Exclusive–Kat Cammack: GOP Immigration Policies Should Put Americans First

Neil MunroJanuary 16, 2022

Florida GOP Rep. Kat Cammack wants to be a leader on migration policy in the House, and she’s working hard to get there.

“We need to — for the first time in a long time — put America first and that means putting Americans first,” she told Breitbart News on January 10. She continued:

We’re going to need leaders in Congress who are willing to have an honest, candid discussion about what we want for our immigration system.

There are a lot of hard truths that need to be exposed. I think that corporate America is is going to really have to come to the table and understand that they can no longer profit off of the cheap labor, and really we’re going to have to do the tough thing, which is completely revamp our immigration system.

That has to happen and it should have happened decades ago, but much like so many other issues in Washington, — entitlements [for example] — people are too scared to touch it. They think it’s too controversial, too politically tough to get across the finish line. Quite frankly, the ones that are “too tough to get across the finish lines” are the ones we need to be addressing.

But first, the GOP has to win the 2022 elections and prevent further damage during President Joe Biden’s tenure, she said:

I am very confident — very, very confident — that we will not only have that opportunity in November …[and] that come January 2023, you are going to see a [GOP legislators’] conference execute on an agenda in a more efficient, effective manner than people have ever seen.

Cammack is young. She grew up in Colorado and now represents an inland district in Florida. “I come from a different perspective, being a millennial, having a little bit more of a longer-term approach and vision on this,” said. “It’s typically my generation today that deals with all of the decisions that Congress has made.”

She holds seats on the Homeland Security Committee and the Agriculture Committee, which is important to the agricultural producers in her district. her bio says:

Kat … grew up on a cattle ranch and she understands the hard work and determination it takes to run a small business, navigating labor challenges, interpreting regulation, and more. A proud alumnus of the Naval War College, Kat knows the issues and constituents of Florida’s 3rd intimately, having served as the longtime former deputy chief of staff for the district prior to her election in 2020.

An Obama-era program forced Kat’s family to lose their cattle ranch in 2011, evicting them from their home and livelihood. After months of homelessness, Kat was motivated to fight back against the failures of big government and dedicated her life’s work to becoming part of the solution in Washington. Representative Cammack fights for Florida’s 3rd District to ensure no other family has to endure what hers experienced.

Cammack spoke with Breitbart News about the multiple pressures on legislators — including her responsibility to help job seekers and blueberry-growing employers in her own district — within the nationwide migration chaos created by Biden’s deputies.

In the runup to the 2022 campaign, Republicans are developing draft legislation on border security for passage in 2023, she said.

In the short term after the 2022 election, she said, the GOP will concentrate on the border chaos and the migrant inflow through the myriad loopholes being cut in the border by Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “There’s absolutely the short term vision on this which everyone has talked about, ” she said, continuing:

We need to secure the borders. How do we do that? Well, I think the Republicans have a three-step plan that we will actually be able to get done [in 2023]. That includes a suite of different legislative options — we really do have a full slate of very good pieces of legislation that are common sense, that will fly through Congress.

At that point, Biden will have to make a decision with all these various pieces of legislation sitting on his desk. Is he going to listen to the overwhelming calls from the American people to secure the border? Because at that point, they will have sent a very strong message by flipping the House — overwhelmingly — and the Senate — that they want to secure borders, and they do not like illegal immigration. He’s going to have to make the decision if he’s going to play ball. That is on him.

But in addition to us sending these bills to his desk, we have the ability to put a pause on the purse strings, and we will absolutely bleed dry his legislative agenda, make him a lame duck, and redirect the resources to the border patrol agents and CBP and DHS in areas that they have been begging for resources. That is something that is absolutely well within our purview.

But then the thing that I think is most exciting here in the short term that Republicans are going to do is — for the first time in a long time — we’re going to hold people accountable. My eye in particular is on Secretary Mayorkas.

He has lied to Congress. He has sat in front of my committee and told me three separate times on three different occasions that he believes that the border is secure and that there has never been better handling of this immigration crisis. We all know that that’s not true. We know that the data and the statistics speak for themselves and he is someone who has repeatedly — and continues to this day — lie, mislead, and is putting people at risk because of his actions.

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Mayorkas is using his power in the agency to cut open more loopholes in the border, so he can quietly import more migrants without media coverage. “Jim Jordan and I — Jim being the incoming chairman of judiciary once we take the House back — both agree that this is a huge, huge priority,’ Cammack said. “When you have someone like Jim Jordan leading that committee, these loopholes will absolutely be exposed and we will be pushing back on that.”

Cammack is part of a business-based party whose leaders — including Rep. Kevin McCarthy and retiring Rep. John Katko — are loath to talk about the pocketbook impact of migration on Americans.

Such pocketbook debates and legislation could win swing voters — especially in heartland states — and also deflate the Democrats’ perpetual claims of “Racism!” But first, the GOP would have to alienate donors by campaigning on pro-American, wealth-shifting, lower-migration policies.

