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Biden’s Policies Endanger the U.S. Far More Than One Hamas-Supporting Immigration Official


BY: JOY PULLMANN | OCTOBER 19, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/19/bidens-policies-endanger-the-u-s-far-more-than-one-hamas-supporting-immigration-official/

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On Oct. 18, the intrepid Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak outed a former Palestinian spokeswoman and open Hamas supporter as an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tasked with “vetting” immigrants and asylum seekers. He followed up to report Nejwa Ali is now on administrative leave — no word on whether that includes full pay and benefits.

Of course, it’s a no-brainer that someone who supports terrorism should not be employed by any national security agency, let alone given the power to determine who enters the U.S. At the same time, suspending Ali while probably still paying her is just a symbol, while the underlying policy of ushering across our border people who hate America remains firm. It’s tokenism.

Just consider the fact that Ali’s fellow DHS employees donated 70 percent of their 2020 political contributions to Democrats. If she does end up out of this job, the odds are another person who hates America will replace her. Democrats as a party now openly state their hatred for America by constantly smearing it as “racist” and “oppressive.” Their immigration policies admit similarly-minded people, starting with the reality that anyone who enters this country illegally thereby demonstrates contempt for the United States and its people.

Ali’s own history is more proof. Rosiak writes that Ali “is from Dearborn, Michigan, a hotbed of unassimilated immigrants where thousands reportedly took to the streets in support of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.” Dearborn’s mayor immediately responded to Hamas’s barbaric attacks on unarmed women and children by blaming…Israel.

Dearborn is approximately half comprised of immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. Their immigration poses obvious national security concerns given the propensity of these groups to favor and excuse terrorism, as Mayor Abdullah Hammoud did. Not surprisingly, to anyone who knows politics, Dearborn is considered a “Democrat stronghold” in Michigan, a presidential election swing state.

Hamas is committed to eradicating Jews. It’s rational to suspect they would send members to the United States to perpetrate atrocities here. With immigration and asylum vetters like Ali, they wouldn’t even have to avoid getting caught crossing our open southern border, as millions of border crossers have since Joe Biden took office. They can turn themselves in, get released inside the United States, and stay indefinitely. Eventually, they can even get citizenship!

This isn’t speculation. Border authorities are aware terrorists have gained access to the United States, and an open border only makes their goals easier to achieve. Terrorists here have already formed sleeper cells, and not only against Jewish targets.

As Todd Bensman reported in 2020, “Iranian avengers, in the form of Quds Force-supported Hezbollah operatives of the clandestine ‘Unit 910,’ are stationed in cities across America, set to activate pending distant command on target lists they have painstakingly developed over time. Hezbollah operatives also are positioned throughout Latin America, where American officials and economic interests are ubiquitous.”

A September DHS report notes that, due to historic increases in illegal U.S. entrances during Biden’s presidency, U.S. officials have “encountered a growing number of individuals in the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS), also known as the ‘watchlist.’” Obviously, those are the potential terrorists border officials encounter. Since Biden took office, they’ve watched an estimated 1.2 million enter they haven’t been able to apprehend. Exactly who was in that group, and what were their motives? We have no idea.

HOW ABOUT ALL THE “GOT AWAYS”??????? How many of them could be these Hamas plants determined to continue their quest for America’s destruction?

Of course, we also don’t know how many people U.S. officials haven’t detected who entered the United States across its completely unenforced border. Democrats’ open border is a national security disaster, and it’s far more dangerous than one open terrorist supporter vetting immigrants.

This same tokenism dynamic also applies to Biden himself. Getting rid of him, whether through internal Democrat struggle sessions or the publicly decaying man’s nearing natural death, will not solve America’s problems. It will be merely a symbol change instead of an underlying reality change if he’s replaced with someone who runs similar policies.

The policies that have led to our nation’s failure on multiple fronts are the problem, not the figureheads representing them. Our national security is in danger not through random accidents but because of failing to enforce our immigration laws and politicizing the U.S. military. Those are policy choices. So are engaging in noncritical foreign wars, trying to inflate away our bankrupt welfare state’s increasing piles of debt, and setting up moral hierarchies between Americans based on their skin color and sexual activities.

The policies are the problem, no matter who fronts them. Although it’s the right thing to do, merely getting rid of Ali and replacing her with another college-educated America-hater solves no underlying problems. Neither does getting rid of Biden and replacing him with another leftist like Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom.

