Sessions has never hidden his plan to stop all immigration. He wrote it all down in 2015
by digby
The Department of Justice, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is drafting a plan that would totally overhaul asylum policy in the United States.
Under the plan, people would be barred from getting asylum if they came into the US between ports of entry and were prosecuted for illegal entry. It would also add presumptions that would make it extremely difficult for Central Americans to qualify for asylum, and codify — in an even more restrictive form — an opinion written by Sessions in June that attempted to restrict asylum for victims of domestic and gang violence.
Vox has confirmed that the regulation is in the process of being evaluated, and has seen a copy of a draft of the regulation.
When the regulation is ready, it will be published in the Federal Register as a notice of proposed rulemaking, with 90 days for the public to comment before it’s enacted as a final regulation.
The version Vox saw may change before it’s finalized, or even before the proposal is published in the Federal Register. (The Department of Justice declined to comment.)
But as it exists now, the proposal is a sweeping and thorough revamp of asylum — tightening the screws throughout the asylum process.
One source familiar with the asylum process but not authorized to speak on the record described the proposed changes as “the most severe restrictions on asylum since at least 1965” — when the law that created the current legal immigration system was passed — and “possibly even further back.”
Sessions put out a plan in 2015. I wrote about it during the presidential campaign:
Jeff Sessions had a lot to say about this in his “IMMIGRATION HANDBOOK FOR THE NEW REPUBLICAN MAJORITY” dated January 2015. It’s a fascinating document and well worth reading. It is the perfect example of right-wing populism at its most traditionally xenophobic.
He sets forth a fatuous argument that income inequality is not a result of the tax structure or the concentrated power of wealth but rather the result of immigrants stealing the jobs of natural born Americans:
The last four decades have witnessed the following: a period of record, uncontrolled immigration to the United States; a dramatic rise in the number of persons receiving welfare; and a steep erosion in middle class wages.
But the only “immigration reforms” discussed in Washington are those pushed by interest groups who want to remove what few immigration controls are left in order to expand the record labor supply even further.
The principal economic dilemma of our time is the very large number of people who either are not working at all, or not earning a wage great enough to be financially independent. The surplus of available labor is compounded by the loss of manufacturing jobs due to global competition and reduced demand for workers due to automation. What sense does it make to continue legally importing millions of low-wage workers to fill jobs while sustaining millions of current residents on welfare?
He put it into philosophical and historical perspective:
We need make no apology in rejecting an extreme policy of sustained mass immigration, which the public repudiates and which the best economic evidence tells us undermines wage growth and economic mobility. Here again, the dialect operates in reverse: the “hardliners” are those who refuse even the most modest immigration controls on the heels of four decades of large-scale immigration flows (both legal and illegal), and increased pressures on working families.
Conservativism is by its nature at odds with the extreme, the untested, the ahistorical.
The last large-scale flow of legal immigration (from approximately 1880–1920) was followed by a sustained slowdown that allowed wages to rise, assimilation to occur, and the middle class to emerge.
This is the reason he’s stuck it out no matter how much Trump insults him. This is his legacy project. His life’s work.