well, is that these are people who went through the immigration court system, were found to be removable by an immigration judge, they had their day in court, if they had appeals, they failed, and we're bringing them back to start that process over just again. Of all the parts of the bill, I think that is particularly just so outrageous that we would, on taxpayer expense, bring these people back to the U.S. so they can go through the immigration court system again, but I’ll digress. And then again this also expunges certain criminal offenses that were committed by illegal aliens, we're talking misdemeanors and, in some cases, even felonies that involve drunk driving, things of this nature where, again we don't expunge these felonies for American citizens often. That's a very tortuous process to go through to get something like that erased from your record. But don't worry! Our government is going to go all in on expunging these records for illegal aliens just so they can get on the pathway to citizenship. So, like you said Matthew, this is just insanity and what's even worse about this bill, is that in past attempts in 2013 and in 2007 there was always an effort to try and balance the amnesty with some sort of enforcement mechanism. In 2013, believe it or not E-verify was in that legislation, but that was pretty much it and in 2007 there was there was a significant expansion of worksite enforcement all these other kinds of things that none of that is present in this bill, there is no attempt to even offer window dressing for border security. And so, in that respect they're trying something different and that they're saying well we're just gonna for try and force through this amnesty and we're not even gonna give immigration hawks something to even consider. It's pretty much a just a giant middle finger to anyone that has legitimate concerns about illegal immigration. So, in a nutshell, that's pretty much what the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 is going to do for us and I think it's just very telling and I’ll end on this point, I think it's very telling that this is the priority of the Biden administration and of congressional Democrats who barely have a majority in the House and it's a tied Senate, so Kamala Harris would have to break any 50-50 votes, but this is not legislation that could pass 50-50. They would need to get 10 Republicans to sign on to this and even some of the Republican senators that supported the 2013 amnesty proposal, we're talking about Lindsey Graham from South Carolina and Marco Rubio from Florida, both of them have already come out and said this is a non-starter. So that just goes to show you how crazy this bill is, that you can't even get the kind of the squishy republicans to even to even consider it.

Matthew:
No I’m really glad you touched on this Preston, I think it's important for listeners to understand the magnitude of this bill, what's in it, something we've really never seen in U.S. history in terms of amnesty, I mean this has really gone rogue and I want to take this to you now, Spencer, going back to the report you just released you talk about fiscal costs, kind of the expected migration trends that could result from this potential amnesty and just kind of the overall effects on our country with it. Can you go a little bit more in depth here, I know you touched more so on the histories before but I mean if this were to be implemented what could we see?

