Republican Senator Wants to "Unleash" Migrants Into Economy
Sen. Kevin Cramer is the odd Senate Republican still talking about the economic benefits of legal migration (AUDIO).
“No there isn't [an update]. The only update I'd say is in light of the southern border issues. It's been very hard for me to get very many people's attention on the legal immigration side and that’s really too bad,” Cramer told Capitol Press in a follow-up interview this week about the Eagle Act, a bipartisan immigration bill the North Dakota Republican introduced on November 13, 2023.
CRICKETS. So far, the bill has all of 3 cosponsors. The last senator to co-sponsor was Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) on December 12, 2023. Which is to say this bill is going nowhere fast in the Senate.
BACK STORY. Eagle Act is the brainchild of Immigration Voice, a non-profit co-founded by Daily Caller co-founder Neil Patel and Aman Kapoor, an obscure businessman. The legislation has seen migrant relief sweeteners added to the bill over a decade of negotiations with trade associations and other stakeholders. But the bill’s original premise and laser focus is redistributing to the rest of the world (ROW) the burden of impossibly long wait times applicants from India face for family- and work-based green cards.
igrants from India can wait decades for permanent status due to a 7% cap on how many total green cards can go to a single country’s migrants. Because a vast majority of migrants applying for permanent status in the family - and (especially) the work-based categories are from India, they get screwed.
Critics of the Eagle Act are quick to point out that phasing out country caps doesn’t really create any winners (policy sweeteners not withstanding), only more losers. In short, Eagle Act would have ROW stuck in the same impossible plight as Indians who, in turn, will still face impossibly long wait times when the policy is enacted a decade after final passage.
The underlying rationale for jamming every nation’s family and work-based green card applicants is, according to Immigration Voice members, that if white European migrants have to wait decades for green cards, it will eventually force changes. Here’s the point/counterpoint—
On the one hand, advocates have a point. White migrants have historically held a preferred status among policymakers in Congress.
On the other hand, the bill’s incredibly cynical premise ignores the frequency of policy carveouts for white migrants. CBS News reported just this week that Ukrainian migrants will benefit from another low-key resettlement program that sits conspicuously above scorched earth fear-mongering from the right.
That’s what makes Cramer’s clear-eyed advocacy for the green card backlog so remarkable. In the Capitol echo chamber of invasion narratives casting non-white migrant “military-aged males” as national security threats, Cramer stands out in the Senate.
“If you could unleash half a million of the million legal immigrants per year into the economy with a skill that's in high demand, you’d take away the greatest inhibitor to our economy, and that's an available skilled workforce,” said Cramer. Listen to his full response here—