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This is the last in my series on “Three Reasons the Left Wants Open Borders.” I’ve covered ideology and electoral politics; now, let’s turn to extortion.
By turning on the taps of illegal immigration, open-borders proponents hope to create bargaining chips to negotiate amnesties and increased immigration flows. Since he took office, Joe Biden has paroled a million and a half inadmissible aliens under bogus premises, caught and quickly released into the U.S. the better part of 7 million more, and allowed at least 1.8 million more to evade Border Patrol—the “gotaways.”
As Jason Riley wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year, “The White House knows that an overwhelming majority of the people coming aren’t fleeing persecution but are economic migrants gaming our asylum laws. They know that there will be no serious effort to deport people whose claims are denied.”
Nonetheless, the roughly 10 million inadmissible foreign nationals who the White House calls “newcomers” will be new leverage to push immigration “reform,” which means massive amnesties and new “pathways” into the U.S. outside and on top of the legal immigration system authorized and numerically limited by Congress. Biden’s threat is to leave the taps wide open.
Under this pressure, wavering conservatives might concede to ineffective or even counterproductive legislation like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s, D-N.Y., bill that claimed to be a solution but did nothing to reduce the illegal flow. Fortunately, it failed on Thursday.
It was a trap—House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., correctly stated that the bill “would actually codify many of the disastrous Biden open-border policies that created this crisis in the first place,” making it difficult for a future conservative president to reverse.
“Once bitten, twice shy” sums up why conservatives aren’t going to fall easily for this round of extortion. The relevant lesson is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The deal was that about 3 million illegal aliens would be amnestied, but that the government would work to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and keep another amnesty from happening again. To achieve this, employers would have to confirm the legal status of people before hiring them or face penalties.
The first part of the bargain (the amnesty) happened, but the second part did not in any comprehensive manner. Almost 40 years later, the number of illegal aliens present in the country is perhaps five times as great as in 1986.
Until recently, Democrats believed in enforcing immigration laws, even if they might want them eased. Listen to President Bill Clinton talking here in 1995. He endorsed the conclusions of the bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform chaired at the time by Texas Democratic Rep. Barbara Jordan, which in its final 1997 report urged “immediate reforms to ensure that aliens with final orders of deportation, exclusion, or removal are indeed removed from the United States.”
Today, there are over 1.2 million such aliens with final orders, including 400,000 convicted criminals, and the Biden administration plans to remove barely 30,000.
Clinton also proudly stated that his administration had “moved aggressively,” hiring more Border Patrol, deporting “twice as many criminal aliens as ever before,” “cracking down on illegal hiring,” and “barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
Today, no elected Democrat would even dare call an alien present in the U.S. illegally an “illegal alien.” In fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is required to use the nonsensical term “undocumented noncitizens,” and Biden apologized recently for calling Laken Riley’s accused alien murderer “illegal.”
In 2024, after three years of mass release, mass parole, and lax enforcement, “Democrats appear to be panicking about this fall’s election, to the point that they are feigning doing something about the invasion at our southern border,” as Teresa Mull put it in the Spectator. Their strategy is to try and convince the American people that the real obstacle to securing the border is unreasonable Republicans. To sell this message would be to pull a giant rabbit out of a very small hat, as the open border is the clear work of the president and his hand-picked secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Schumer brought up the supposedly “bipartisan” Senate border bill for another vote Thursday, but it failed again, with even less support than in February. Biden may claim that he had “proposed and negotiated and agreed to the strongest border security bill this country has ever, ever, ever seen,” but senators who read it no doubt quickly reached the same conclusion as Johnson did in a few hours. The bill would have turned Biden’s welcome mat policies from overreaching executive whim into hardlaw. The Schumer bill was electioneering in the guise of legislating.
Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-N.J., claimed the bill “gives the president new tools to better manage the border.” In fact, Biden has had the tools, including under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, since January 2021.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre unwittingly admitted this week that Biden could “unilaterally” limit how many illegal aliens are allowed to enter the country. Biden has also considered ordering expedited processing for newly caught illegals rather than just releasing them. Inaction on the border is the president’s choice.
In a May 19 letter to fellow senators, Schumer wrote “the American people … want bipartisan action to secure our border.” Indeed, a May 21 nationwide poll by the University of South Florida found that 77% wanted more Border Patrol agents at the southern border, and 60% actually supported “increasing physical barriers.” In a March poll, The Wall Street Journal reported that “at least 72% of respondents in each of the [seven swing] states saying the country’s immigration policy and border security were headed in the wrong direction.” Schumer somehow discovered this six months before the national elections.
Jean-Pierre has echoed her boss many times over the past three years in claiming that the border was “not open”—even as it leaked 10,000 or more illegal aliens a day. On May 20, she told senators to set “partisan politics aside and vote to secure the border.” But even Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., opposes using the bill he drafted for purely political messaging, and Johnson has called it “dead on arrival” if it were to pass the Senate.
