JOE GUZZARDI: Troubling details of Build Back Better bill being hidden

While a disbelieving nation is focused on the endless border crisis, more immigration sleight of hand is ongoing in Washington. Cloaked in Congress-speak, the troubling details of the Build Back Better Act are being hidden from a bad-news weary public.

The National Border Patrol Council’s Rio Grande Valley chapter vice president Chris Cabrera told Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) that the widely cited 400,000 “got-aways” represents a significant undercount. The total number of aliens who evaded border patrol detection is, Cabrera said, “at least twice if not three times that number,” as many as 1.2 million illegal immigrants. Add the 1.2 million not tallied to those among the 1.7 million caught and released in fiscal year 2021, and all of a sudden, the U.S. has a new population roughly the equivalent size of Phoenix, the country’s fifth largest city.

The border crisis is public, seen in its full inglorious detail on the nightly news. Congress’ immigration shenanigans occur behind closed doors and are incomprehensible to nonimmigration lawyers. Nevertheless, the open borders and Capitol Hill wrangling have the same goal: a huge, nation-altering immigration increase.

Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough rejected amnesty Plans “A” and “B,” concluding each time that transformative immigration changes don’t belong in budget reconciliation legislation. That should have ended the amnesty discussion. But, undeterred, expansionist Democratic senators have nevertheless stealthily included provisions in Biden’s bill that will significantly increase legal immigration and subsequent chain migration.

Writing for the Center for Immigration Studies, Robert Law, a former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official, noted that pro-expansion advocates have tried to hide the reconciliation bill’s massive immigration increases through “an accounting scam,” commonly known as “visa recapture.”