Democrats have tried twice before to insert an amnesty provision in their Build Back Better bill, most recently in late September. The House version of the bill includes language that would provide temporary protection from deportation and work permits to illegal aliens who entered the U.S. prior to January 2011. That would cover about 6.5 million illegals.
Related: Is it Offensive to Illegal Aliens to Refer to Them as ‘Illegal Alien’?
But so far, the immigration provision has run into objections from the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who has said the provision fails to fulfill the requirements for reconciliation laid out in the “Byrd Rule.”
The requirements are specific and although Democrats have been trying to massage the language of their immigration provision to meet MacDonough’s objections, they have been unable to shoehorn amnesty into the Build Back Better bill — yet.
Amnesty advocates in the Senate haven’t given up and are hoping the third time is the charm, but the parliamentarian has set the bar very high. Her objections in September were specific.
“This registry proposal is also one in which those persons who are not currently eligible to adjust status under the law (a substantial proportion of the targeted population) would become eligible, which is a weighty policy change and our analysis of this issue is thus largely the same as the LPR proposal,” MacDonough wrote in a response, which was obtained by CNN.
No matter how the Democrats try to slice it, legalizing millions of people — even temporarily — is a consequential policy change that demands congressional review.
A source familiar with the arguments from Democratic aides in favor of the provisions told CNN that because this is their third meeting with the parliamentarian, they have taken the criticism she’s provided for their more detailed immigration provisions and applied that to Plan “C”, or their third argument for immigration provisions that was in the House version of the bill.
The Democrats are offering “parole” to illegals in order to create an entirely new immigration status to meet the objections of the parliamentarian. Theoretically, parole would only last five or ten years. But given the fate of other “temporary” immigration measures, it may as well last forever.
Like the proposal rejected in September, this new amnesty would have wide-ranging legal, social, and economic effects that go far beyond the budgetary matters on which the reconciliation process is supposed to be focused. The Senate parliamentarian probably will (and should) rule the proposal out of order.
But regardless of how the parliamentarian rules, amnesty in one form or another will inevitably be proposed again, so it’s instructive to examine how the CBO has scored this latest proposal. It estimates that the net fiscal impact over ten years will be $124 billion. As I had been warning, however, a ten-year time horizon excludes most of the entitlement costs associated with amnesty. Illegal immigrants generally cannot collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, but many still pay taxes into the system. These taxes are essentially free contributions to our entitlement programs. Once illegal immigrants receive amnesty and become eligible for benefits, however, the free contributions turn into IOUs from taxpayers. Earlier this year, I estimated that the cost of amnesty to Social Security and the hospital insurance portion of Medicare would come to $1 trillion in present value, yet almost all of this cost would occur beyond the CBO’s usual ten-year window.
The Democrats will keep trying to sneak amnesty in though the back door until they are out of power. Hopefully, that will be before they succeed in destroying immigration law entirely.