“Bipartisan” should mean just that, like the Jordan Commission report, not a one-party position enforced through the extortionary means of doubling the illegal alien population via mass release, parole, and negligence.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
Unprecedented Surge in Chinese Illegal Immigration Raises Security Concerns
The Ways the Left Exploits Illegal Immigration for Electoral Gain
The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push
US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration
Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants
The post Reason No. 3 the Left Wants Open Borders—Extortion for Amnesty: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A new study has revealed that roughly 10% to 27% of noncitizens living in the U.S. are illicitly registered to vote, which could result in up to 2.7 million illegal votes being cast in the November elections.
Experts say the significant amount of potential illegal votes could be enough to alter election results.
The study, released last week by the research institute Just Facts, notes that the 2022 U.S. census recorded approximately 19 million adult noncitizens living in the country. “Given their voter registration rates, this means that about 2 million to 5 million of them are illegally registered to vote,” the report observes. “These figures are potentially high enough to overturn the will of the American people in major elections, including congressional seats and the presidency.”
On Tuesday, James Agresti, president of Just Facts, joined “Washington Watch” to discuss the scope of noncitizens casting ballots and the implications of the study’s findings.
“[T]here are very broad openings for noncitizens to vote,” he explained, adding:
In no state in the nation are they required to provide proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote. Now, a couple of states like Arizona tried to enact that requirement, but they were blocked by a court ruling supported by the Obama administration.
And if you look at the federal voter-registration form, it says you can submit all different forms of ID to register. That could be a Social Security number; it could be a driver’s license number; or it could just be a utility bill.
I mean, these are things that anyone can get by living here. They do not prove you’re a U.S. citizen.
And more than that, a lot of noncitizens have faked Social Security numbers, especially illegal immigrants. That’s what they do to work. A recent estimate by the Social Security Administration tallied 2.5 million noncitizens who had Social Security numbers gained by using fake birth certificates or stealing those numbers from somebody else.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation and board member of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, concurred. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
“[T]he problem is, states aren’t doing very much to verify citizenship, so it’s extremely easy for someone who’s not a citizen to register to vote and to vote in elections,” he remarked during Monday’s edition of “Washington Watch.”
“And when that is discovered, oftentimes nothing is done about it.”
Agresti went on to point out the effect that lax enforcement of citizen verification could have in November. “[B]ased on the latest available data, approximately 1 million to 2.7 million noncitizens are going to vote in the upcoming presidential election unless something changes. And that is more than enough to tip the results of congressional races, Senate races, and yes, the U.S. presidency.”
Von Spakovsky echoed Agresti’s concerns. “[I]t doesn’t matter whether they’re black or white, Asian or Hispanic. It doesn’t matter which political party they support. Every time an alien illegally votes, that alien is voiding, negating the vote of a citizen, no matter which political party they support,” he contended. “And the Democrats just don’t seem to want to understand that or to basically ignore it.”
Agresti further reflected on the motivations behind the Democrats’ opposition to efforts to improve election integrity.
“[I]t’s always hard to read people’s minds, but I can tell you this: The vast bulk of these noncitizens are voting for Democrats. According to the best data we have, about 80% of them will vote for Democrats when they vote illegally. And Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to prevent any kind of checking of people’s citizenship. It does benefit them. Is that their reasoning? It’s an obvious incentive, but I can’t read their minds.”
Earlier this month, House Republicans attempted to address the issue by introducing a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and would remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls. But Agresti expressed doubt about the bill’s chances of passage. “My guess is it will move in the House and die in the Senate, but that’s just an educated guess. And again, even if somehow it got through the Senate, there’s no way [President] Joe Biden’s signing that bill.”
“However,” he added, “I do think in the aftermath of the election, and we hate to have a repeat of 2020, that there should be some accountability, some lawsuits that demand proof that people are who they say they are in tight races. None of that was secured in the last round of election lawsuits, and it needs to be there.”
Agresti concluded by urging candidates involved in tight elections to demand verification that only citizens voted. “A candidate has to make a plea and say, ‘Hey, I want this data to prove that these people who are registered and voted actually are citizens.’”
Originally published at WashingtonStand.com
The post Up to 2.7 Million Noncitizens Could Vote Illegally in November, Study Warns appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The bipartisan border bill failed in the U.S. Senate Thursday, even losing the support of two key negotiators who helped craft the legislation. This marked the second time the Senate voted against moving forward with the bill.
The vote on the border bill “is not an effort to actually make law, it is an effort to do political messaging,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said Thursday ahead of the vote. Lankford worked to negotiate the bill with Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., but he and Sinema voted against the bill Thursday, criticizing the reintroduction of the bill as being politically motivated.
Sen. Lankford helped to craft the border bill, but voted against it today.
— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) May 23, 2024
"Everyone sees this for what it is. It is not an effort to actually make law, it is an effort to do political messaging." pic.twitter.com/0Ab0M2l2fe
The bill, which needed 60 votes to pass, failed with 50 senators voting against it and 43 voting in favor.
The vote broke largely along party lines with Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska being the only Republican to vote for the bill. Six Democrats joined Republicans in voting against the bill.
WATCH: Border bill fails in the Senate a second time. pic.twitter.com/bM9PfY3UZl
— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) May 23, 2024
During the first vote in February, Lankford voted in favor of advancing the border bill, along with Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah.