The underlying problem is the systemic America hatred that fuels people like Ali and Biden and places their ideology in positions of power. Their threat to us all begins to end with prioritizing America’s legitimate interests over the left’s nihilistic self-hatred.


Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

It’s No Accident the Southern Border Is Collapsing, It’s Intentional


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/21/its-no-accident-the-southern-border-is-collapsing-its-intentional/

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A clip of comedian Louis C.K. on the Joe Rogan show has been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) this week in which he goes on and on about how opening up the southern border would be a good thing because Americans shouldn’t have such a high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, how poor people in other countries just want what Americans have, and how it’s not fair that we have so much. “It shouldn’t be so great here,” he says. So, open the border and let them pour in.

It’s possible he’s joking, that it’s just a comedy bit he’s practicing. That’s what my friend Inez Stepman thinks. Get liberals to nod along in agreement and then expose the consequences of such an insane idea. You can judge for yourself:

I don’t think it comes off as a joke but as an almost perfect distillation of globalist liberalism. Louis C.K. cannot fathom why Americans should have a say about who comes into their country and who does not. He clearly has no real allegiance to his country or countrymen, and is actually embarrassed by their prosperity — and presumably his own as well.

There is nothing special about America, according to this view, and no reason the rest of the world should not enjoy her ill-gotten riches. Opening the border is the least we could do for the cause of justice.

Whether it’s a joke or not, the substance of what Louis C.K. articulates is the logical endpoint of leftist ideology. It’s what the mainstream left actually believes — and the Biden administration has been actively working to accomplish at the southern border. 

This week, the border began collapsing completely in south Texas. Over five days, about 45,000 people illegally crossed the Rio Grande near the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas, population 28,000. In one especially active 24-hour period, nearly 10,000 people forded the river.

Customs and Border Protection shut down two international bridges to deal with the crisis. The mayor of Eagle Pass, Rolando Salinas, declared an emergency on Wednesday, it seems with good reason. He told The New York Post that the surge of illegal immigrants, most of them single adult men from Venezuela, has swamped the city’s only migrant shelter. Many of them, says Salinas, “don’t want to listen to instructions.” He added, “Not all of them come in peace.” 

Bill Melugin of Fox News has been in Eagle Pass this week posting jaw-dropping videos and images of the influx, which sure enough consists of mostly single adult men. The lines stretch over the river and along both banks as far as the eye can see. Whatever you think of the border and U.S. immigration policy, this is shocking.

All of it recalls the mass encampment of some 15,000 Haitians under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, two years ago. At the time, images of what looked like a refugee camp you might see in a war-torn country dominated several news cycles, goading the Biden administration to disband the encampment and deport a small number of Haitians as a warning to others. Most of them fled back across the Rio Grande rather than face being deported to Haiti, a country they had left years ago for better jobs in South America (which countries they in turn left for better jobs in the United States).

But notice how the illegal immigrants in Melugin’s footage are walking calmly, not running, not trying to evade Border Patrol. They show every indication they believe they will not be detained long.

And of course they’re right. It’s impossible for federal authorities to detain this many people arriving within such a short timeframe. There is simply nowhere to put them.

A soft-sided facility erected by Customs and Border Protection that could house about 2,000 quickly reached capacity early in the week, leaving federal officials little choice but to parole mass numbers of illegal immigrants and release them from custody on their own recognizance. They are now making their way to points all across the United States. The vast majority of them will stay for good.

This is not a mistake or a mishap, the unintended result of an ill-considered policy. This is intentional. Flooding the border with illegal immigrants is the actual policy.

When White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeats the talking point that President Biden has “done more than anyone else” to secure the border and deal with illegal immigration, as she did again last week, what she really means is that under Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, uncontrolled illegal immigration is not something federal officials are trying to stop, it’s something they’re trying to facilitate and manage.

The numbers tell the tale. Nearly six million people have been arrested crossing into the United States illegally since Biden took office. Millions more have gotten in without being caught. About 200,000 are arrested every month. They are coming in such great numbers because they know that if they can get across the river they’ll be allowed to stay. Under Biden, there is almost no chance of being deported. It’s not more complicated than that.

That brings us back to Louis C.K.’s comments and the ideology from which they spring. Deterring illegal immigration is a policy you pursue only if you believe foreign nationals do not automatically have a right to enter the United States simply because they want a better life. Borders are something you enforce only if you believe you have a duty to your fellow citizens and the nation at large to protect the country and safeguard its way of life.

