Congress Defunds ICE, Opens Door for Migrant Wave
Congress has agreed to shrink funding and detention beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), just as pro-migration groups are warning that a wave of wage-cutting economic migrants will rush north to exploit President-elect Joe Biden’s pro-migration campaign promises.
“Democrats are bragging that they are cutting ICE funding,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA. “They are bragging about making our communities less safe,” she added.
Congress chopped the ICE budget by $107 million below the 2020 level after rejecting a request by outgoing President Donald Trump’s for a $2 billion budget increase.
The cuts will pressure the agency to restart the catch-and-release of economic migrants in 2021, once the number of migrants overwhelms the agency’s reduced budget for detention spaces.
“The bill funds 34,000 detention beds, which is 26,000 beds less than the President’s budget request and 11,274 less than fiscal year 2020,” said a press statement from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the top Democrat on the spending panel.
If ICE does not have enough detention beds, it must release the migrants into the United States, where they will take jobs from Americans to repay their smuggling loans. The loans often use family farms and homes as collateral, putting migrants under extreme pressure to work for wages far below Americans’ levels. This profitable economic process spiked the number of migrants from low levels in 2009 to almost one million in 2019.
“If there is a perception of more-humane policies, you are likely to see an increase of arrivals at the border,” T. Alexander Aleinikoff, the director of the New York-based Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, told the New York Times for a December 13 report, titled “As Biden Prepares to Take Office, a New Rush at the Border.”
Democrats also won extra funding for a non-detention program that allows migrants to take jobs from Americans — typically, from American parents with kids, unfirm or disabled Americans, and Americans with criminal records. “The bill includes $440 million for Alternatives to Detention (ATD), which is approximately $86 million more than the President’s budget request and $120 million more than fiscal year 2020,” said Leahy.
But the ATD spending does create jobs for Democratic political activists under a new $5 million provision allowing the Department of Homeland Security to delegate criminal law enforcement activists to Democrat-aligned political groups. The bill requires “ICE to consider enrollment referrals for the ATD program from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and community partners,” according to Leahy’s statement.
The legislation also attacks the financial stability of the private prison industry by allowing the government to cancel contracts that fail agency inspections. The sector is vital to border enforcement because it allows border agencies to detain surges of migrants before they can get jobs in Americans’ workplaces.
Leahy’s statement does not mention any spending to help deter economic migration into Americans’ jobs or to forcibly return migrants to their home countries once their appeals for asylum are denied after years of legal hearings.
Under Trump, federal officials fought bipartisan pressure for the cross-border arrival of blue-collar migrants, so helping to raise median family income by seven percent in 2019. Trump’s deputies temporarily won the fight by early 2020, despite massive resistance from the establishment media, both parties, business, and Hollywood.
But Trump’s push to protect Americans’ labor rights helped solidify the quiet alliance between progressives, companies, and Wall Street investors, all of whom gain from a growing number of migrant workers, shoppers, and renters.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American grads, undermine labor rights, and even get many progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.
Americans should be kept in the dark about plans to transfer refugees into their workplaces & communities, say managers at the VOLAG groups.
B/c the taxpayer-funded experts are the guardians of America's true ideals, of course. https://t.co/i1jWVSzyUy— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) December 18, 2020
Joe Biden’s Deputies Urge Intending Foreign Migrants to Be Patient
Two deputies for President-elect Joe Biden are urging migrants not to rush the U.S. border, saying officials will soon offer various legal routes for migrants to get into U.S. workplaces and communities.
“Individuals should not believe those who are pushing the idea that they must come to the United States right now,” Jake Sullivan, the expected National Security Advisor, told EFE, a Spanish-language wire service that is widely read in Latin American countries. “We need time to increase processing capacity and to do so consistent with public health requirements.”
“Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on Day 1,” said Susan Rice, who is expected to be Biden’s top domestic policy chief. “It will take months to develop the capacity that we will need to reopen fully.”
Neither official suggested any migrants would be rejected by their proposed “establishing a fair, humane, and orderly immigration system.”
President Donald Trump is denying asylum to migrants “rather than helping create alternative pathways to protection,” said Sullivan. “That is just not who we are as a country.”
The appeals for patience comes after Biden’s campaign trail rhetoric promised to welcome many poor migrants — even though millions of people in Central and Latin America have declared they would like to migrate into Americans’ jobs and neighborhoods. In 2018, Gallup reported:
In Gallup’s most recent global estimate, between 2015 and 2017, 15% of the world’s adults — more than 750 million people — said they would like to move to another country permanently if they could. In Central America, this percentage is one in three (33%), or about 10 million adults.
Three percent of the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S. This includes 16% of adults from Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica, which translates into nearly 5 million people.
The comments by Sullivan and Rice outlined some ways the Biden administration may use to minimize the political reaction they deliver many poor and unskilled foreign migrants into Americans’ jobs and rental markets, despite the recent economic chaos caused by China’s coronavirus.
“We will expand lawful pathways for migration, allowing people to apply for refugee resettlement and temporary worker and other employment-based programs from within the region,” Rice said.
“We also will make it easier for [foreign] people to reunite with their families in the United States [although] many should be able to seek safety much closer to home,” she said.
“We will rethink asylum processing to make it more efficient and fair, enabling asylum officers to adjudicate claims so asylum seekers aren’t tied up in court proceedings for years,” she said.
