A supposedly moderate Democrat says his “biggest desire” is to grant amnesty to millions of wage-cutting illegal migrants.
“My biggest desire, my biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now, is I want to legalize seven or eight or nine or 10 million people in our country, so they will not be subject to deportation,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) told an audience in a speech spotlighted by the Republican National Committee.
Suozzi is often described as in the establishment media as a moderate. But his desire for mass amnesty is driven by ideological support for foreigners instead of Americans and by pressure from progressive economic planners and profit-maximizing business groups.
“People often ask me why I care so much about immigration,” he wrote in an August 2025 essay, adding:
Immigration is personal for me. I look at America through the lens of the immigrant story — the story of my family, and the story of the American dream.
My father came to this country as an infant. His parents — my grandparents — came from Italy with nothing. And yet, through hard work and devotion to family, they built a life here. Their son went to law school on the GI bill after serving in World War II, rising to become a mayor and a State Supreme Court justice. Their grandson is a member of the United States Congress.
Many other Democrats emotionally favor migrants above Americans. This emotional skew is especially strong among Democrats with many migrants in their districts.
Sympathy for migrants over citizens and their children is also common among GOP politicians. For example, retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) posted a September 25 op-ed in the Washington Post lamenting the successful deportation of an illegal migrant:
I tried to help her. In August, I detailed Mariana’s case in the Omaha World-Herald. I personally talked with the secretary of Homeland Security about her situation, and my office exhausted every avenue available to us to prevent her departure. None of it was enough.
Suozzi’s emotional support for migrants — not citizens — is also backed up by progressives’ eagerness to use migrants for progressive economic priorities such as economic redistribution, regardless of the damage to ordinary citizens.
For example, in January 2026, Suozzi complained that wages are rising because of President Donald Trump’s deportations and his low-migration economic policies:
We have to expand the [progressive] Affordability Agenda beyond just health insurance… We have to look at all the different factors, even the immigration policy, where we have a million and a half less people in the workforce right now, it’s causing more overtime and having to hire people at higher wages. These are all upward pressure[s] on people’s prices.
Rising wages help Americans and their families but hurt progressives because they reduce voters’ interest in progressive-style economic planning and redistribution.
Rising wages are also uncomfortable for establishment Republicans because they anger donors by deflating the profits and stock prices of profitable companies.
Bacon echoed this concern in his op-ed:
We are doing [deportations] at the exact moment the country can least afford to lose workers… Without immigration, our workforce shrinks, and we are pushing out the people who could help fill the gap.
…
There are practical fixes right in front of Congress. I have worked closely with nearly 40 of my colleagues on the bipartisan Dignity Act, which secures the border while giving people who are already here, working and following the rules, a lawful way to stay. But such efforts struggle to gain real traction in a Congress locked into an us-versus-them posture. This does not get fixed unless the parties work together.
The “Dignity Act” would provide a huge inflow of “cheap labor” for employers, says its chief advocate, Rep. Marcia Salazar (R-FL).
Though Suozzi is repeatedly described by the establishment media as a “moderate,” his migration policy is a close match for President Joe Biden’s radical policies.
In September 2024, Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, explained how he used migration to grow the national Gross Domestic Product regardless of the impact on migrants or Americans’ wages and housing:
We look to the north, with Canada. Canada takes a look at its market needs, and it says, “You know what? We need 700,000 foreign workers to address our labor needs domestically.” And, so, they build a visa system for that year to address the current market condition. And they say, “We’re going to bring in a million people.” And it’s market-sensitive.
We [in the United States] are dealing with numerical caps on labor-driven visas that were set in 1996. It’s 2024. The world has changed. It is remarkable how there can be [elite] agreement that [the visas system] is broken and not have an agreement on a solution. The country is suffering as a result of it.
Living standards in Canada have been wrecked by the high-migration policies pushed by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Under Biden, Mayorkas imported roughly 10 million inadmissible migrants. The inflow suppressed wages, spiked housing costs, inflated the stock market, reduced births — and also helped Trump get elected on a mandate to deport millions of illegal migrants.
In contrast, Trump’s policies are creating opportunities for Americans:
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