Analysts expected the latest vote on the bill to fail following Republicans’ outspoken criticism of the measure.
The bill “spends $20 billion to not secure the border, but to more efficiently encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said during a news conference Wednesday.
Johnson and other GOP senators bashed the bill for allowing up to 5,000 illegal aliens to enter daily in a seven-day period.
The bill directs the Department of Homeland Security to close the southern border “during a period of seven consecutive calendar days, [if] there is an average of 5,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day.”
Over 1.8 million illegal aliens a year still would be permitted to enter the United States under the now twice failed legislation.
Republicans bashed the bill as an election year stunt.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are promoting the bill because “poll numbers are showing [Democrats] that, after months and months of throwing the border open to anyone who wants to come in, that the public doesn’t like the policy.”
Gallup reports that immigration is the No. 1 issue not specifically related to the economy on the minds of American voters right now.
“And now, all of a sudden, six months before an election, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have got religion on border security,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio., said ahead of the vote.
Under the Biden administration, Customs and Border Protection has encountered over 9.5 million illegal aliens on America’s border and at ports of entry. With five months remaining in fiscal year 2024, CBP encounters of illegal immigrants under President Joe Biden’s leadership are expected to far surpass 10 million before the start of the new fiscal year.
An additional nearly 1.8 million illegal aliens have crossed the border managing to evade Border Patrol. Authorities refer to them as “known gotaways.” It is impossible to know how many unknown gotaways have entered the country in recent years.
Senate Republicans continue to advocate for the passage of the border security bill known as H.R. 2, which the House passed in May 2023. If passed into law, H.R. 2 would end “catch and release,” restart construction of the border wall, and reinstate the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, among other things.
“The Democrats don’t want border security,” Sen Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in a statement. “Every single Democrat in the Senate supports these open borders. And I can say that because every single time we push to implement real border security to stop this invasion—to stop Joe Biden from releasing criminal illegal aliens that are threatening our families—every single Democrat votes no.”
On Tuesday night, Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., and Cruz, spoke on the Senate floor and called for the Senate to pass H.R. 2 by unanimous consent. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., reserved the right to object and blocked the bill.
The post Border Bill Goes Down in Flames on Senate Floor appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An agency of the District of Columbia held a training session last month to teach illegal immigrants and other noncitizens how to vote, according to documents obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch.
News of the training session held by the local government in the nation’s capital comes as House Republicans push a bill—with the backing of Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.—to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
The D.C. Board of Elections conducted the April 10 event, called “Non-Citizen Voting Education Virtual Training.”
Judicial Watch obtained 13 pages of the training session’s PowerPoint presentation through a request under the Freedom of Information Act. On one slide, the presentation says:
Non-U.S. citizen residents can vote in District elections for the offices of Mayor, Attorney General, Chairman or member(s) of the D.C. Council, member(s) of the State Board of Education, or Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner(s) Non-U.S. citizen residents cannot vote for Federal Offices.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project previously raised concerns about noncitizen voting in the District of Columbia. (Heritage established The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Washington, DC’s Voter Guide for Illegal Aliens is up! pic.twitter.com/COeIpOba5w
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) May 1, 2024
The District of Columbia is joined by local governments in California, Maryland, and Vermont in allowing foreign citizens to vote in local elections. Federal law allows only U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections.
State courts blocked New York City from allowing noncitizen voting there.
“Illegal aliens and noncitizens should not vote in any elections,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “That Congress allows the votes of citizens to be legally stolen by illegal aliens in our nation’s capital is inexcusable.”
The District of Columbia amended its election code last year to allow noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, to vote for local D.C. offices.
As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” Democrats long have sought to change election laws to gain a political advantage. These noncitizen voting laws mimic a tactic used by New York City’s legendary Tammany Hall and other political machines that controlled big city politics.
The District’s presentation explains the qualifications for registering to vote when someone isn’t a U.S. citizen.
“To register to vote in the District of Columbia as a non-citizen, you must: Be at least 17 years old and 18 years old by the next General Election; Maintain residency in the District of Columbia for at least 30 days prior to the election in which you intend to vote; Not claim voting residence or the right to vote in any state, territory, or country; Not been found by a court to be legally incompetent to vote,” the presentation says.
Neither the D.C. Board of Elections nor the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on this report.
The post DC Holds Training Sessions for Noncitizens to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A foreign national named Paul registered to vote at a local office of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles and records show that he voted, although he says his American wife voted after being accidentally checked in under his name.
Another noncitizen, Najib, also was registered to vote at a motor vehicles office, and his name was discovered on the voter rolls after a year, but he hadn’t voted in that time.
In these and other cases, the city of Boston flagged the noncitizens and removed them from voter registration lists.
In fact, the largest city in New England—although commonly viewed as a liberal bastion—could serve as a national model on this aspect of election integrity, according to new findings by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative watchdog group.
“In Boston, voter registration records disclosed to PILF demonstrate that Boston and other Massachusetts municipal systems—although not perfect—are a good example for how other states could tackle the noncitizen voting question,” says the report, first provided to The Daily Signal.
Public Interest Legal Foundation’s findings come as Congress considers requiring proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections and another bill to restore a citizenship question to the U.S. census form.