Instead, the GOP leadership has long used migration to boost the election-day turnout of their base voters with talk of illegal migration, amnesty, crime, chaos, and the border wall. “Backing the border wall allows them to triangulate, telling voters they want to stop the flood of migrants while reassuring business that they won’t stop them from hiring those who get through,” said an op-ed by Henry Olsen at the Washington Post.

When Republicans regain the House, we’ll get America back on track by
→ Stopping the flow of drugs & human trafficking on our border
→ Making it easier to start & grow a business in America
→ Re-establishing America’s energy independence
→ Passing a Parent’s Bill of Rights pic.twitter.com/V349kq90de

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) January 9, 2022

The same don’t-mention-the-migration-money policy is followed by GOP Senators. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the Senate GOP’s 2022 campaign chief, told Fox News on January 11:

I think we’ll take back the House. I think we’ll take back the Senate. Now, when we do, we have to govern. We have to say we’re going to reduce taxes, reduce regulation, stop having government run our lives, secure our border. I mean, there are so many things we have to do, and you just can’t imagine. Biden has been president for a year, and look at what has gone on. It is horrible for families across the country.

President George W. Bush’s business-first GOP is gone. Instead, the GOP now zig-zags as GOP politicians frequently shift positions or dodge issues to avoid alienating voters or donors.

Breitbart News reported January 13:

GOP leader Kevin McCarthy used an interview with establishment outlet Axios.com to reaffirm his populist promises to Breitbart News of pro-American immigration, economic, and technology policies.

“On immigration: McCarthy reiterated to Axios his recent pledge to Breitbart’s Matt Boyle — that he’ll not consider any legislation offering legal status to undocumented immigrants, preemptively ruling out comprehensive immigration reform,” said the January 13 report in Axios, which is headlined “McCarthy’s plot to build the House of Trump.”

“Yes, more enforcement at the border, making life better for small businesses, securing American energy independence, and enforcing parental choice are good and absolutely necessary policy goals,” responded Rachel Bovard, the policy director at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “But they also represent the absolute baseline expectations that voters should have from an even marginally competent Republican party,” she wrote, adding:

Republicans need to present an actually compelling policy vision — one in which the party is prepared to deliver tangible policy relief to conservative voters who are beleaguered by a host of new threats, ranging from the large and impersonal forces of deindustrialization and globalization to the intensely local damage inflicted on families by the petty corporate tyranny of public health czars.

Some Republicans are pushing that broader vision. Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), for example, has drafted bills to begin a pro-America, and pro-American, immigration reform.

Migration moves money, and so the federal government since at least 1990 has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.

That economic strategy is harmful to ordinary Americans: It cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs. The strategy also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the GOP’s heartland states. The economic policy radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

“The American people hate Biden’s immigration policies, but they distrust the Republican Party because the GOP continues to ignore the pocketbook issue of immigration’s impact on American wages,” one migration activist told Breitbart News. He continued:

The winning issue [for the GOP] is to highlight the reality that legal and illegal immigration at high levels in the workforce is just as much of a threat to the well-being of American voters as the border crisis … It will be a missed opportunity for the GOP to not highlight the need to tighten immigration restrictions as part of the 2022 campaign cycle. The Republicans will lose their legitimacy to make a real claim in 2024 if they only focus on the border in 2022.

In the 2022 campaign, Cammack does emphasize the poll-tested talking points pushed by GOP leaders.
“The American people are so overwhelmed today with crisis after crisis after crisis. You can’t turn on the news, you can’t walk down the street without a reminder of the failures of this administration … We need to have a very succinct message and plan that we put forward,” she told Breitbart News:

We all know that this administration has turned every town in America into a border town. When you look at what illegal immigration does, it’s not just what’s happening at the border, it’s what’s happening in our communities: More adults today have died from fentanyl than they have from cancer. That is a direct tie back to what is happening at the southwest border. The fentanyl that has been pouring into our communities is killing people at historic, record rates.

When you look at the crime that is taking place, we in my own district, in my own region, we’ve had homicides, we’ve had burglaries, we’ve had assaults, we’ve had rapes, and we can pinpoint back to when people have been dropped off in the middle of the night and they have gone to ICE — ICE had to release them because they’ve been directed to — and local law enforcement can’t detain them because they are at risk for getting sued for unlawful detention. So there’s the crime element that continues to permeate throughout.

Then you look at the economics of it. Illegal immigration inputs a direct strain on our healthcare system because a lot of people end up using hospitals as primary care. And you look at the education system — many of our schools are having to hire teachers that speak Spanish because these [foreign] kids are being put into classrooms with no resources and no ability to speak English. So you can look at it from many different directions.

The pro-American migration activist responded:

If they only focus on the border issue and [do not talk about] the economic harm that immigration causes on the American workforce, then there will be no incentive [in 2023] to pass any form of legislation to force a [presidential] veto, or to force tough votes [on Democrat legislators]. Then once the presidential campaign cycle kicks in [during 2023], the donor class will take over [the GOP leadership] and the [immigration pocketbook] narrative will be completely shut down.

“This is the election cycle to make a point on legal immigration [and] illegal immigration harming the American pocketbook,” he said.