FNC’s Carlson: ‘Professional Class’ Democrats, Media Don’t Track Illegal Immigration Because It ‘Means Cheaper, Low-End Labor for Them’
Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson speculated on the reasons why Democrats, including President Joe Biden and Biden’s allies in the mainstream media, do not track illegal immigration.
Carlson argued there were benefits for that group within the so-called “professional class” from getting an influx of illegal immigrants.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Ten days before the last election, the 2020 election, a reporter for The Texas Tribune came across a very strange sight in Starr County, Texas. Starr County sits on the border right across from Mexico. It’s one of the poorest places in the country. Not a lot of people visit Starr County, Texas. But this reporter did and he watched as more than 70 vehicles with Trump flags drove in parade formation from the little town of Roma, Texas to Rio Grande City.
“All aboard the Trump train,” read one sign.
It was a convoy and was organized by a man called Raul Reyes, even Reyes couldn’t believe the turnout. “I was expecting 15 to 20 cars max,” he told the reporter. And the reason he wasn’t expecting more cars is because Starr County is not exactly a Republican stronghold. In fact, just four years before in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in Starr County, Texas by 60 points. That’s definitive.
But things changed and they changed fast. In the span of just four years, Starr County, Texas moved from deep blue to almost red. Donald Trump finished within just five points of Joe Biden. That’s a swing of over 50 points.
And the numbers are even more dramatic in nearby Zapata County. Donald Trump lost Zapata County in 2016 by 33 points, but last November, he easily beat Joe Biden. These are big changes. And you’re seeing them all along the Rio Grande Valley, the southern border with Mexico.
Now to the geniuses looking at these numbers in Washington trying to figure out what they mean, the most amazing thing, the things that leaps out of them immediately is that Starr and Zapata Counties are overwhelmingly Hispanic. Starr County is 96 percent Hispanic, Zapata is 85 percent.
So how could Hispanics support Donald Trump in numbers like that? They must be QAnon people.
And not only were those two counties non-white, they are very poor, legitimately, as we said, some of the poorest places in the United States. Nearly a third of the residents of Starr County, Texas live in poverty, the median household income in both those counties, Starr and Zapata, is under $35,000.00 a year, but they are voting for Trump.
What the hell is going on?
Well, a lot of things are going on probably, but uncontrolled illegal immigration, definitely is one of them, probably the main one. And that’s completely baffling to people in D.C.
If you’re a Yale educated bureaucrat or a nonprofit executive living in Bethesda, of course, you see everything through the lens of identity politics, you’ve been told to do that. And needless to say, you obey, you always obey.
Most illegal aliens are Hispanic, so you assume that most Hispanics support illegal immigration. That’s just how you think. The problem is, you’re an idiot. You have no idea what you’re talking about, but you have no clue how ignorant you are. How could you know, you never leave Bethesda.
Congressman Henry Cuellar is a Democrat, but he doesn’t live in Bethesda. He lives in Texas. Cuellar represents both Starr and Zapata Counties. Cuellar sees what’s happening. He can’t ignore it.
On Saturday, he told FOX News that his constituents are being overwhelmed by an influx of migrants from Latin America, and the Biden administration is doing nothing to stop it. In fact, they’re lying about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. HENRY CUELLAR (D-TX): It might have started under Trump, but when you’re the President, you own the situation, whether it’s a success or not a success, it’s going to own that.
I think in February, we’re going to get about 100,000. And again, I don’t care what we call it, but I can tell you this, those numbers of people that are being released, they are purposely withholding that information. They’ve been told not to withhold that information.
I now know that they’re bringing people from McAllen over to Laredo, processing them in Laredo, and they’re going to release them in my community.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Those numbers of people being released says Henry Cuellar, the Biden administration is purposely withholding that information. Now, why would they do that?
How bad is it? Well, again, this is an elected Democrat admitting that he has no idea how many people are flooding into his community every day because the Biden administration is hiding that information.
He is supposed to be representing this country, but he has no idea how many of these people compete for his constituents for jobs. He has no clue how many of them are criminals. He has no idea how many of them have COVID.
No one knows the situation there is that out of control. And it’s not just Henry Cuellar who is upset about it.
