Vote Notes: H.R.4760, Securing America's Future Act of 2018

Statement

It's been another most interesting day here on Capitol Hill.

I've had a lot of colleagues coming up to me based on the president's different comments of this week and subsequent tweets...but I'll leave that issue alone for now, and accordingly, I just wanted to write on the immigration bill that came before us this afternoon.

We were originally going to have a vote on the so-called Goodlatte bill...and if that failed, a subsequent vote on a compromise bill that amounted to a watered down version of the original Goodlatte bill.

The Goodlatte bill came up, and it failed 193 to 231.

I voted for it, as it represented the most conservative option of the different options that will be offered in the House on immigration. The compromise bill has been pulled for the evening, though I suspect it will likely come up for a vote tomorrow or next week.

If I were to boil the Goodlatte bill down, it trades border security and internal enforcement of immigration policy in for an agreement on the so-called DACA recipients.

The agreement would allow current recipients to stay in this country based on three year renewable visas. It's not permanent citizenship, or even a pathway to citizenship that is different from other people seeking to become Americans. And I recognize that many conservatives think that even this is a bridge too far in offering DACA recipients any sort of deal.

But, this is where the tradeoffs of politics become real because this issue has festered since the mid-1980s with no resolution. There is now a Republican House, Senate, and White House...and if some kind of deal isn't struck now on border security, I'm not sure what kind of deal one will get if one of these bodies was to flip to the other side.

It's for this reason that groups as strong in their views on the importance of border security and limited immigration as Numbers USA were in support of the Goodlatte bill.

I say this because in exchange for the deal on DACA, conservatives would get many different wins. They would get $24.8 billion for border security and the wall. They would get mandatory E-Verify so that if someone attempted employment without American citizenship, they would be detected. They would get defunding of sanctuary cities. They would get an end to chain migration. They would get a reallocation of the visa lottery, which now consists of 55,000 people...to instead have these lottery slots dedicated to high-skilled employment-based workforce categories. They would get a change in law to prevent the current debacle that we've witnessed with families being separated on the borders. The administration has now reversed itself based on the PR, but this is a serious issue that I think does require a legislative remedy so that we can be robust in border enforcement while at the same time holding sacred our shared belief in the importance of the family unit. They would get a new ag guest worker visa, as well as a number of other things vital to better administering the immigration system now in place in this country.

Tom Rice stood up before the conference this week and made the point that he could live with the compromise bill...the bill that was to come after the Goodlatte bill, if it did more in internal immigration enforcement and did more on moving us from a family-based immigration system to a skill-based immigration system.

Let's examine for one second both of those tenants.

Supply equals demand. If we don't have serious internal immigration enforcement, you can't build a wall high enough, a moat deep enough, or a net big enough to hold enough people out if there's enough demand for their skills. This is why E-Verify is so important. In fact, two-thirds of our illegal immigration problem is driven by visa overstays rather than people crossing the border. This makes internal enforcement vital, and this is one of the key features that came with the Goodlatte bill.

The other thing that we have to move toward is a system of migration that's built around the needs of our country and making us more competitive as a society rather than nothing more than family reformation. Currently, our system is built around the latter. But, what's fascinating here is that a country like Canada has 53% of its immigration based on high-skilled people bringing something to the table as they immigrate. In Australia, it's 63%. In Finland and Japan, it's over 50%.

Currently, in the United States, it's about 12%...which is even far below the OECD average on skilled immigration that is over 20%.

My point in all this is that if we can get to a point of border security, and we can get to robust internal enforcement of our immigration laws, I think that the trade-off would be worth it. And again, it's important to note that some of the most robust guardians on immigration reform have agreed with this opinion.

Unfortunately, the Goodlatte bill didn't pass, and so a more watered down version will come to us most likely tomorrow, and I will report back as it does.

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