“We are not looking at this through an ideological lens so much as a data lens,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “This illustrates how this population data can be used by states to help in election administration.”
Adams noted that Massachusetts is among a few states that conduct their own census, or population tally, outside the census conducted by the U.S. government every 10 years.
The proof-of-citizenship legislation is not likely to pass the Democrat-led Senate, but at least in this narrow area, Massachusetts provides an example for other states on the issue of foreign citizens listed on U.S. voter registration rolls, Adams said.
“Rather than reimagining the future, states should take this data tool that Massachusetts uses and apply it,” he said.
Although every Democrat in the House recently voted against restoring a citizenship question to the census, Massachusetts law requires an annual census, or “annual resident listing,” that includes questions about citizenship status and voter registration and is used by local governments.
“Any registered voter who fails to complete the annual survey is warned that their voting status will be changed to INACTIVE until they comply,” says the report by Public Interest Legal Foundation, which is narrowly focused on tracking citizenship.
Overall, The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard ranks Massachusetts as 45th out of 50 states. (The Heritage Foundation launched The Daily Signal in 2014.)
The study by Public Interest Legal Foundation concludes that Boston’s voter registration system manages to “catch and cancel foreign nationals listed throughout the roll on a roughly two-year churn.”
“Unfortunately, a significant percentage of these disclosed records show that votes are still cast and counted within those years before discovery,” the report says.
The Boston city government this year provided information to Public Interest Legal Foundation that showed the city canceled voter registrations of 70 noncitizens. Most canceled registrations occurred in 2016 and 2017, with 13 in each year.
On average, foreign citizens were registered to vote for two years before being discovered and dropped from the rolls. But the longest known period was 24 years, and the earliest known year it occurred was 1995.
“Roughly 18% of Boston registrants were mailed confirmation notices prior to a reclassification to inactive status during the period,” the foundation’s report says. “Also, during this time, about 13% of Boston registrants were shed from the voter roll for reasons such as relocation, inactivity, and death.”
The report also points to other specific examples, such as a noncitizen named Hai who was registered to vote for a year and a half before Boston removed him, and Fred, who was registered for two years before being removed. Neither voted and both were registered at a local motor vehicles office.
A pattern of ineligible voters being registered at motor vehicle offices is a national problem that can be traced back to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, popularly known as the “motor voter law,” which allows someone to register to vote while getting a driver’s license.
“Foreign nationals are reflexively offered applications to vote and they unwittingly accept,” Public Interest Legal Foundation’s report says, adding:
The 24 states plus D.C. that have automatic motor voter [registration], meaning they are not giving the immigrant a chance to decline registration, exacerbate the problem. States giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants increase traffic to DMVs. States with higher amounts of legal immigration mean even more driver’s licenses or state IDs are needed for daily life (and increases the risk of screening immigrants for voter registration).
The post EXCLUSIVE: Here’s Where This Blue State Could Be a National Model for Election Integrity appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Why does the Biden administration want open borders so badly? For three very big reasons. One is ideology, which I covered in last week’s BorderLine column. Another is extortion, which I will cover in next week’s column. But this week, I look at how the Left uses illegal immigration to give itself an unfair electoral advantage.
First, illegal immigration affects congressional representation because the apportionment of members of Congress by state is based on U.S. census data.
As Heritage Foundation Border Security and Immigration Center Director Lora Ries writes, the census currently counts all noncitizens—from green card holders to illegal aliens—in addition to U.S. citizens for the purposes of apportioning congressional districts among the states.
The more citizens in a state, the more congressional districts—i.e., seats in Congress—a state gets. In turn, the number of congressional districts in a state determines how many Electoral College votes that state receives. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
While president, Donald Trump tried to restore the U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 census and exclude all noncitizens from apportionment calculations. Yet court challenges prevented him from doing so prior to the deadline for getting a new census form printed and distributed. Joe Biden then immediately terminated the effort when he took office. That should tell you which states and party benefit most from the population overcount.
The second way mass illegal immigration undermines U.S. elections is through negligence and fraud. Only American citizens can legally vote; it is a crime for a noncitizen to vote. Yet, in many states, noncitizens can easily register and vote with little chance of detection.
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as “Motor Voter,” was intended to make it easier for U.S. citizens to register to vote when they applied for or renewed a driver’s license. However, Motor Voter also made it easier for noncitizens to accidentally or purposefully get on voter rolls.
In December 2022, the Reno Gazette Journal reported that if applicants applying for a Nevada driver’s license check the online box saying they are eligible to vote, their information is sent to Nevada’s secretary of state for registration. The Washoe County Registrar’s Office told the Gazette Journal that it is possible for a noncitizen to register by falsely claiming citizenship (though this is a felony).
Moreover, Nevada accepts alien work authorization cards as proof of identity. Millions of aliens the Biden administration has released into the country are eligible for such cards and could register to vote in Nevada and other states with similar registration processes with little risk of detection.
It would seem to be common sense for all states to want to close loopholes and maintain confidence in their electoral systems. Yet, one of the biggest canards in American politics today is to equate election integrity efforts—like ensuring proper identification or limiting mail-in and early voting—with voter suppression.