Another Democrat from Texas, State Senator Chuy Hinojosa from McAllen has charged the Biden administration is encouraging illegal aliens to come which obviously, they are. Quote, “It’s gotten worse,” Hinojosa said, “I don’t think quite frankly the Biden administration was aware of what’s happening on the ground here, which you can understand because they’re just coming in and trying to get people up to speed with what’s happening. But I don’t think they were aware that there were that many coming across. The Border Patrol is overwhelmed, they’re throwing up their hands because they don’t know what to do.”
Now, that’s not a problem if you’re Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s cool. But if you actually live there, and you’re poor, it’s a huge problem, and you shouldn’t be surprised by this.
Our policymakers realized a long time ago that they could simply hide most of the relevant data on illegal immigration, and no one would bother to look into it.
Case in point is the total number of illegal immigrants living in the United States, it’s been 11 million officially for decades. Everybody repeats that. They keep repeating that number, even when all available evidence contradicted that number. That number is a complete lie.
There is some research out there, some good research, totally nonpartisan, and the best research suggests that there are at least twice that number of people living here illegally, and possibly many more, quite possibly more than 30 million.
But journalists and the politicians they protect don’t get to the bottom of because it doesn’t bother them, because they’re all part of one class. They’re the professional class. They run the Democratic Party, and more illegal immigration means cheaper, low-end labor for them.
It doesn’t really matter what effect it has on the country. It doesn’t really matter what more crowding does to the natural environment. We’ve got about 100 million more people living in the United States than we had 30 years ago. What does that do to the environment? No one cares.
Who does it hurt? They don’t care.
Of course, if you are being hurt, you do care. If you’re living in poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, none of this is an abstraction. The actual numbers matter very much to you.
FOX’s Casey Stegall recently did what most journalists are refusing to do, he went down to the border to try to understand, on foot, with a camera, the scope of the illegal immigration surge that has intensified since Joe Biden became President.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CASEY STEGALL, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The wave of migrants currently flooding America’s southern border runs the gamut from entire families to children all alone. And now once again, larger packs traveling together.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Huge groups are coming in, because they know that they’re going to be let go.
STEGALL (voice over): U.S. Border Patrol agents say it’s not at all uncommon to encounter clusters of 20, 30, 50, sometimes even groups of more than a hundred migrants wandering the desert and surrendering, as the overall apprehension numbers keep ticking up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are between 700 and a thousand daily.
STEGALL (voice over): Which translates into a shortage of detention beds and space, even as additional temporary overflow facilities are brought online.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CARLSON: This is obviously humanitarian crisis, mostly for Americans, but not just for Americans, for the migrants themselves.
Whatever happened to “those kids in cages”? All those unaccompanied minors? Maybe some of them don’t have their parents with them. Nobody cares anymore.
It’s hypocrisy. Yes. But it’s so in your face, you have to conclude the hypocrisy itself is the point. They humiliate you and wear you down by ignoring their own previous statements and blowing right past you with their new agenda.
As Congressman Cuellar pointed out, all of this is intentional from the way they’re hiding the data to the complete 180 on the child overflow facilities.
People living in Starr and Zapata Counties voted the way they did for a reason. Is it surprising to you that they are being punished for it now? It shouldn’t be.
But this is a bigger story than just South Texas. It’s not just affecting border towns in the Rio Grande Valley. What you’re seeing is an attack on an entire social class, an attack on working people, the ones who’ve been hurt the most by COVID, the ones who saw their lives destroyed after a year of incoherent health mandates from incompetents posing as experts.
And just to rub it in, in case you missed the point, the administration is demanding that American citizens, unless you’re Gavin Newsom, but the rest, remain under Corona law forever.
Meanwhile, foreign nationals living here illegally can do essentially whatever they want.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): Officials with the City of Brownsville, Texas report at least 108 migrants tested positive for COVID since the end of January, more than six percent of everyone they screen.
A city spokesperson tells FOX News, they don’t have the authority to detain those people and prevent them from getting on buses and traveling elsewhere.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So the illegal immigrants, some infected with coronavirus get on a bus and just take off. Who knows where they’re going? No one knows where they’re going. No one is checking. That would be racism.