Biden and Mayorkas and the ruling elite in this country do not believe these things. They believe a borderless world is better, that the United States does not belong to the American people, to whom they feel no particular allegiance.

To quote Louis C.K., they believe it shouldn’t be so great here. And they’re determined to make it so.


John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

United Nations Grantee Uses U.S. Tax Dollars To Fund Illegal Immigration


Reported By Todd Bensman | DECEMBER 16, 2021

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/16/united-nations-grantee-uses-u-s-tax-dollars-to-fund-illegal-immigration/

AUSTIN, Texas – During a recent trip to a Reynosa, Mexico migrant camp, I took photos of a United Nations-supported International Organization for Migration (IOM) operation to hand out cash debit cards to intending and repeat border crossers. One of two workers at a plastic folding table inside the Reynosa camp, which was filled to capacity with at least 1,200 mostly U.S.-expelled Central Americans, said they were distributing the cards for IOM to help migrants waiting until they cross the Rio Grande at greater leisure to claim asylum, for which most will be declared ineligible years later. Many parents, for instance, got about $400 every 15 days, I was told, or $800 a month if they were still there to collect it, although the support level varied.

My photos of this posted to Twitter and related dispatch for the Center for Immigration Studies drew outrage among some Republican lawmakers. They saw the images as evidence that the U.S. taxpayer-funded IOM was providing material support to an ongoing mass migration harmful to America’s national interest.

A couple of weeks later, Texas Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, and 11 other House Republican co-sponsors introduced the No Tax Dollars for the United Nations Immigration Invasion Act bill. It would prohibit the $3.8 billion in contributions currently proposed in the White House 2022 budget to the IOM and other UN-supported organizations. A Daily Caller story that broke news of the bill’s introduction quoted Gooden citing my Reynosa photos.

When I took the photos, I wasn’t exactly sure of exactly what I was seeing in Reynosa. But here’s what I have learned since: The money card is confirmed beyond doubt, but also “hard cash in envelopes” and “movement assistance”; and an online IOM “Emergency Manual” describes what I saw as part of a program it terms “Cash-Based Interventions,” or CBIs.

A plastic IOM cash card given to an aspiring border-crossing migrant in Reynosa, Mexico on November 20. Photo by Todd Bensman.

Paying People Who Illegally Enter the United States

So, for starters, country-specific IOM “Cash Working Groups” are indeed coordinating the handouts of the cash-holding plastic cards I saw (referred to as prepaid debit cards, e-wallets and e-cards) to intending U.S. border crossers in Reynosa, Mexico. But it turns out that is just an iceberg tip. The IOM is handing out cash and other material support to intending illegal border crossers in as many as 100 other shelters it helped build, expand, or supports from Central America north. Some form of this has been around for years, but starting with a mass-migration event and Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy in 2019, the IOM supercharged the program and “institutionalized” it. This doubled the countries where it is used in 2020 and increased by 77 percent the number of recipients to 1.6 million worldwide, according to an annual 2020 IOM report. That would include Mexico.

The IOM Emergency Manual document says this cash assistance also includes less-seeable bank transfers, mobile transfers, and e-vouchers that go to intending illegal border crossers en route or at least temporarily blocked like many of those I saw and interviewed in Reynosa. In addition to those and the pre-paid plastic cards, the IOM says in its Emergency Manual that it also sometimes hands out “cash in envelopes (hard cash).” No details are offered on that. Many payments are given as “unconditional; unrestricted cash transfers” for “multi-purpose use,” the manual says. Still other handouts subsidize the lodging, rent, and utilities of intending border crossers for “safe tenure, to reduce the risk of forced eviction.”

Start Tapping U.S. Taxpayers Before You Get There

Then there is “movement assistance” in the form of conditional or unrestricted cash transfers. The IOM describes this money as providing transportation access after, say a camp is closed, but also simply “to sites and other situations related to onward movement of population.”

To border hawks, all of this looks, feels, and acts like an agency providing the means for illegal border crossings. The IOM’s own stated purpose for cash-based interventions would only reinforce the perception: the money is intended to “restore feelings of choice and empowerment for beneficiaries.”