Spencer:
Yeah absolutely, one thing I think that's important to touch on a little bit is every piece of information you see on this, whether it's the legislation itself or the campaign points that the Biden administration has put out, states that this would grant citizenship to no more than 11 million illegal aliens. But as we've shown in previous work here at FAIR, it's probably more likely there's about 14 and a half million illegal aliens in the United States so of course you're looking at essentially all of those illegal aliens receiving amnesty with perhaps a very small exception, those that have multiple major felonies if this is passed as written. So that's the first impact you'll see we're still in a very sluggish economy in the United States. Not only was the official unemployment rate right around seven percent at the end of 2020, if you look at what's known as the U6 unemployment rate which includes those who have given up looking for work altogether or who are only working part-time for economic reasons, it's closer to 12 or 13 percent of people who are not currently gainfully employed. And so, when you just give so many millions of illegal aliens legal status and work authorization what this does is it allows them to start openly competing in the jobs markets. They no longer have to work under the table, they no longer have to stick to certain industries that would typically look the other way and hire illegal aliens, instead of U.S. citizens. What you're doing is you're just drastically increasing competition in an already very tight labor market. Another thing that I think most people tend to overlook that's extraordinarily important and we've already touched on a little bit is that it'll drastically increase the number of immigrants who enter the United States in coming years. We already talked about how the illegal aliens that received amnesty during the Reagan administration essentially in many ways dictated who came to the United States legally in the coming years but according to the federal government each immigrants the United States sponsors an average of 3-4 additional family members for green cards in the coming years after they come to the United States. Right now based on our best data there are about 13 million adult illegal aliens currently in the country so if each of those adults, we're not talking about the total population just the adults who are likely to receive amnesty, sponsor green cards for three or four additional family members, you'd be looking at more than 40 million new immigrants eventually entering the country and that would effectively double the number of foreign-born individuals living in the United States right now so that's a massive long-term impact of this whole issue. Again as we noted previously it would trigger more illegal immigration after the 1986 amnesty we saw the illegal alien population increase all the way up to 9 million in barely a decade, just about 10 to 13 years and since then has increased up to the 14.5 million that we have now. So, it's going to encourage more illegal immigration and you're also going to see an interesting thing that you saw during the whole IRCA process is that… and we're already seeing the effects of this you see a massive surge of illegal aliens that try to enter the United States before this amnesty takes place that way they can hopefully get in on it. Now this is supposedly not supposed to give amnesty to those who are entering the country right now but what's stopping those individuals from creating some fraudulent piece of paper that says hey I’ve been in the United States since 1995 or whatever you see a lot of that a lot of that fraud take place and so you're seeing a surge right now of people who are hoping they can take advantage of either this or any of the other pieces of legislation regarding this topic that are going that are going through Congress right now or being issued by executive order from the Biden administration. And finally, I think it's important to focus on the cost we've looked at the cost of illegal immigration in the past and it comes out currently to more than $130 billion which is a massive number and if you look just strictly at illegal aliens who have found a way to receive welfare benefits either at the state level where a number of states offer illegal aliens some sort of welfare or those who obtain federal benefits fraudulently, you're looking at roughly $7-8 billion in cost already. Now the average family headed by an illegal alien makes far less of an annual income than family headed by a U.S. citizen, so essentially what you're looking at is all of these illegal aliens are going to qualify or at least the vast majority are going to qualify for some sort of federal and state welfare program so you're going to see the cost for those programs going way, way up. Right away. Which again is concerning because you've already seen the cost for some of these programs as much as double and triple due to the economic crisis that we're in right now caused by COVID-19. So, we're just going to add an even heavier burden based on those who are suddenly able and qualified to receive welfare. In the past, in 2007 The Heritage Foundation estimated that an amnesty, if the amnesty that was proposed at that point was passed, the lifetime cost would be over $2.5 trillion. And now there are approximately three million more illegal aliens the United States than there were in 2007, so the price tag of that amnesty has only gone up and I don't think it's radical to suggest that such a fiscal burden could cripple the U.S. economy during a time when tax revenue is down and costs are up due to COVID-19.

Preston:
Yeah and Spencer that's a great point, I actually saw a really interesting article that came out of the Center for Immigration Studies a few days ago that was discussing kind of just the back of the napkin calculation and they kind of came to this number of over $90,000 for each illegal alien, that would be the cost, the net drain on the Social Security trust fund alone and so if you're able to meet… for all these millions of people to benefit from Social Security down the road, that could cripple Social Security, unless there's some sort of legislative change to the way that we administer that program, which is extremely unlikely… entitlement changes are pretty much a dead end in the Congress. That could cripple Social Security. I mean we already know that Social Security is running out of money without these additional 14 and a half million people, I mean that is a huge cost and it's like you said it's not outrageous to ask what are we going to do about this? If this is really the path that Congress is going down, you have to take into account the monetary and fiscal cost that this is going to have.

Matthew:
Right so I mean what do you guys think about this proposal in general, I mean obviously there's a lot into it. There are serious ramifications that could result from it, but does it have a legitimate chance of being implemented? I mean I’ve heard a lot of different opinions about this, perhaps that it's more of a messaging type of thing, maybe it'll get broken into smaller bills for it to be passed more easily but should we fear of this actually being implemented or just kind of like it's all show but no go?