There was real and shameful voter suppression in our nation’s past. Efforts in the post-Civil War South to deter blacks from registering included discriminatory literacy tests and poll taxes; police intimidation at polling places; and at the extreme, cross-burnings, bombings, and even killings. But the civil rights movement, strong new laws, and voter-registration drives ended the “Jim Crow” era by the 1960s. Poll taxes and literacy tests were banned.
In 2022, 98.9% of voters in Georgia “felt safe in their polling location” and “98.9% reported no issues casting a ballot,” according to a University of Georgia postelection poll. Nonetheless, legitimate efforts to ensure that voters are legally entitled to vote, that they do so in accordance with the law, and that their votes are properly counted are falsely labeled as voter suppression.
“Americans need and deserve a system in which it is easy to vote and hard to cheat,” says The Heritage Foundation, which publishes a state-by-state Election Integrity Scorecard to encourage best practices from electoral officials and vigilance by voters.
As Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Ensuring that only American citizens vote in American elections is a straightforward requirement for maintaining election security and public trust.”
And yet, progressive groups seem intent on fighting efforts to ensure that voter rolls contain only eligible voters. The logical inference is that they believe ineligible noncitizens would be more likely to vote for their candidates. As Raffensperger writes, these activists want states “to rely on a person’s word” when registering to vote and oppose all efforts to verify citizenship. Unfortunately, in the real world, people sometimes lie—especially when there are no consequences.
A Heritage database currently records 1,500 cases of proven election fraud nationwide—and that is merely a sampling. When it comes to abusing absentee ballots, most of the perpetrators in the database are Americans. But on just the first page (of five) for one state (North Carolina) are cases of noncitizens from the Congo, Guatemala, Mexico, and Nigeria convicted of falsely claiming American citizenship to register to vote. They committed a fundamental offense against our democracy, and yet most of them got a one-year pretrial “diversion program,” after completion of which, charges were dropped.
Some states are better than others regarding voter integrity. Virginia cross-references Motor Voter data with the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, and “since 2014, has removed 11,000 ‘declared non-citizen[s]’” from the voter rolls, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Meanwhile, the foundation is suing Wisconsin and Minnesota for lack of transparency with their voter rolls.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, recently introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to require states to obtain proof of citizenship—in person—when registering an individual to vote. Further, the bill requires states to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls.
Meanwhile, this week, the House passed the Equal Representation Act, a bill that would restore the U.S. citizenship question to the census and exclude noncitizens from congressional apportionment. The bill passed 206-202 by a completely party-line vote. Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., forced a vote on a similar bill in the Senate in March, but it failed 51-45. All of the Democrats and one Republican voted against it.
Election integrity shouldn’t be a liberal versus conservative issue, and maintaining accurate voter rolls is a national, not a political, goal. Impartial legislation to ensure both integrity and accuracy ahead of our next election and census should receive bipartisan support.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push
US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration
Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants
My Look Inside Biden’s Illegal Immigrant Catch-and-Release Craziness
What I Saw on My Latest Visit to the Border
The post The Ways the Left Exploits Illegal Immigration for Electoral Gain: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., can breathe a little easier now that more than 80% of his House colleagues put an end to the latest drama gripping Capitol Hill.
Six months after ascending to the speakership, a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly voted to table a motion to vacate the chair—the House’s terminology for removing its leader. The final vote was 359-43; seven voted present and 21 others didn’t cast a vote. (See how your representative voted.)
“Hopefully, this is the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress,” Johnson said after Wednesday’s vote. “It’s regrettable. It’s not who we are as Americans and we’re better than this. We need to get beyond it.”
Don’t count on it.
Johnson may have survived the vote, but the anger toward him among some Republicans likely won’t subside anytime soon.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who offered the motion to vacate, bemoaned the “uniparty” that saved the speaker.
Tonight, you saw the Uniparty in action.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) May 8, 2024
Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and the rest of the Democrats saved Mike Johnson. pic.twitter.com/67ZOn76yDN
Petty squabbles and personal recriminations are nothing new for the House of Representatives. History offers many lessons. But today’s divisions—among the majority party, nonetheless—seem irreparable.
The GOP’s narrow House majority after the November 2022 election emboldened rank-and-file conservatives to demand much-needed changes. After multiple rounds of voting in January 2023, then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy acquiesced to their requests and secured the votes needed to be speaker.
>>> 20 Lawmakers Stood Up to the Washington Establishment. This is Their Story.
With any member of the narrowly divided House able to initiate the process of removing the speaker, it was perhaps inventible that Johnson would eventually face the same scenario as McCarthy. And when Johnson opted to rely on Democrats to pass bills, that’s precisely what happened.
To avoid a showdown, Johnson reportedly spent hours meeting with Greene this week, only to have her deliver a fiery floor speech that was met by a chorus of boos and jeers. When she wasn’t being interrupted, Greene accused the speaker of selling out his party and turning over House control to Democrats.
? I just called up my Motion to Vacate Nancy Pelosi-endorsed Uniparty Speaker Mike Johnson.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) May 8, 2024
WATCH: pic.twitter.com/LaTu76QSLR
Sitting by her side, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., repeatedly came to Greene’s aid.
