Within the next few weeks both the Congress and President Donald Trump will be facing the most monumental decision on America’s cultural, political, and economic future since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the 1986 Ronald Reagan immigration amnesty.

Federal lawmakers and the president soon will decide whether to allow almost 800,000 minors and young adults who were brought to this country illegally as children, and who were given temporary permission to stay in America forever by President Barack Obama’s executive order, Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which I along with many others see as unconstitutional.

Such a DACA “fix” by Congress would then make it legal for the participants to continue to work and receive taxpayer-provided benefits like schooling and health care, and it would provide them a future pathway to U.S. citizenship.

But this would be political suicide for President Trump, the GOP, and the American polity.

Granting amnesty to people here illegally would be a terrible and irreversible defeat for Trump’s agenda of putting the welfare and interests of American citizens first, especially his working-class supporters of all races, economic stations, and ethnicities. Not only would law breaking once again be rewarded, but it would just encourage another invasion-like wave of people to crash our borders looking for work and welfare. Common sense would dictate, too, that an influx of cheap labor would depress wages and employment for American citizens.

Democrats politically benefit from these poor, unskilled, and government-dependent residents. Many will become future Democrat voters because they want and need taxpayer-provided benefits.

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They are assisted by such racially conscious ethnic lobbies like the National Council of La Raza and some nonprofit organizations, which rake in millions of federal tax dollars helping resettle sometimes hostile and inassimilable refugees with other people’s money.

And many GOP big-business donors approve of this. Why not? It means cheaper labor and higher profits. What’s good for the hospitality, construction, and financial industry is good for America, right? Americans who work for low wages or have no job because they have been pushed aside by cheaper foreign labor, legal and illegal, beg to differ.

There is a movement afoot among virtually all the Democrats and some Republicans to have a grand bargain on DACA. Exchange amnesty for the “Dreamers” for building Trump’s promised Mexican border wall, ending the visa lottery, making the E-Verify system mandatory for employment, and passing the proposed Cotton-Perdue RAISE Act. The latter would end family-linked immigration, or chain migration and select immigrants in the future by skill level.

But even that’s a very bad deal. Why? Because in modern identity politics, pioneered by the Democrat Party and President Obama, “Demography is destiny.”

If there is just one more amnesty, the chance for a peaceful, prosperous, and cohesive America will be over. It will not be amnesty for just 800,000, but probably for 3 million to 4 million, most future Democrats. More former red states like California will become what Prof. Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford University aptly calls “Mexifornia” and the Republican Party will never again win another national election.

Any DACA fix is a bad deal. Promises are fleeting. Amnesty is forever. The Democrats know that. The Republicans should. What America really needs is a immigration moratorium of about 50 years so we can try to assimilate who we already have.

President Trump and Rep. Bruce Poliquin are both supposed to be financial “numbers” men. I hope they can do simple electoral math. They should support the interests of American citizens, not foreigners and special interest lobbies. Their voters will roar their approval and many other Americans will silently thank them.

Gayle Finkbeiner is a resident of Belgrade.


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