Katie Britt won the Alabama GOP Senate primary runoff last night, and one of the main issues she ran on was immigration. Britt has endorsed Senator Tom Cotton’s 2017 RAISE Act, which was a plan to decrease legal immigration by 50 percent. Britt is not the only Republican Senate candidate to come out in favor of stricter immigration policies. Blake Masters, running for the GOP nomination in the Arizona Senate race, wants to triple the size of the Border Patrol, wants to finish the border wall, and opposes all amnesty for illegal aliens. While he has espoused liberal immigration policies in the past, he now pledges to “end illegal immigration.” The winner of the Ohio GOP Senate primary, J. D. Vance, is focusing part of his campaign on illegal immigration, promising changes similar to Masters’s. Yet Vance goes a step further, seeking to overhaul the current legal immigration system: “Millions of people want to come here, and we should only allow them if they contribute something meaningful to our country.” Vance wants to curb the number of legal immigrants coming into the country, prioritizing skilled immigrants. In one of his primary-campaign ads, called, “Are You a Racist?,” Vance said, “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” These Republicans clearly believe immigration is an issue that can drive voters to the polls, even in an election year dominated by inflation and other economic concerns.
The RAISE Act, endorsed by Katie Britt, was a plan pushed by Senator Cotton and former Georgia senator David Perdue in 2017. The bill, reintroduced in 2019 by Cotton and Perdue as well as Senator Josh Hawley (R, Mo.), was pitched as a way to boost job and wage growth, end chain migration, and welcome the highest-skilled immigrants to the country. The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act would cut the number of green cards issued on an annual basis from 1 million to 500,000.
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