Their grievances against Johnson include his decision to pass government spending bills with Democrat support, expel embattled New York Republican George Santos from the House, and advance a $95 billion foreign aid bill over the objections of conservatives.
Greene even managed to work in a defense of ousted Speaker McCarthy, whom both she and Massie considered an ally. Hours later, Massie doubled down on their defense of McCarthy by contrasting him as a favorable option to Johnson.
Vacating Kevin McCarthy was a huge mistake. Every Democrat voted to vacate him because he fought them tooth and nail.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 8, 2024
Keeping Mike Johnson is an even bigger mistake. An overwhelming majority of democrats voted to keep him because he’s given them everything they want.
Sorry, Mr. Speaker, personality politics reign supreme.
In reality, Johnson will never know just how many Republicans want to see him gone beyond Greene, Massie, and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. That’s because before Greene’s motion to vacate came to vote, the House opted to table it.
Of the 11 Republicans against motion to table, only a few explained their vote. But it’s safe to say not all were aligned with Greene, despite what Massie suggested.
It’s a new paradigm in Congress.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 8, 2024
Nancy Pelosi, and most republicans voted to keep Uniparty Speaker Mike Johnson. These are the eleven, including myself, who voted NOT to save him. pic.twitter.com/8HnfDQ7lBe
At least three said not to interpret their opposition as an indication of their feelings toward Johnson.
Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, opposed Greene’s motion to vacate even though he joined her on the procedural vote. “One should not be viewed as a proxy for the other,” he said.
New Speaker, same vote.
— Warren Davidson ?? (@WarrenDavidson) May 8, 2024
To be clear, the motion to table and the motion to vacate are separate questions. One should not be viewed as a proxy for the other.
As I did when Speaker McCarthy was ultimately vacated, I opposed the passive-aggressive motion to table which neuters…
Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., declared her opposition to Green’s motion to vacate but opposed the effort to table it. “I fought a lot to change Pelosi rules and have more accountability on the speaker in Congress,” she explained.
I am not happy with where we are now, but would not vote to vacate the speaker at this time. However, I fought a lot to change Pelosi rules and have more accountability on the speaker in Congress, so I voted not to table the motion consistent with my vote on McCarthy last fall.
— Rep. Victoria Spartz (@RepSpartz) May 8, 2024
And finally, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., put it bluntly when he said that “joining Democrats in a motion to table was more than I could stomach.”
While I may not agree with the timing of a MTV, joining Democrats in a motion to table was more than I could stomach. That is why I voted against the motion to table.
— Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) May 8, 2024
While Johnson’s critics will continue to complain that Democrats helped save him, more Republicans had his back Wednesday.
So where does Johnson go from here?
He most certainly shouldn’t let Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., dictate the chamber’s agenda for the next six month. Across the halls of the Capitol, Senate Democrats are already plotting to change the narrative on border security, one of President Joe Biden’s greatest vulnerabilities.
A sustained effort by the House to elevate the issue of illegal immigration is needed now more than ever. Republicans took an important step Wednesday to pass the Equal Representation Act, which prevents illegal aliens from influencing congressional representation and the Electoral College.
>>> House Passes Bill to Restore Citizenship Question to Census
Those same lawmakers must redouble their efforts on other fronts, including the strong measures already adopted in the Secure the Border Act (HR 2).
With only a few must-pass pieces of legislation remaining this Congress, there’s precious little time to squander the opportunity.
The post House of Drama: Speaker Johnson Survives Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Ouster Attempt appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Pointing to the combination of an open border and declining confidence in elections, congressional Republicans are backing legislation to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
“Due to the wide-open border that the Biden administration has refused to close, practically engineered to open, we now have so many noncitizens in the country that if only one out of 100 voted, they would cast hundreds of thousands of votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Wednesday during a press conference in front of the Capitol.
Because America’s borders are wide open and Democrats want to turn noncitizens into voters, Congress must act to protect our federal elections.
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) May 8, 2024
Today, we introduced the SAVE Act to ensure that only Americans get to decide American elections.
Thank you to @RepChipRoy and… pic.twitter.com/dXANdzUuoC
“Since our elections are so razor thin these days—just a few precincts in a few states decide the makeup of Congress and who is elected to the White House—this is a dangerously high number and it is a great concern to millions and millions of Americans. It could actually change the outcome of our elections,” Johnson said.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, is sponsored in the House by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, in the Senate.
The House speaker noted that about 16 million illegal aliens have entered the United States since Joe Biden took office as president.
Although it’s already illegal for these illegal immigrants to vote in federal elections, Johnson said, election officials have no mechanism to deter them from registering to vote.
“If a nefarious actor wants to intervene in our elections, all they have to do is check a box on a form and sign their name. That’s it,” Johnson said.
The legislation would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “motor voter law,” to require that states obtain documentary proof of citizenship from someone before he or she may register to vote. It also would require states to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls.