Migrant advocates defend cash support to aspiring illegal border crossers as a means to prevent death and suffering among populations they believe have no choice but to migrate and would whether or not any UN agency helps out. But the legitimate flip side of that claim is that cash in envelopes or in e-wallets—filled in part by U.S. taxpayer money—can also be said to enable, sustain, or even entice many driven not by urgent dangers but by a desire for better jobs amid reports that Americans would let them in.

Spending U.S. Money to Encourage ‘Invasion’

An aggravating irony among the fast-expanding coterie of Republican congressional critics of the UN largesse is that U.S. taxpayer money is being spent in contravention of American immigration law and national interest in controlling the border against economic migration.

“All of this sounds like they’re using U.S. tax dollars to encourage this invasion into the nation, and it seems strange to me that we would support an organization that encourages and funds this,” Gooden told me. “It’s totally crazy. I am baffled that there’s not more outrage, but I think the lack of outrage is due to the lack of knowledge.”

While it may be true that IOM money relieves the suffering of intending border crossers, it is just as arguably true that it creates financial breathing room they need to prepare for more opportune crossing moments. The money enables that highly desired payoff, rather than a forced trip home for lack of funds after, say, an expensive smuggling journey that ended with U.S. expulsion. Those ones arrive in villages with a deterring don’t-try-this message to friends and neighbors.

Regarding the importance of such messaging in the development of mass migration crises, I’ve never met one who didn’t carry a cell phone connected to Internet social media. In interviews with perhaps hundreds of migrants in Mexico and beyond, I learned that this live-time social media grapevine constantly sings with news from the trail upstream that directly informs decisions downstream as to whether to launch north or remain in place. So when word of these IOM cash, lodging, and transportation benefits spreads via social media to hometowns, friends and relatives undoubtedly feel more emboldened to invest smuggling money for their own journeys to UN waystations. Because of all this, monthly IOM cash for food, lodging, and “movement” assistance amounts to material support for illegal immigration. It influences decisions to cross.

Increasing U.S. Cash Support for Illegal Immigration

It’s unclear just how much the United States gives IOM to sustain intending border crossers until they succeed, or how many got some during 2021. But the cash giveaways have been on a steep skyward trajectory since 2019 and only show signs of continuing upward.

The public reporting as to how much the United States, through the State Department, gives IOM and how many got it is opaque at best. President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget calls for $10 billion in humanitarian assistance “to support vulnerable people abroad.” But there’s no detailed breakout.

A Fiscal Year 2019 summary (starting page 37) by the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), which provides U.S. funding to the IOM and many other United Nations agencies, offers one clue of the pre-expansion levels. IOM spent more than $60 million in 2019 for activities in the northern part of South America, Central America, and Mexico during the so-called “caravan migrant crisis” earlier that year, the fiscal year report said.

State Department-funneled money helped IOM provide 29,000 people in the Western Hemisphere with cash and voucher assistance and supported 75 shelter waystations, the State Department report states on page 42, much like the one I visited in Reynosa. Along the northern border of Mexico in July 2019, at the height of a “caravan” crisis, the IOM provided 600 beds and essential items to the Mexican government and helped it expand existing shelters and build new ones to accommodate the “asylum seekers.”

This came as a response to the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” turn-back policy. That deported economic migrants trying to abuse the asylum system, while others chose to wait for Democrats to take the White House in November 2020—a sound bet, it turned out.

The IOM decided to increase the size and scope of the program after 2019, even after President Biden took office and ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The extent is unclear, but the IOM institutionalized cash handout programs in Panama, El Salvador, and Mexico in 2020. Ambiguously, the IOM’s annual 2020 report on the program showed only that it gave cash to somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people in Mexico that year.

Whatever the recipient numbers since 2019, the IOM clearly intends an upward trajectory for the cash giveaways. The IOM’s Emergency Manual stated several times it would do so in alignment with a fairly recent pact among an international consortium of organizations known as The Grand Bargain, of which the IOM is a signatory. The Grand Bargain pact dates to 2016.

An Inter-Agency Standing Committee Grand Bargain website reports that number 3 on the objectives list is Increase the use and coordination of cash-based programming.” A November 26, 2021 Grand Bargain caucus on cash coordination had all principals agree to increase the use of cash “beyond current low levels” through the use of even more means of delivery.

The section’s first line starts out using familiar language seen in the IOM’s Emergency Manual: “Using cash helps deliver greater choice and empowerment to affected people…”

Here’s the problem: with the greater choice and empowerment that IOM money can buy, aspiring migrants are able to remain within striking distance of the southern border to choose the time of their inevitable illegal border crossings. No one should wonder why border hawks hate this system and open borders advocates love it.

