If the proposed bipartisan immigration bill becomes law as it now reads, the Republican Party may never win the White House again, according to Dr. Steven Camarota, Director of Research for the Center for Immigration Studies.
"It's over 40 million new immigrants this bill will admit … [creating] an enormous number of new guest worker programs. Many of these new categories are uncapped, so an unlimited number of people can come in," Camarota told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
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"Is this an unremitting electoral disaster for the Republican Party? Absolutely. The amnesty beneficiaries plus the new immigrants — it's hard to see how the Republicans would ever win another presidential election .
"Everything we know about the political opinions of new immigrants, including Hispanics and non-Hispanics, are that they tend to favor the Democratic Party because the Democrats favor expansive government, and immigrants are in favor of that."
Camarota — whose nonpartisan, research group advocates immigration reduction — said a "very large fraction" of Republicans feel they must support the bill, a bipartisan effort of four Republican and four Democratic lawmakers known as the "Gang of Eight."
"[They] want to vote for something so that they can say they did something. Whether the bill has merits or not, they just want to vote for something. And what this is is a fig leaf. It doesn’t really change anything," he said.
"It's just another promise to add more border patrol agents and fencing, but it doesn’t get at all of the underlying problems – the weakness of the interior enforcement, the fact that legalization and amnesty come before any enforcement . . ."
Gaffney said that alarmingly, the 2006 "Secure Fence Act" passed by Congress in 2006 to erect better barriers at U.S. borders and other immigration control measures have been failures.
"Almost none of it has been done. Congress has five times passed an entry-exit system to keep track of temporary visitors when they come and go from the United States. And this bill, of course, would be a sixth time," he said.
"But every time they pass it, it never gets implemented. Congress drags its feet, it doesn’t allocate the funds, the bureaucracy resists, the administration doesn’t want to do it."
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