“The most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in elections and undermine integrity of elections by making it unclear as to who is voting and limiting our ability to know that only citizens are voting,” Roy told reporters, adding:
We are here for the proposition supported by the vast majority of the American people: that only citizens of the United States should vote, that we should have documentary proof, that we should have a system to guarantee that only citizens of the United States vote in federal elections where we have the clear authority under the Constitution of the United States, under our laws as Congress, to set the terms of those elections.
For his part, Lee argued that the one-citizen-one-vote measure should have lawmakers’ unanimous support.
“When federal law has been interpreted as precluding in many ways the voter registration officials in various states from even inquiring into someone’s citizenship when addressing voter roll issues, we have a problem,” Lee said.
“It’s legislation that really ought to pass unanimously in both houses of Congress because the only reason to oppose this—that I can think of—would be if you are comfortable with or somehow want noncitizens to vote and noncitizens in some instances to influence the outcome of elections,” the Utah Republican continued.
However, there is opposition. It’s “not true” that noncitizens are voting, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal advocacy group that opposes voter ID and other election security measures, posted on X.
Speaker Johnson, explaining bill to require passport or birth certificate to register to vote: "We ll know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it's not been something that is easily provable." That's because … it's not true! (Intuitively?)
— Michael Waldman (@mawaldman) May 8, 2024
Johnson announced the legislation last month while visiting former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
The press conference featuring Johnson, Lee, and Roy came one day after House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., sent a letter demanding answers from the District of Columbia Board of Elections, which allows noncitizen voting in local races. Steil’s letter inquires how the District will ensure that noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections.
“Not only is D.C. allowing noncitizens to vote, but the board is actively encouraging it,” Steil writes. “In addition to board staff hosting a virtual town hall focused on the ability of noncitizen D.C. residents to vote, the committee has received notice regarding a postcard mailed by the board to ‘residential customers’ advocating for noncitizens to register to vote in D.C. elections.”
During his remarks Wednesday, Johnson also raised the issue of jurisdictions that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.
“A growing number of localities are blurring the lines by allowing noncitizens to vote in municipal local elections,” the House speaker said. “In cities and towns in California, Maryland, and Vermont, and even right here in D.C., you might not know this, but noncitizens are voting.”
But Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chairwoman of Tea Party Patriots Action, said at the Capitol press conference that just because it’s already illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
“It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote, but just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. If you’re not a citizen, it’s illegal to enter our country without authorization. but that happens multiple millions of times every year,” Martin said. “We’re trying to get ahead of the curve here.”
The post Roy, Lee Introduce Bill to Require Citizenship Proof to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Legislation adopted Wednesday by the House of Representatives would restore a question about U.S. citizenship to the 2030 census, potentially reshaping congressional representation and the Electoral College.
Lawmakers voted, 206-202, to pass the Equal Representation Act, a bill championed by Reps. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio. (See how your representative voted.) Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., introduced the Senate version, which Republicans overwhelmingly supported in a March vote.
With millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States—a problem exacerbated by the Biden administration’s border policies—the legislation aims to protect Americans’ electoral power and congressional representation by ensuring foreign citizens aren’t counted in the census.
“If you are an illegal immigrant, you should not be represented in the U.S. Congress,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., told The Daily Signal. “It’s a shame that House Democrats are allowing their open-borders agenda to get in the way of common sense.”
One of those Democrats openly acknowledged the benefits of counting illegal aliens. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”
Democrat Congresswoman Yvette Clarke on illegal immigrants in America:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 9, 2024
"I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes."
The end game: Dems are willing to destroy what it means to be an American citizen to help themselves politically. pic.twitter.com/3XmBDqYEsH
After being in all but one census from 1820 to 2000, the citizenship question was abandoned in the 2010 questionnaire during the Obama administration. The Trump administration attempted to restore the citizenship question for the 2020 census, but a divided Supreme Court ruled against its approach, and the idea was abandoned.
The Equal Representation Act would require the citizenship question on the 2030 census and each decennial census that follows.
Heritage Action, an independent partner of The Heritage Foundation, advocated for passage of the Equal Representation Act. The organization scored Wednesday’s vote on HR 7109. (The Heritage Foundation created The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Ryan Walker, Heritage Action’s executive vice president, faulted the Obama administration for undoing nearly 200 years of precedent. Walker said the consequences of inaction are significant, given the ongoing border crisis.
“Illegal immigrants and other noncitizens cannot vote, and should not be given the power to sway our elections or congressional maps—especially in light of Joe Biden’s border crisis that has brought more than 10 million people into our country,” Walker said. “The Equal Representation Act puts electoral power back in the hands of those with the right to vote—American citizens—something every member of Congress must protect.”
The House version amassed 114 co-sponsors and was approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in April on a 22-20 vote.
Illegal aliens should have ZERO influence in our electoral process.
— Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) May 8, 2024
You don't get to come to our country, break our laws, and then be included in congressional apportionment.
That's why I cosponsored the Equal Representation Act, which the House will vote on tonight.
“Members of Congress represent U.S. citizens, not foreigners,” said Davidson, the bill’s co-sponsor. “Under the Democrats’ open-border policies, sanctuary cities and states inflate their population with illegal aliens. Then they’re rewarded with more congressional representation by a census that counts illegals. The inflated count is then used to draw congressional maps, undermining fair representation for our citizens.”
