As President Donald Trump’s DACA deadline passed on Monday, the putatively conservative Koch Brothers are working overtime to keep the dream alive.
The LIBRE Initiative – a Koch-funded group launched to “empower the U.S. Hispanic community” – has produced ads portraying beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as “patriots.”
“We love our country, our way of life, and we sacrifice and fight to defend it,” the ad begins, narrated by the voice of a DACA illegal alien. “We work hard, put food on the table, care for our families, and we pledge allegiance to this flag. We are patriots. We are DREAMers.”
While congressional Democrats insist on a sweeping amnesty for illegal aliens, the Kochs are pressuring their bankrolled Republicans to make a deal. But the gauzy DACA story doesn’t wash – and lawmakers know it.
Congressional hearings and the Congressional Budget Office have painted a less-dreamy portrait:
- One in five are projected to end up on food stamps.
- One in seven will be on Medicaid.
This profile of dependency seems at odds with the “free market” Kochs. But strip away the patina of patriotism, and their corporatist agenda of cheap imported labor and immigrant-fueled population growth is exposed.
A DACA amnesty – pairing chain migration and anchor babies — has the potential to legalize 3 million illegal aliens to legally compete against Americans for working- and middle-class jobs.
The Kochs are either willfully ignorant of the negative effects of amnesty, or simply don’t care. They are similarly dismissive of the dangerously weak vetting of DACA applicants. Since President Obama created the program by executive order, more than 2,100 DACA recipients have been removed for criminal acts or gang membership.
No amount of flag waving can nullify these inconvenient facts.
The Kochs’ departure from conservative political principles may do little to enhance their brand, but it should be enough to call their true allegiances into question.
In a March 5 blog, Koched Up on DACA, FAIR incorrectly reported that 71 percent of DACA recipients live in government subsidized housing. That 71 percent figure was incorrectly derived from research by Harvard scholar Roberto G. Gonzales, presented at the Oct. 3, 2017 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, showing that 73 percent of DACA recipients he surveyed live in a low-income household (defined as qualifying for free lunch in high school). No official accounting or estimate of public housing assistance to DACA beneficiaries has been released.