Preston:
So I think there are really kind of two possibilities here because Biden and his congressional allies have made it clear that they want to do something related to immigration in this Congress. And particularly they say in the first 100 days which is coming up but, who knows? So, this bill cannot pass in its current form without nuking the filibuster in the Senate. And I think if you're Chuck Schumer, I don't think that this is the bill that you nuke the filibuster over. I think that politically is extremely fraught it's not as if this enjoys 90 percent support in polling or… this is very much a bill that, there's really no gray area. You're either extremely against it or you're voraciously for it, so I don't think that's likely. I don't think for one I don't think Schumer has the votes to nuke the filibuster regardless. I think that both Manchin and Sinema in his caucus have said they will not vote to remove the filibuster. So, the possibility of this passing on its own is very unlikely, on the other hand and this is what we are really particularly worried about, is that congressional Democrats are going to take certain parts of this bill and try to pass them individually, which becomes very tricky because there are a number of Republican senators, particularly who would vote for some of these proposals on their own. For instance, any kind of legislative fix for DACA for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that is going to at least bring some Republicans to the negotiating table. And what we're particularly concerned about is that there would be a legislative fix for DACA and nothing in exchange and that's where it's important for Republican Senators to come to the table and say look we are willing to negotiate on this for this population of 700,000 and I know that the Democrats I think have always kind of had a number in their head of about 3 million so that's more of like a DACA plus the people that probably qualified for DACA but never bothered to actually apply, but even then that's 3 million that's not 14 and a half million. But if you're a Republican Senator, you have to fight for some sort of enforcement change, whether it's mandatory E-verify phased in over five years for all employers, whether it's changes to asylum so that we don't continue to have these surges at the border. You cannot just pass individual parts of this bill on its own. Another thing that's going to attract a lot of attention from Republicans I think are individually tailored fixes for the TPS for Temporary Protected Status. Again people that have been here for decades it's regardless, it's a terrible policy but they've been here, right? They're people… it's a sympathetic population to an extent. So again and we cannot emphasize this enough Republicans have to, if they are negotiating they have to negotiate with enforcement changes in mind as a trade-off and so that's again, and I’ll end my remarks here, is that that's our biggest concern is that once you start breaking this up, there's gonna be Republicans that look at this and think, “well maybe this isn't so bad, we can pass parts of this,” but that would be a huge mistake and I think it would be really a missed opportunity to really have some sort of meaningful immigration reform in the sense of either tightening up enforcement or changing our asylum laws.

Spencer:
Right and my theory on this is simply that the Biden administration wanted a place to start and so what they did is they just put out the entirety of the wish list of their administration to the far left, that way once it is chopped up into smaller pieces like Preston just noted, they can say, “Hey look we compromised! Unity, yay!” And kind of spin it into a positive and also of course the stance of FAIR is, we would love to see no amnesty be offered. Even with trade-offs there would be significant negatives that would hurt the American people but just to emphasize again the biggest concern here is that if these get broken into small pieces that some Senate Republicans feel like they could digest and handle, you're going to end up with kind of a piecework, patchwork amnesty that could entail 20% of this bill or 50% or whatever with absolutely no trade-offs. And like Preston mentioned that would be tragic. That would be kind of a sneaky way to pass an amnesty without having this massive bill that is very easily torn apart. So, I think in some ways this isn't, “oh let's see if we can just pass everything,” I don't think they ever expected that to happen. As it stands, I don't think you could get 50… even if this was a situation where they only needed a majority vote and it's not, I don't think you could get the 50 votes on it. Like we mentioned, Sinema and Manchin I think we're very likely… yeah, they wouldn't want to vote they wouldn't want to vote for this at all, filibuster aside. And so in some ways I think it you could say that this was a tactical decision to start here because if you start with the version you think is going to pass you always have to expect there to be debate and for there to be parts of the bill taken out and scrapped and that sort of thing so I think we need to be careful not to think, “oh wow the Biden administration is just being stupid and idiotic,” I think in some ways they want this to be to turn into something where they can pass their favorite points and say, “wow look you all need to vote for this because we're compromising, we're compromising in the name of unity.” Whereas in reality what they're doing is proposing something that on its own is still radical and extremely damaging to the American public but when compared to the original bill looks like something that's far less problematic.

Preston:
Your opening hand, your opening offer is always as large as it can be, it includes as much as you want and you almost expect the other side to do that as well and so I think it's important when and if Republicans come to the negotiating table on some of these smaller piece by piece approaches, I think Republicans need to be unified in what they want and I think the easiest and probably the least controversial to get all the Republicans behind would be phased in E-verify. And I think that is a very fair trade-off in turn, personally I’m not speaking for FAIR as an organization right now, I’m speaking for myself, I think that is a very fair trade-off for a DACA+ and I think that is a very equal footing, but my fear is that Republicans would come with nothing and would just be like, “oh well yeah we agree with DACA so we'll pass it in exchange for absolutely nothing,” and like you said Spencer then Biden and his team and congressional Democrats have gotten what they wanted all along, they get to check off a campaign promise and move right along.

Spencer:
Yeah and E-verify has to be a starting point for any of this because E-verify as long as it's enforced properly and there has to be mechanisms in any kind of negotiation to ensure that it is, will help, it will take away the single largest incentive for illegal immigration and that'll help solve the issue over the long term. If it's just not worth it for employers to pay the five dollars less an hour to hire an illegal alien versus someone who's in the country with work authorization, then they won't do that and without employment prospects the vast majority of illegal aliens are not going to want to come to the United States or they're going to want to put in the time and effort to come in a lawful manner, so a trade-off like that while again it may not be ideal and that you get E-verify without any kind of amnesty attached, you're at least putting in some sort of mechanism to help solve the problem in the long term as a trade-off.

