The Republican Study Committee (RSC) has released its yearly proposal for the federal budget. In the proposal, the group specifies the policy points and ideological considerations informing its prescription for a budget that enables the U.S. government to spend prudently and for the benefit of its citizens.
In this year’s proposed budget, keen attention is focused on the crisis currently engulfing the southern border. The document promulgates reforms designed to ameliorate the flaws in the current immigration system which cause it to benefit big business and wealthy investors and transform the system so that it promotes the safety and economic opportunity of gainfully employed American citizens and immigrants already in the country legally.
The RSC, which was founded in 1973, is the largest and, arguably, the most prominent ideological caucus in the U.S. Congress. It is made up of 153 Republicans, and focuses on developing a “strong, principled legislative agenda that will limit government, strengthen our national defense, boost America’s economy, preserve traditional values and balance our budget.”
NumbersUSA, a leading non-partisan immigrant-reduction organization, has issued a statement strongly supporting the RSC’s budget.
“The Republican Study Committee’s Fiscal Year 2022 Budget is a bold statement of hope to the millions of working-class American citizens and lawful residents that our immigration system should serve your interests, not undercut them,” the statement reads. “We are thrilled to see the RSC call for reshaping the immigration system to protect national security, economic opportunity, and the rule of law.”
As a grassroots advocacy group, NumbersUSA works with its members to lobby policymakers on immigration related issues, with a goal of supporting immigration policy that focuses on reducing immigration levels to historical averages. The group contends that excessive immigration harms the quality of life of existing citizens and legal immigrants and threatens environmental sustainability.
In the budget, the RSC recommends terminating chain migration and the visa lottery and making changes to reform birthright citizenship so that children born in the U.S. only gain automatic citizenship if born to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. The budget also advocates that sanctuary cities be defunded, E-Verify be made mandatory, visa overstays and asylum fraud be ended, and improvements made to border security.
Support for these policies is echoed on the NumbersUSA website. In its statement, the group strongly backs the RSC’s proposed budget, stating: “Combined, these policies would fundamentally rewrite our immigration system for the better. They would reform the legal immigration system to reflect the Barbara Jordan Commission recommendations by focusing immigration policy on nuclear family and those with needed skills.”
The statement also speaks favorably of the budget for endorsing policies ensuring that jobs in America would be filled by Americans and legal foreign workers rather than illegal aliens. By withholding taxpayer funding from jurisdictions that allow the release of convicted criminal aliens into local communities where they can victimize additional people, the budget’s policies would foster safer communities. Additionally, the statement holds, they would be a significant factor in solving the crisis at the border created by Biden’s policies.
“NumbersUSA applauds Chairman Banks, Chairman Hern, the Leadership and Membership of the RSC, and their staff for having the courage to stand squarely with the American people.”
According to the RSC, “U.S. immigration policy should be designed to primarily serve the interest of American citizens, families, and workers.”
The RSC identifies four fundamental principles to be used in attempting to design such a policy:
- Immigration policy should protect our national security by protecting the American people from terrorism, cartels, and other threats to their safety;
- Immigration policy should prioritize American workers, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents;
- Immigration policy should respect the rule of law, along with immigrants that honor our legal immigration processes, rather than incentivize law breaking; and
- Immigration policy should aim to assimilate legal immigrants into the American family so they too can take pride in our values, history, and heritage.
According to the NumbersUSA statement, the RSC appears to realize that the principles they espouse conflict with the actions and words of the Biden Administration, which has “rolled out the welcome mat to all who would illegally cross into the United States.”
As a result, the RSC’s budget highlights the damage caused by this approach using statistics to tell the story:
- At 136,679, the average monthly illegal crossings of the Southwest border since Biden took office is 142% higher than the average of 56,420 during this time period averaged over the three full fiscal years Trump was in office after beginning to secure the border. In certain sectors, encounters are up over 368% since last year.
- According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the number of illegal aliens that cross the border and then disappear into the interior of the country is up 156%.
- Some of Biden’s holding cages for kids were at 1556% capacity, and he denied Congress and the press access to these facilities.
The RSC budget, in addition to exposing the pernicious effects of the Biden Administration’s failed immigration policy, also offers suggestions for taking concrete steps to remedy the situation. These include passing a variety of bills that have already been introduced in Congress and ideological measures for which bills have not yet been drawn up.
The initial recommendation provided by the RSC is that the federal government should understand how vital it is to prohibit the overstay of temporary visas by aliens – a significant contributor of illegal immigration into the country. Unfortunately, according to the NumbersUSA statement, the current administration has announced that it will discontinue the policy of fining aliens who stay beyond their visa expiration date and eliminate any past penalties owed by aliens who overstayed their visas.
According to the RSC, rewarding illegal aliens for breaking the law causes a cycle that only encourages more illegal immigration and must be solved via “rigorous enforcement” of the law. The RSC budget also recommends adding additional immigration judge teams in order to deal with backlogs and improve the country’s ability to secure its borders and ports of entry. In addition to recommending that all employers be required to use E-Verify to ensure a prospective employee can legally work in the U.S., the RSC also suggests reforming ‘Birthright Citizenship’ so that it doesn’t serve as a magnet to foreign citizens who enter the country just to give birth here.
What may be the two most important recommendations relating to immigration policy in the RSC’s alternative budget, according to NumbersUSA, are terminating the Diversity Visa Lottery, which arbitrarily offers 55,000 visas a year to individuals without considering whether they have valuable skills the country can use and ending Family-Chain Migration.
The committee decries the practice of using Chain Migration to bring distantly related relatives into the country. “In F.Y. 2019,” the alternative budget states, “68.8% of new immigrants came in through chain migration, and only 13.5% came in as prospective employees.”
The RSC budget concludes by endorsing 10 bills that have been introduced in the House of Representatives that aim to improve the country’s immigration laws by building a wall on the border and closing asylum loopholes, among other immigration-related initiatives.
About NumbersUSA
NumbersUSA, based in Washington D.C. and Arlington, Virginia, is the largest grassroots organization focused on immigration reduction in the U.S. The nonpartisan group has more than eight million participants including conservatives, liberals and moderates. Its members are encouraged to persuade public officials that the country stands to benefit from reducing immigration numbers toward traditional levels, thereby enabling current and future generations to enjoy a standard of living that isn’t negatively impacted by excessive immigration numbers.