Rosemary Jenks, co-founder and policy director of the Immigration Accountability Project (IAP), warns that only Congress has the power to permanently fix America’s immigration system, arguing that presidential actions and executive orders can provide temporary enforcement but are easily reversed.
Jenks, who founded IAP in 2023, explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show that the organization was established to focus exclusively on Congress and the federal administration, as Congress alone, she stressed, has constitutional authority to set immigration law.
She emphasized that executive actions can be reversed, so lasting reform must come through legislation. To support this mission, Jenks said IAP has created a public ranking system that scores all members of Congress based solely on their immigration-related votes, bills, and sponsorships.
“It’s a great resource if you want to know how your member of Congress is doing on immigration, whether they’re doing what they said they were going to do or not,” Jenks noted.
Pivoting to the current immigration challenges facing the nation, Jenks argued that the U.S. is experiencing the negative consequences of decades of mass immigration, particularly when combined with a large welfare system.
She contrasted the current era with the early 20th century, noting that earlier immigrants faced pressure to assimilate and did not have access to government benefits.
“At the turn of the last century, we didn’t have a welfare system, so our government was not stealing our money to give to foreigners who the government let in. The second thing is that people seem to ignore that the greatest time of prosperity in our country was during this time of low immigration after the World Wars. We had the largest growth in the middle class with extremely low immigration. What did Congress do? They came in and opened up the floodgates, and of course we are seeing the impacts of that,” Jenks explained.
“When you combine this massive flood of immigration with a welfare system, you get a disaster,” she added.
Jenks further noted that today’s scale of immigration allows newcomers to live in language- and culture-specific communities without integrating, reducing incentives to assimilate.
This, she said, strains public resources and undermines social cohesion.
“The lack of assimilation is primarily due to the numbers of people we’re letting in, because if the numbers are large enough that an individual alien can find a community in the U.S. where they never have to speak English, they can speak their home language, they never have to go to a grocery store that is an English grocery store. They can go to a local, from their own culture, grocery store, a school that will cater to their language needs and their cultural needs,” she stressed.
Considering the current immigration scene in the U.S., Jenks went on to advocate for a broad temporary halt to immigration proposed by the Pause Act, a bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX-21), which would impose a moratorium on most immigration except tourism until Congress addresses systemic problems.
“We’re at a time right now when what we really need to do is just pause. If your basement is flooding, you don’t start mopping before you turn off the water. We have to turn off the water so that we can clean up the mess,” Jenks said.
“I think it would take at least 10 years for Congress to actually do all the things that [the Pause Act] requires before the moratorium ends,” she added.
Jenks, however, acknowledged that the Pause Act has a low chance of passing in the near term as Congress moves slowly and faces pressure from powerful business interests.
She identified major corporations, agricultural companies, and technology companies as key opponents of an immigration pause, explaining that they benefit from cheap foreign labor and resist policies that would require higher wages for American workers.
Jenks argued that while employers may seek profits, the government’s responsibility is to serve American citizens.
“The government’s job is to serve American citizens,” Jenks said.
“We have to get members of Congress to recognize that they have a duty to all Americans. All Americans are not being served by mass immigration. Mass immigration does in fact make some Americans very wealthy: it serves the elites who can hire cheap workers…It also enriches the immigrants themselves, but it does not help the average American in any way. It hurts the average American,” she added.
Jenks also emphasized that responsibility for the current immigration system lies with Congress, not with immigrants themselves.
“We don’t need to be blaming immigrants for coming in and taking advantage of the system we set up. We need to blame Congress. Congress did this. Congress designed this system. It’s working exactly as Congress designed it. So we need to put the blame where it lies, which is with them,” she said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