Edwards stressed only American citizens can legally vote, “so, only American citizens should be counted when determining federal representation.”
Hagerty forced a vote on the Equal Representation Act in March. It ultimately failed, 51-45, although only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against it. Three other Republicans didn’t vote.
The post House Passes Bill to Restore Citizenship Question to Census appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Why does the Biden administration want open borders? As a researcher and writer on immigration, that’s the question I often get asked.
Here are the three reasons I think are behind President Joe Biden’s deliberate border chaos: electoral politics, extortion, and, most insidiously, ideology. I’ll start with ideology and come back to the other two reasons in my next two weekly BorderLine columns.
The most dangerous driver behind Biden’s open borders is ideological. Policy differences can be negotiated, but as we’re seeing on college campuses, people fanatically committed to an idea can prove intransigent, regardless of the facts.
When you see the word “abolition” used in connection with criminal justice and immigration, you might be confused. Americans rightly associate the term with ending slavery and abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison who were active before the Civil War.
Why are academics, politicians, and race professionals using it in 2024?
Those saying “abolitionist” today have appropriated it for the positive historical connotation it possesses, but they mean something else entirely. To see the roots of their ideology, you have to go back to the dawn of the New Left, as described by Chris Rufo in his book “America’s Cultural Revolution.”
Under their intellectual godfather, German academic Herbert Marcuse, Marxist-Leninists, Black Panthers, the Weather Underground terrorist group, and Students for a Democratic Society gathered.
This leftist alliance believed—as the Students for a Democratic Society magazine Prairie Fire explained—that the U.S. was founded on genocide, slavery, and racism. Its goal was to abolish the existing capitalist America and build a new society. One element of this was destroying the justice system. The Black Panthers’ manifesto thus called for the release of all black men who were incarcerated, no matter for what crime.
As Rufo writes, “[Communist Angela] Davis and her comrades began to call not for the release of individual criminals, but for the abolition of the entire system.” Davis said that “a society without racism … has to be a society without prisons.”
The Black Lives Matter organization adopted the same agenda of “abolition.” The mobs that destroyed a police station and looted Minneapolis in 2020 shouted, “Abolish the police, then the prisons.” The “abolitionist” activists in the Seattle CHAZ commune wanted to abolish the police, prisons, and courts.
BLM founder Patrisse Cullors was crystal clear in this Harvard Law Review essay from 2019: “Abolition means no borders. Abolition means no Border Patrol. Abolition means no Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” America is the source of world evil, in her view, and thus has no right to exist as a nation state nor keep anyone in the world from entering its borders.
Some Biden administration officials seem to share this core belief. Avideh Moussavian, a senior appointee at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, tweeted “#abolishICE” in 2018 and “cut ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] funding” in 2019.
Another Biden appointee, Claire Trickler-McNulty, undermined ICE from within before leaving for a nongovernmental organization partly funded by the Vera Institute for Justice. The Vera Institute says, “The U.S. immigration system is an arrest-to-deportation pipeline rooted in racism,” wants no detention of people in the U.S. illegally, and grants millions to nongovernmental organizations defending illegal immigrants.
“Abolition” ideology also has clear links with today’s campus support of Hamas. Take a look at this course taught at Columbia University this Spring by professor Mohamed Abdou, titled “Decolonial-Queerness and Abolition in SWAN.” SWANA likely stands for South West Asian and North African people. A sentence from the course description sums it up:
Using intersectional/assemblage-based theories, what decolonial, gender-based readings and formulations of feminisms/queerness exist that evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTQIA categories that characterizes most (non)Euro-American political queer-feminist scholarship beyond the depiction of queer BIPOC as co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of ‘Gay Empire’ towards elucidating critical discussions on identity, agency, subjectivity, and dissidence?
Parents are paying $90,000 a year for their kids to learn that kind of balderdash. But even if you can’t make any sense of that sentence, you can be sure of what Abdou means by “abolition.”
Columbia University now resembles Gaza as designed by outdoor equipment retailer Eastern Mountain Sports. Meanwhile at Princeton University, students briefly set up a camp last week “in solidarity with Gaza to protest Princeton’s role in funding the ongoing genocide,” according to organizers Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta was among faculty who signed a letter supporting the Princeton students and boycotting Columbia University. He is a “classics” professor who calls his field “equal parts vampire and cannibal” and the foundation of white supremacy, and argues that it should be abolished.
Peralta came from the Dominican Republic as a child, and his family overstayed their visas and became illegal immigrants. Leftist academics such as Peralta do not like nations or borders any more than they do classical antiquity. In his book “Undocumented,” Peralta wrote, “Demography is a b**ch. Holla at me if you want me to break it down for you.” By this, Peralta implies that without immigration enforcement, the “global majority”—defined here as everyone but white Europeans—will be able to dominate every country.
What we’re seeing at the southern border and on college campuses comes from the same ideological roots and ends the same way: anarchy.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration
Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants
My Look Inside Biden’s Illegal Immigrant Catch-and-Release Craziness
What I Saw on My Latest Visit to the Border
You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time About Immigration
The post The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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