Op-Ed: Democrats’ reconciliation amnesty push puts Americans last

Democrats are not letting a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and a tie in the U.S. Senate stop them from pushing what is arguably the most radical agenda of any Congress in American history. Based on reporting to date, they intend to use the federal budget reconciliation process to achieve some of their longest-held policy fantasies in almost every issue area. In a more reasonable era, this effort would be deemed “dead on arrival” even within the Democrat Party – but this is 2021, and all bets are off.

While virtually every corner of American life is in the crosshairs of reconciliation, immigration may be the one area where Democrats’ overreach is blatant beyond Capitol Hill.

Having spent the last 50 years aborting 60 million Americans in the womb, Democrats likely recognize behind closed doors what their shrill public rhetoric conceals: they are a party in severe demographic decline. At a time when American citizens – including growing swaths of minority communities that have traditionally voted for Democrats in overwhelming numbers, based on data from the outcome of the 2020 election – are turning away from Democrats and their tired repackaging of Marxism, Democrats have abandoned winning the hearts and minds of their employers – American citizens – and have instead gone in search of new citizens through amnesty.

The Democrats have also been far from covert in laying the framework for their voter importation project. Indeed, the Biden Administration has spent the last eight months working feverishly to tear down core national security protections at home and abroad to fuel a critical mass of new entrants before their hoped-for passage of amnesty.

At our southern border, Joe Biden has reversed the Trump Administration’s primary national security initiatives, including border wall construction and the Remain in Mexico asylum processing policy, to ensure that hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions of illegal foreign nationals can enter the United States with little to no scrutiny. President Biden has also essentially given his blessing to the smuggling and trafficking of children from the Northern Triangle and elsewhere worldwide. Thousands of these children are abused and trafficked along the route between their home country and the United States, and many then disappear once in the United States. The cartel-driven trafficking industry is arguably the only segment of the economy – albeit an illicit one – that has improved during President Biden’s short tenure in the White House.

President Biden’s recent surrender in Afghanistan has a strong amnesty dimension to it as well. The careless evacuation of Kabul that endangered American and Afghan lives and gave the Taliban $85 billion of high-grade military equipment also conveniently allowed the Biden Administration to load tens of thousands of foreign nationals – not all of whom were Afghans – onto planes to bring them to the United States with little to no screening. The juxtaposition between Biden’s open arms for tens of thousands of unknowns and his abandonment of American citizens behind enemy lines is heart-rending but telling of his political priorities.

There are undoubtedly Afghan nationals on those planes who are safe and deserving of relief, but this misses the point, which is that we have very little information about the people who have boarded those planes and been scattered across the United States by your federal government (including at the D.C. metropolitan area-based Dulles Expo Center). From President Biden’s perspective, however, the fitness of the individuals on those planes or the threat they might pose to American citizens in their communities is irrelevant. From the Left’s perspective, the greater good is quantity, not quality, and Americans are a sacrifice they are willing to make in the name of more power.

President Biden’s re-creation of a porous border with Mexico and his failure in Afghanistan are not accidents. These two problems are engineered failures, and while the Afghanistan failure is about more than just amnesty, the influx of unknown and potentially dangerous individuals is absolutely about amnesty. One wonders what other crisis the Biden Administration might manufacture in the coming weeks and months to further add to the amnesty pile.

The future of the left’s blatant reconciliation power grab remains unclear. Congressional Democrat leadership must know that they are putting their majority on the line to make it happen. And at least one Democrat senator has publicly pushed back against reconciliation as it now stands. It is up to Americans to reject the abuse of the reconciliation process with destructive policies and remind those in Congress who is in charge.

John Zadrozny serves as Director for the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration at the America First Policy Institute. During the Trump Administration, he most recently served as Deputy Assistant to the President at the White House.