Yes, Republicans have managed to achieve tactical unity on immigration policy at the moment by opposing the president’s executive action. But just under the surface, chaos still reigns, per this angry report from the Daily Caller‘s Neil Munro:
House Speaker John Boehner’s top committee chairman says he wants an immigration bill that would allow millions of foreign migrants to stay and work jobs sought by Americans.
“I’m going to use my assets and resources in the new year to work with this Congress… to have a well-understood agreement about what the law should be, and how we as communities, and farm communities, and tech communities, create circumstances where we can have people be in this country and work, and where not one person is quote ‘thrown out’ or ‘deported,’” Rep. Pete Sessions, the chairman of the powerful House rules committee, told a group of Democratic legislators.
The committee has the power to kill or boost members’ bills because it decides how each bill will be considered in floor votes.
Sessions’ promise of de-facto amnesty to Democrats was welcomed by Chicago Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who frequently describes unauthorized migrants as members of his community.
Ouchy ouchy. You have to appreciate, though, that Munro interprets John Boehner’s refusal to shut down the federal government to force a withdrawal of Obama’s executive action on immigration as “support for Obama’s amnesty.” And he espies a bipartisan conspiracy:
Pete Sessions is from Texas, and from the business wing of the GOP, whose legislators have long supported a greater inflow of lower-wage migrants for use in farms, meat-packing plants, restaurants, hotels, resorts, hospitals, universities, banks, computer firms and in research centers.
In the mid-2000s, for example, President George W. Bush pushed Congress to create a free-market of labor in North America, which would have allowed U.S. employers to freely hire an unlimited number of Mexicans instead of higher-wage Americans for any jobs in the United States….
However, Bush’s guest-worker and amnesty proposals were rejected by Congress in 2006 and 2007 because of public protests.
The business wing is now being opposed by a growing GOP populist wing, led now by Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions in the Senate, and by a group of conservative advocates in the House.
But the GOP’s business wing remains dominant, partly because it is backed by media progressives who also favor large-scale immigration.
Will patriots manage to stop this bipartisan conspiracy? Only time will tell.