Ann Coulter Letter: “Immigration — Hey, Look! A Cop Yelling at a Black Girl in a Bikini!”


waving flagBy  Ann Coulter  | 

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://humanevents.com/2015/06/10/immigration-hey-look-a-cop-yelling-at-a-black-girl-in-a-bikini/?utm_source=coulterdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Immigration -- Hey, Look! A Cop Yelling at a Black Girl in a Bikini!

 I’m impressed by the coolness and steadiness of our media in suppressing any news about immigration. It’s as if they’ve built a triple-layer fence with border guards around immigration topics. And guess what? Their fence is working!

How many thousands of news stories have there been on Ferguson, ISIS, Chris Christie’s “Bridgegate” or men becoming women? 

But the media will never tell you about Mexicans gang-raping a lesbian in Richmond, California, an Indian immigrant in San Francisco importing 12-year-old girls he bought from their parents for sex, or three children being beheaded by Mexicans in Baltimore.

Don’t Americans have a right to know about the cultures flooding into our country?

This isn’t a natural transformation. It is purely the result of government policy. But our media don’t care to discuss the issue. In fact, they get mad whenever Americans find out what they’re doing with immigration. When Americans do think about immigration, they’re against it. In polls earlier this year, more Americans had a favorable opinion of North Korea than wanted to increase immigration. That’s why the media’s approach to immigration is to never talk about it.

Three times in the last decade, Democrats and Republicans conspired to grant illegal aliens amnesty. All three times, the American people rose up in blind rage and shut it down. The only way they were tipped off to the proposed amnesties was through the hard work of about three bloggers, four talk-radio hosts and the Drudge Report. What will happen if Matt Drudge ever goes on vacation? (Answer: You’ll be living in Mexico.)Only Reason

The media will make absolutely sure we know about every immigrant who wins a spelling bee. It’s either important to know about who’s immigrating to this country or it’s not. If it’s important, then we have a right to be told not only about the spelling bee champions, but also about the child rapes, genital mutilations, welfare use and Medicaid scams of our recent immigrants.

But the media’s position is: If we don’t talk about immigration, it doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately, they’re right. Most people think about only what the media want them to think about. Everyone has developed a position on Ferguson, ISIS and gay marriage. This week, everyone has a position on a policeman’s confrontation with a black girl in a bikini at a pool party in Texas.Picture4

But no one is supposed to have an opinion about who gets to live, collect government benefits and vote in this country.

Whatever issue you think is more important than immigration, you’re wrong. Without our post-1965 immigration policy, Obama would never have been elected president. That means no Obamacare, no withdrawal of every last troop from Iraq, no playing footsie with the Iranians, no Eric Holder, no Fast and Furious, no IRS harassment of tea party groups, no Benghazi massacre — and on and on and on.

Democrats haven’t been able to persuade a majority of white people to vote for them in any presidential election since 1948, except the aberrational Democratic landslide in 1964. That’s why they had to bring in ringers. In addition to giving the Democrats tens of millions of new voters, our immigration policies have also brought in people who engage in charming traditional practices such as genital mutilations.Only Reason

In 2006, an Ethiopian immigrant living in Lawrenceville, Georgia, tried to cut off his 2-year-old daughter’s clitoris with a pair of scissors. The New York Times ran one tiny AP item on his conviction — on Page 19 — titled, “Man Convicted in Daughter’s Mutilation.” (Always look for “Man” in the headline to find the most appalling stories about immigrants.)

Thanks to decades of mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East, it is estimated that at least half a million girls living in the United States have been subjected to genital mutilation. (And that’s just one of the many ways immigrants are making our country more vibrant!)Picture5

One white male, Bruce Jenner, merely contemplates voluntary genital mutilation and gets 10,000 times more media attention than the hundreds of thousands of “American” girls being involuntarily subjected to this practice.

