Top Republican Senators: Joe Biden’s $106 Billion Ukraine Aid Plan Hides a Migrant ‘Magnet’

Biden Zelensky Border
Nick Ut/Getty Images, AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s request for $106 billion in emergency military aid to Ukraine and Israel includes a hidden magnet for more migration that would expose American communities to more poverty, drugs, and terror threats, say Republican senators.

“When we looked at this emergency supplemental … [we found it] continues to facilitate the mass migration that we see across our border,” Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) told a December 7 press conference. “It was yet more of a magnet to draw more and more people here!”

“You can’t throw money at it” if you want to stop the migration, said Sen. John Thune (R-SD). “This requires changes in policy that change the signals that we’re sending to people who are coming across the border illegally, and the magnets that are out there that keep pulling them [across the border].”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) dismissed the Democrats’ $14 billion migrant magnet as merely “funding to address the symptoms” of Biden’s open border.

“The symptoms are a New York mayor saying it’s out of control [and] Chicago saying they’ve had too many people sleeping in tents and cold conditions. He [requested] money to address the symptoms. We’re here to fix the problem,” he said.

RELATED — NYC Mayor Eric Adams: Migrant Crisis Will Destroy New York City

The senators held their December 7 press event to explain to Democrat-enthralled reporters why they voted on Thursday against the massive spending bill that included $14 billion for the border plus $92 billion in military aid for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.

The event was also used to reassure the GOP’s 2024 voters that the GOP senators are not faking their opposition to the migrant spending and will not crack under relentless closed-door pressure from GOP donors, pro-migrant media, and ruthless Democrat senators.

But the GOP senators have a long history of “failure theater” — faking opposition while gradually allowing Democrats to win — that advocates will have to maintain pressure on the GOP for many months to beat, one advocate warned Breitbart News.

The GOP press event was also used to torpedo the White House’s media-echoed narrative that Republicans are recklessly endangering Ukraine and Israel by blocking the aid to win “radical” border changes for “petty” political reasons.

In reality, Democrats are holding the $90 billion in military aid hostage until they can get ten GOP senators to vote for their $14 billion magnet plan that would fly and bus more illegals into the United States.

WATCH — GOP Senators on Biden’s Border Plan: “It’s a Magnet”

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The GOP senators would have voted en masse against the migrant magnet plan if Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had tried to pass it through the Senate without the military aid. “Giving the Biden Admin more money to fuel its disastrous open-borders resettlement operation is insanity,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said in October. “It would worsen the border crisis, not stop it,” he tweeted.

Democrats paired the magnet bill with the war funding because they needed ten votes from GOP senators to pass the magnet bill. They hoped to get those ten votes by delaying military aid for Israel and Ukraine until ten GOP senators switched sides.

That strategy reveals that Democrats view their magnet bill as a higher political priority than aid for Ukraine and Israel — contrary to their media-echoed narrative.

But the plan failed Thursday when all Republicans voted against the funding package.

“I care about Ukraine’s homeland Security; I care about Israel’s homeland security,” responded Tillis, one of the most pro-migration GOP senators and one of the four GOP senators negotiating a deal with Democrats. “But it would be immoral for me to put those two ahead of what I think is a clear and present threat to our homeland security.”

“I will not go back to South Carolina and try to explain why I helped Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel and did nothing to secure our own border,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is the top GOP member of the Senate’s judiciary committee and usually a cheerleader for more migration. “I will help all of our allies, but we’ve got to help ourselves first,” he added.

In 2013 and 2014, Graham pushed the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill that would have further flooded the U.S. labor market for at least ten years. But amid Biden’s migrant flood, he has suddenly moved to the center, and he used the press event to repeatedly slam Biden’s open-borders policy.

WATCH:

Republicans slammed Biden’s open-border policy as a deliberate policy choice that is bad for national security, drug deaths, terror threats, and pocketbook economics.

“The president is the enforcer of the laws,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who holds the title of senator pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, putting him third in line to replace the president. Biden “has decided not to enforce these laws because he believes in an open border.”

