As good as it is that the House rejected the Securing America's Future Act (Securing it for whom? From whom?), it's absurd that 193 Republicans voted for the most anti-immigrant bill in a century. Only 41 voted no & 5 did b/c it wasn't anti enough! clerk.house.gov/evs/2018/roll2…
This means roughly 85% of Republicans are firmly in the anti-immigrant camp. And “anti-immigrant” and “in a century” are not exaggerations. Forget illegal immigration. This bill would have cut *legal* immigration by nearly 40% almost immediately cato.org/blog/house-gop…
It would have voided the applications of more than 3 million people who have waited for the opportunity to immigrate to the United States legally for more than a decade, and in many cases, more than two decades (pp. 15-17). 
This gives the lie to the entire notion that the purpose of the bill was to prevent *illegal* immigration. If you want people to immigrate legally, you’d make it easier for them to do so, and you wouldn’t pull the rug out from under them after they waited decades to come.
The bill would criminalize every single infraction of immigration law. Not updating your address would be criminal. It is mind-blowing how many criminals this provision would create overnight. But that’s the goal: to be able to call immigrants criminals cato.org/blog/securing-…
Imagine how many families would be separated under a Trump administration empowered with a law that criminalized every infraction of immigration law. It would be zero tolerance on steroids. It would overwhelm our justice system, and for what? Who benefits?
The bill would make it nearly impossible for immigrants coming to the border to receive asylum, essentially requiring them to prove their claims at the border (after having fled thousands of miles without access to witnesses, evidence, or lawyers). reason.com/archives/2017/…
The bill subordinates conservative principle to the anti-immigrant cause. Its provisions targeting sanctuary cities attack federalism as furiously as it is possible to conceive. (This post analyzes an earlier bill included in this one) cato.org/blog/no-sanctu…
Just to highlight one other particularly awful aspect of these provisions. It would ban U.S. citizens wrongfully detained by states at ICE’s request from holding their local police liable in court, essentially undermining local accountability for constitutional violations
The bill would have enacted possibly the broadest labor regulation in history (E-Verify), with complex requirements on every single employer and every single worker in the entire country. Here’s my analysis of the bill that this bill incorporated cato.org/publications/p…
And in exchange for all this? We get the phoniest, puniest Dreamer legalization possible, w/ no pathway to citizenship & where the 10% of Dreamers who could legalize are criminalized if they fall into poverty (thanks to the violation of status provision) cato.org/blog/house-gop…
Rather than asking Dreamers as Americans, most Republicans see them as criminals to be watched and monitored for the rest of their lives
Sadly, the 36 moderate Republicans response to this is to cut legal immigration just 10 or 12 percent instead of 40, and provide a pathway to citizenship, but not for very many Dreamers. cato.org/blog/some-good…
For as long as I've worked on this issue, I believed many Republicans would, at a minimum, defend legal immigrants, but at the end of the day, the illegal-legal line is apparently not the underlying motivation.