When it comes to immigration, you’ll only hear

  • “Diversity is a strength,”
  • “Immigration is fantastic for the economy,”
  • “Polls show Americans overwhelmingly support a ‘path to legalization’” —
  • pay no attention to the outpouring of hostility every time an amnesty bill comes up — and “Oh, look! An immigrant valedictorian!”Liberalism a mental disorder 2

The media don’t need to run this scam forever. Democrats only need to keep it going until they have California-style majorities in every state, and then they’ll say, “Screw you, America. We did this deliberately, and now there’s nothing you can do about it.”Party of Deciet and lies

That’s exactly what the Labour government of Tony Blair did — as we found out in 2009. In public, Blair’s government claimed that the mass immigration of the Third World to Britain was absolutely crucial to the economy! Once they were out of office, Blair adviser Andrew Neather admitted that their real objective had been “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,” as the London Telegraph reported in 2009. That’s one way of winning elections. It’s cheating, but it works!Buying votes

Here in the U.S., Republicans aren’t even fighting back. First of all, the GOP’s big donors want the cheap labor. True, the country will be ruined, but business owners will be able to make a pile first — and then retire. Evidently, elected Republicans ran the numbers and realized that the GOP won’t be completely wiped out for a few more years, and by then, they’ll all be retired.

Apres moi, le deluge.

(Noticeably, the younger, smarter Republicans are all on America’s side on immigration: Sens. Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, and Rep. Dave Brat.)

If necessary, political and media elites will call you a “racist” for opposing their mass immigration policies. But they’d really rather that you just not find out what they’re doing to the country.freedom combo 2

Exclusive — GOP Pollster: Scott Walker’s Bold New Pro-American Immigration Position ‘Winning Hand’ Against Hillary Clinton


 waving flagby Matthew Boyle, 21 Apr 2015, Washington, DC

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s new populist pro-American worker position on immigration is “absolutely the winning hand” against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a general election should he decide to run for president and wins the GOP primary, GOP pollster Kelly Anne Conway of The Polling Company told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

Conway said of Walker:

The left will try to caricature him as union-busting, as anti-worker. This gives him the opportunity to say ‘if you’re for amnesty, you’re anti-worker. What I am is pro-worker. It is anti government corruption. Having public sector union members expect Wisconsin taxpayers pay 100 percent of their benefits, that wasn’t fair.’ It’s a matter of fairness. Allow him to explain all of that as pro-worker not anti-worker and if he can do that he’ll be fine. Also, this gives him a distinction among a Republican field that’s getting increasingly crowded. This allows him to be seen as a working-class, populist hero—a working class governor who’s a natural populist, it’s just a natural fit. I don’t know if Mitt Romney could have pulled this off. Then you fast forward and you think of this idea versus Hillary Clinton—if she even has anything to say on immigration—this is the winning hand. This is absolutely the winning hand.

Walker this week rolled out a newly strengthened position on immigration, one that focuses on protecting American workers’ job prospects and wages from a massive influx in either legal or illegal immigration. Conway said this wasn’t a flip-flop, but a “natural transformation” on a difficult issue by Walker, in line his “pro-worker, pro-fairness mantra that propelled him to win three elections in four years and propelled him to national recognition in the conservative movement.” Conway has done significant polling on this issue, polling that has been subsequently confirmed by everyone from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) to Gallup and more. Conway said:

2016 will be a process of elimination. Instead of saying which one or two are going to get the most support, the question really is which ones will be left standing a year from now. The one thing I can guarantee you as to who those will be is that they will all be on the right side, on the pro-worker side—the American worker side—of immigration. There will be absolutely nobody who has supported amnesty, there will be nobody talking about a path to citizenship who is a credible presidential nominee. The thing is we’ve been active in these early states really with polling and focus groups. When you look at the numbers from that poll [from last August], that’s nationwide data. This issue is that much more magnified and amplified among Republican primary and caucus-goers in these early states. It is top shelf issue and they see it melding together fairness, opportunity, pro-worker, pro-American, economic stimulus for the local areas.

Conway continued by noting that voters “literally see this as the right way to go” and, while she thinks “Gov. Walker was being dogged a little bit by his past of  a Ted Kennedy like immigration plan, it’s an incredibly bold move but an incredibly smart move as well, because it puts him more in line with where Republican primary and caucus voters in early states are on this issue.” She went on to say:

It will be a top three-to-five issue and it will play well in the debate. Marco Rubio would be in second place right now if it were not for his being on the wrong side of this very recently. If you look at the straw poll we did at CPAC and you look at other polling we’ve done since, nationwide and in these early states, we don’t just ask Republican primary voters and caucus goers what are your number one and number two issues. We also ask them do you have any deal breakers and the biggest deal breakers for Republican primary voters right now are if you expanded Medicaid through Obamacare, if they embrace amnesty or comprehensive immigration reform which is the same thing to them, or if they embrace Common Core. The top two—it’s not gay marriage by the way, and it’s not if you’re going to raise taxes—the top deal breakers right now for Republican primary voters are if you expanded Medicaid through Obamacare and you favor a comprehensive immigration reform slash amnesty position on immigration.