Joe Biden’s pro-migration policies are inviting another blue-collar migration flood across the southern border, say his Democrat allies. https://t.co/N8Twl45ynE
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 26, 2020
That plan would allow migrants to win asylum — which means the huge prize of life in wealthy America for them and all of their children — by asking asylum officers in the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. If denied by the asylum officers, the migrants could still take the longer route through the courts.
The officials also said they would eventually cancel asylum deals with Central American countries and eliminate the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” which prevent migrants from getting U.S. jobs while asylum judges consider their asylum claims by keeping the migrants in Mexico.
The administration also plans to reward prior migrants with the huge prize of citizenship, said Rice. “That [2021 immigration ] bill will provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented individuals, as well as critically needed reforms of our broken immigration system,” she said.
Rice and Sullivan did not say how many new migrants they would welcome through the new legal avenues and the streamlined asylum process.
That uncertainty pressures potential migrants to rush up to the border if Biden tightens border rules in 2022, as President Donald Trump dramatically did in 2019. Median household wages for Americans rose by 7 percent in 219 as Trump forced employers to compete for American workers instead of hiring new migrants.
Both Biden officials also promised more aid to the region — but if they leave the U.S. border open, then the locals will rationally use the foreign aid to migrate northwards in the hope of winning the big prize of asylum.
Rice said:
We recognize that the longer-term solution for sustainably reducing migration in the region is to work with civil society, the private sector, governments, and international partners to address the underlying causes of migration. As part of this, we aim to implement a $4 billion, 4-year plan to confront corruption, enhance security, and foster prosperity in migrant-sending communities while ensuring these countries are investing in themselves.
Wealthy Americans at 'Refugees Intl' urge Joe Biden to smuggle more low-wage migrants into US jobs.
One critic responds: "I don’t think they feel a moral duty to fellow Americans … [cheap labor] is cruelty to ordinary Americans."
We need a term for this.https://t.co/KnEpu3tBdp— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) December 22, 2020
On December 12, USA Today wrote up the story of a Guatemalan migrant who missed getting into the United States by just a few months:
“I told her, ‘Listen, lately the U.S. government is giving children priority,” reminding his wife that her own brother had reached the U.S. with a son a few months before. “Immigration visits him twice a week. But they let him work in peace!”
[…]
When [Francisco] Sical and his daughter reached the El Paso border on May 31, 2019, after a 20-day journey north and five days detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, their fate was spelled out in English on paperwork handed them by a border agent:
“You are an immigrant not in possession of a valid unexpired immigrant visa, reentry permit, border crossing card or other valid entry document required by the Immigration and Nationality Act.” The papers assigned father and daughter an “alien” number, used by the U.S. government to track immigrants, and listed an appointment to appear before a U.S. immigration judge at 8:30 a.m., on July 23, 2019, at the courthouse in Downtown El Paso.
Sical is now back in Guatemala, where he must find a way to repay the “microcredit” bank loan he used to pay his coyote.
The loan is mortgaged to his house, so he may lose his family’s house because he was lured towards the border loopholes created by Democrats and progressive judges.
Joe Biden told the Jesuit Refugee Service this week that he plans to drastically increase the annual number of refugees taken in by the United States by over 800 percent of current figures. https://t.co/jpS20pIkr0
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 15, 2020
Democrats Seek to Permanently Add Foreign Workers to U.S. Labor Market
A group of House Democrats is seeking to permanently add foreign workers to the United States labor market by opening American citizenship to those who would otherwise be asked to return to their native countries after their visa expires.
Led by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), the House Democrats have introduced legislation that ties increased labor protections for American workers — forced to compete against an annual inflow of foreign workers — to permanently adding H-2B foreign visa workers to the labor market.
The plan would provide tens of thousands of H-2B foreign visa workers, and their family members, a path to American citizenship after they have worked at least 18 months in the U.S. Likewise, H-2B foreign visa workers who have worked at least three years in the U.S. would be able to apply for green cards as well as their family members.
While awaiting green cards, the plan allows H-2B foreign visa workers and their family members to remain in the U.S. and apply for advanced parole so they cannot be deported unless they are eventually considered ineligible for green cards.
Such a plan would come as at least 24.5 million Americans are jobless or underemployed, but all want full-time jobs with good pay and competitive benefits.
The massive foreign worker-to-labor market pipeline is coupled with a series of increased reforms to ensure labor protections for Americans seeking blue-collar jobs and foreign workers applying for H-2B visas.
For instance, the plan would demand that U.S. businesses meet enhanced requirements to certify they are not discriminating against Americans and engage with labor unions to search for available and willing Americans.
The plan also increases the wage standards of the H-2B visa program. Whereas U.S. businesses currently use the program to undercut U.S. wages, the plan would mandate that prevailing wages are promised to H-2B foreign visa workers in their contracts and allocates the visas based on the highest offered wages.
The H-2B visa program has been widely used by businesses to drag down the wages of American workers in landscaping, conservation work, the meatpacking industry, the construction industry, and fishing jobs, a 2019 study from the Center for Immigration Studies finds.
When comparing the wages of H-2B foreign workers to the national wage average for each blue-collar industry, about 21 out of 25 of the industries offered lower wages to foreign workers than Americans.
In the construction industry, wage suppression is significant, with H-2B foreign workers being offered more than 20 percent less than their American counterparts. In the fishing industry, foreign workers were offered more than 30 percent less for their jobs than Americans in the field. In the meatpacking industry, foreign workers got 23 percent less pay than Americans.
Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants on green cards to permanently resettle in the country. In addition, another 1.4 million foreign workers are admitted every year to take American jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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