The Senate’s anti-immigration warrior
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) has emerged as one of the most stalwart supporters of immigration enforcement and restrictions on immigration in Congress. This POLITICO story profiles his current immigration advocacy and opines that, in the recent fight over Department of Homeland Security funding, Sessions “became Capitol Hill’s agitator-in-chief.” Sessions rallied his party in the standoff that ended with GOP capitulation. The senator is moving on to his next immigration crusade: attacking high-skilled immigration.
Senator Sessions’ website summarizes his immigration stance as follows:
“Defending American Workers
Senator Sessions is committed to meaningful comprehensive immigration reform that will restore the rule of law, secure the border and the workplace, and promote the long term national interests of the United States by allowing the best and the brightest to come to America.
Sessions was a leading opponent to the flawed comprehensive immigration bill that was rejected by the America people last year. It failed because it lacked real enforcement, compromised our security, provided a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, and did not serve the national interest. The Senate bill would have granted amnesty to the entire illegal alien population, only sought to reduce illegality at the border by 13 percent and would cost the taxpayer $30 billion in just 10 years.
Senator Sessions believes that Congress can and must do better. Before reforms can be implemented, however, Congress and the President must regain the confidence and trust of the American people. To help earn that trust, Senator Sessions recently asked the President to “show that the federal government is serious about reducing illegal immigration” and challenged Presidential candidates to commit to a series of specific actions to restore law and order to America’s broken immigration system.”
In January, Senator Sessions distributed to his congressional colleagues an Immigration Handbook for a New Republican Majority. The handbook at the outset states its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform:
“`Immigration reform‘ may be the single most abused phrase in the English language. It has become a legislative honorific almost exclusively reserved for proposals which benefit everyone but actual American citizens.”
KJ