Matthew:
I was going to mention too, what if the Biden administration's idea is well, we don't even want trade-offs we know that this bill is so radical that Congress is going to outright reject it and we'll blame that on them. If our base is saying hey what the Biden administration promised us in their campaign to give us a pathway to citizenship all these crazy ideas and then Biden can say look, I tried and Congress didn't vote on this didn't come to help. Sorry, that's out of my hands.

Preston:
That’s a good point I mean yeah he could just wash his hands of it and say well we tried because you have to think even from Biden’s own perspective they still haven't passed a lot of his main, they still haven't gotten a COVID bill through, they still haven't sent out checks or there's a lot of promises that he made in the first hundred days and as we approach, I think it's April or whenever, the clock is ticking and at some point members are going to look at him and his White House and say we are not touching immigration before the midterm. (yeah) And so yeah, I think to that extent Matthew you're right he's introduced the bill he's held up his end of the bargain it's up to Schumer and Pelosi to try and do something with it but if they can't because they're too involved doing these other… he made so many different… obviously there were, the White House is worried more about other issues aside from immigration yeah it might the clock might just run out and they say well we did our best we'll try again.

Spencer:
In some ways we would appreciate that because that would mean that no amnesty gets passed and no piecemeal amnesty gets passed. Of course, we may miss out on some of the trade-offs we'd hoped for but that would that would be a definite silver lining. And like you mentioned Preston there are other issues that the Biden administration wants to focus on and if you look at recent public opinion polling, things like a stimulus package, COVID relief, those sort of things poll a lot higher with the general public than offering amnesty to illegal aliens in a difficult economic time and so yeah it would not surprise me at all if, especially with some of the more recent public opinion polls that came out that showed it as even less popular than what the campaign initially thought back in 2020 or even the pre-COVID era, it would not surprise me at all if they would want to at least temporarily shift to some of these other issues that are going to play better with their base because no president wants to essentially throw away that honeymoon period that they get a higher tick in public opinion, they're going to want to pass their most popular reforms, so if that happens I think that would be a win for the American people. No amnesty occurs at least for now and I think as you get closer to the midterms it's going to be harder for them to pass an amnesty because that is easy fuel for Republican candidates and for really any anti-amnesty candidate to take to the American people and say, hey look I would not support something this radical that would do nothing but hurt your economic prospects.

Matthew:
I was going to say Spencer I’m glad he brought that up because in the media there's this Democrat, he's in the House, his name is Vicente González and he sits in a district along the Texas-Mexico border and he actually has publicly declared basically saying, this is his quote right here, he goes, “the way we're doing it right now is catastrophic and is a recipe for disaster in the middle of a pandemic.” So, here's a guy who's not only an elected official, he's a Democrat and he's literally someone who lives in like the front lines down there saying look there this is just a complete disaster right now we can't be having this and you guys mentioned there are other priorities that probably should be addressed more than this massive bill and I’m sure that if Vicente is thinking this I’m sure a lot of Democrats are thinking the same thing too.

Spencer:
Yeah you really are I mean another example would be Representative Koehler who has also come out and said that this will be problematic that it just goes too far. You saw some senior advisors within the governor of North Carolina’s office come out and express concerns as well. This isn't just a Republican versus Democrat issue as we've touched on already. As it stands this thing I don't I don't see any chance in the world I would ever pass in the Senate, I’m not convinced it would have an easy path to victory in the Democratic-controlled House …

Preston:
They’d have to whip it pretty seriously. What is it they only need I think like five, eight maybe people to say hey we're not touching… I’m either voting present or I’m not …

Spencer:
And we've already seen two or three come out and say man I’m really concerned about this so if they're thinking it others are probably thinking it as well so it has difficult prospects overall and I think it is I think that's a great point man, I think it's important to note that this is not just a strictly Republican versus Democrat partisan issue. It goes way beyond that.

Matthew:
Wow I really wish we could talk more about this but that's all the time we have today. We hope all of you enjoyed today's episode and learned more about immigration amnesties and President Biden’s recent proposal for mass amnesty. As a reminder we'll be releasing a new episode every other Monday so look out for those episodes and these episodes are available on most platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google podcasts. They're also on our website at fairus.org also on our twitter you can find our handle at @FAIRImmigration to access episodes so please spread the word we enjoy doing this we want to educate you guys more on what's happening under the Biden administration with immigration. And until next time this has been Understanding Immigration presented by FAIR.