For Walker—the guy who took on organized labor in their own backyard and won—Conway argues that this new populist position on immigration is “a natural fit.” She also says that it’s likely to help him not just in the Republican primary but in the general election:

It is one of those rare issues that is a clear winner in both the Republican primaries and caucuses, and then in the general election as well. Our polling shows independents and even many Democrats support newly created jobs going to U.S.-born Americans and legal immigrants. It has bipartisan support because job losses are bipartisan. Support for a pro-American immigration policy has earned bipartisan support because job losses have been bipartisan in nature. In fact, many of these private sector union households have lost their jobs in construction and manufacturing and a lot healthcare based job losses because of Obamacare. Everybody is feeling the pinch either as a direct stakeholder or second hand surrogate and worried about job losses and this is one of the biggest solutions. If I’m looking for a job, why are we giving preference to non-U.S.-born workers?

Conway added that self-identified liberals are the only people among whom there is not a majority of voters who want politicians to have Walker’s position. Democrats, Republicans, independents, and conservatives all support his position. Conway added:

While I’m sure Gov. Walker is not doing this as a Republican primary ploy—it seems like a real change of heart while reviewing the data and thinking through the realities of job losses in his home state, in the rust belt area and indeed across the country—the only people who disagree are liberals. Democrats are on board, Republicans and conservatives are on board so are independents. If you look at the data, only liberals say Obama should go it alone on amnesty and liberals are less likely than Democrats, Republicans and independents pro-American immigration policy. But so what? That’s 18 percent of the country. Whoopee.

Part of the reason why Conway thinks the political class—everyone from the liberal media to the Institutional Left to the establishment right to even some liberal GOP senators—is attacking Walker is because he’s exposing several false inside-the-beltway premises about immigration:

It is a completely and utterly false premise that somehow agreeing to comprehensive immigration reform and supporting Obama’s amnesty will somehow win Republicans back votes. I would point out to all the establishment types descending on Gov. Walker that they’re on the wrong side of the issue for many reasons. Look at what happened in 2014. In 2014, Republicans did not pass comprehensive immigration reform and they won big. They bolstered their majority in the House, won the Senate, several governorships and legislatures. And they improved their rates among Hispanics by 8 percent over Mitt Romney in 2012, so it blew out of the water this false premise that to win Hispanic votes we must go for comprehensive immigration reform and look the other way when Obama does executive amnesty and not try to defund it.

Specifically to Sen. John Thune (R-SD)—who attacked what Walker said without attacking him directly, joining a bandwagon led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)—Conway noted that what Walker is saying would poll much better than what Thune is saying when it comes to immigration:

If you put Gov. Walker’s statements and Sen. Thune’s statements side-by-side, Walker’s statements are much more popular to the majority of Americans. Why? People are tired of hearing the arrogant and elitist and fantasy of a few billionaires and the quotes like illegal immigrants are doing jobs that Americans won’t do. Americans are saying ‘I want a chance to do those jobs but I want to do them for more than $5 an hour under the table.’ There are many Americans who do want to do those jobs and the vast majority of Americans who do should be given the opportunity to compete for those jobs.

Conway expects that if Walker is elected president, he’ll actually stick to his guns and implement an immigration policy that serves the national interest along the lines of what Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has been calling for:

That’s his track record and if he wants to be a two-term president he will. If he continues emphatically on this track with his change of heart to be pro American worker, he will go ahead and implement it because it’s a job creator. You have Republicans running around saying ‘we’re job creators, we’re job creators.’ Great. This is the ultimate job creator: The ability to allow Americans, which includes by the way high-skilled two and four year college graduates and a lot of these American jobs are not coming back toward manufacturing, construction, retail. For these men and women, the idea that they lost their job and they now have to compete for a replacement job with illegal immigrants who are willing to take $5 an hour under the table. I think he can be a real hero to working men and women and it seems to me that this is a natural expansion of his pro-worker, pro-fairness mantle that has helped him win elections among working class men and women—three elections in four years—but also try to further the national conversation on this issue.

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