“Republicans are dead serious about solving Biden’s border crisis as part of a national security debate that we’re having on the floor of the Senate right now,” said Thune, the GOP’s whip and the top deputy — and potential successor – to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

“I’ve been to six different high schools where parents are grieving, having lost their child to fentanyl poisoning,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who is another leading candidate to succeed McConnell.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) sketched the pocketbook cost to Americans, noting that Biden’s migration “puts strain on jobs and wages for American workers, for schools, hospital systems, and housing.” Cotton is an important voice because he is on the working group with Tillis that is trying to craft a deal with Biden’s deputies.

Outside the Senate, more establishment GOP figures are making a populist case against Biden’s mass migration. Citizens’ wages and wealth are shrinking, their credit card bills and rents are rising, and their adult children are less able to afford homes because Biden’s extraction migration policy skews the U.S. economy in favor of investors, CEOs, and migrants.

“Americans are being pushed aside for Biden’s illegal immigrants,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) noted on December 6. “Parents and other citizens in communities being impoverished by the Biden illegal immigration policy should be invited to testify about the ways in which the Biden administration is making their lives more difficult.”

The GOP senators also showed the reporters that they understand the legal loopholes Biden’s deputies are using to import 12,000 illegal migrants per day. That inflow is greater than the daily number of U.S. births.

“We have 12,000 illegal migrants crossing every day because he abuses our asylum laws [and] because he extends parole to vast groups of people as opposed to [migrants on] a case-by-case basis,” said Cotton. “He could implement policies tomorrow that would not just substantially reduce but almost entirely stop the flow of illegal migrants … He has shown no willingness to stand up to the radical left in his party.”

A reporter asked what the GOP would trade for a deal, such as an amnesty. “Nothing, nothing [that would] incentivize more illegal migration,” Graham replied vehemently, adding, “Right now, legalizing people incentivizes [more] poor people to come … No legalization. Secure the border to get money for Ukraine, to get money for Israel, and to help Taiwan. Secure the border before we get attacked.”

Cornyn noted that the GOP gained leverage because Biden’s deputies linked the migrant magnet bill with the wartime funding:

President Biden has been unmoved to work with us to try to come up with a solution, but now we have found something that provides us the opportunity to force him to do something that they’ve been unwilling to do until this point. And we intend to do everything we can to make sure that these policies are put in place to stem the flow of illegal immigration in our country — along with all the other problems that go along with it.

Unwilling “Democrats have to change their [migrants welcome] messaging, or we will not survive as a nation,” Graham told another reporter:

Here’s what I tell my Democratic colleagues: “You want to please [the far-left progressive] people that literally want the border to stay open in an unlimited fashion [even though] 76 percent of Americans would like to see the border secure?”

[They ask] “How can I sell this to my caucus?” Here’s what you need to sell to your caucus: “On your watch, on the Biden administration’s watch, the largest amount of illegal crossing is occurring daily. We’re on track to 10 million illegal immigrants in the first four years of the Biden administration. The threats to the country to an all-time high.” What do you get? You get a secure nation if you work with us.

“It’s like pulling teeth talking to these [Democrat] guys,” Graham said.

A reporter told Graham that Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) had earlier described the border problem as a traffic jam that could be solved by more processing at the border. Graham replied:

These negotiations should end because he doesn’t understand [the migration crisis]. It is hard to fix a problem if he doesn’t understand what it’s all about. If he thinks 12,000 people are coming here because we’re under-resourced, that’s insane. They’re coming here because they believe once they get here they will never leave under Biden … It is about policy choice, not resources.

“None of us who are supportive of Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan can vote on a supplemental because you’re making us pick countries abroad over our own homeland security,” said Graham. “Everybody behind me will vote for aid to Ukraine if we can get the border right.”

Biden’s economic policy of extraction migration has pulled at least four million foreign workers into the nation’s workplaces.

Business groups urge and welcome that flood because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. It also reduces marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, heartland states, and overseas markets and reduces economic pressure on the federal government to deal with the drug and “Deaths of Despair” crises.

Biden’s easy-migration policies are deliberately adding the foreigners’ problems to the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.

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