Meanwhile, a mom in Ohio dares to watch her son’s football game sitting alone in the stands, and for doing that she gets Tasered, wrestled to the ground, arrested all for not wearing an obedience mask.
It’s awful on every level and a functioning media would expose it. But instead our media create diversion so that you won’t notice it is happening in the first place.
Watch the race lady on MSNBC, Harvard educated, but totally oppressed tell you that you have no moral right to worry about COVID.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: You know who the absolute worst is? Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Yes, he’s a repeat offender. He’s deflecting criticism by dishing out anti-immigrant xenophobia.
GOV. GREG ABBOTT (R-TX): The Biden administration was releasing illegal immigrants — illegal immigrants into our communities who had COVID. The Biden administration was spreading COVID in South Texas yesterday because of their lack of constraint of testing and quarantining people who had come across the border illegally.
REID: So for that absurdly racist claim, Governor Abbott is the absolute worst, for the second time this week.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “An absurdly racist claim,” says the race lady from Harvard. So taking precautions against COVID is racist.
Just the other day, they were telling us exactly the opposite. Tomorrow, they will tell us something completely different again. They don’t mean any of it. Maybe we should ignore them.
What actually matters is keeping our country from falling apart, and right now, effectively, we have no southern border. That’s a much bigger problem than COVID.
Amazon reports record profits in last quarter of 2020
According to Amazon’s latest financial disclosures, the giant international conglomerate recorded unprecedented profits and revenue in the last three months of 2020, as the pandemic sent its sales soaring, and the company continued expanding its operations around the globe.
In these disclosures, made available last month, Amazon reported a fourth-quarter profit of $7.2 billion, more than double what was expected by analysts. This raised its 2020 full-year profits to $21.3 billion, the highest level in company history. This compared to $17.4 billion in 2019 and $13.2 billion in 2018.
For hundreds of millions of people, the coronavirus pandemic has been an extreme hardship and an economic disaster, punctuated by funerals of loved ones and other tragedies. But for the corporate-financial oligarchy in control of giant corporations like Amazon, it has been a cash bonanza like nothing they have ever seen before.
Amazon posted $125.6 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, up 44 percent from the same quarter the previous year. While Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing arm, accounted for 63 percent of 2020 profits, Amazon’s retail operations made up the vast majority of its sales, which totaled $386 billion last year.
This is the same company that viciously canceled its measly $2 per hour coronavirus hazard pay for workers at the end of May of last year. The huge profits now revealed to have been raked in by the company vindicate the sentiments of workers at the time, including one worker who told the World Socialist Web Site, “They can more than afford to let us keep it permanently.”
Indeed, to put Amazon’s profits in perspective, dividing the $21.3 billion in full-year earnings from 2020 by the global workforce comes out to over $16,000 per worker. In other words, the company could have written a check for $16,000 last year to each and every one of its 1.3 million Amazon employees worldwide—and still would have had money to spare.
This money reflects the real value of the labor of “essential workers” at Amazon, who risk their lives to provide critical services during the pandemic, ensuring the delivery of goods as workers and families quarantine themselves to try to limit the spread of the deadly virus. This money was extracted from workers through capitalist relations of production and has accumulated in the bank accounts of the oligarchs and Wall Street funds that own and control the conglomerate.
Notwithstanding the mounting and explosive anger among its giant workforce, the company continues to enjoy an extraordinarily high market capitalization, with stock prices currently at $2,951.95. While this number has dipped somewhat since last month, it still gives the international conglomerate a total market capitalization of around $1.5 trillion. The rise in share prices last year added $70 billion to the private fortunes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, already one of the richest people on the planet.
Amazon’s profits soared into the stratosphere in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the US, accompanied by mass unemployment and general economic devastation. Its profits piled up as demands from Amazon workers intensified for safer working conditions, sane work speeds, livable wages and prompt information on coronavirus infections in their workplaces.
Like the murderous policy of a “safe reopening” of schools, Amazon covered up its refusal to slow or stop operations behind minimal and cosmetic safety procedures, such as requiring workers to wear masks. The company also refused to promptly disclose information indicating how many workers have become infected, in an effort to lull workers into a false sense of security.
By last October, the company revealed that, by its internal count, there had been 19,816 presumed or confirmed COVID infections among its frontline workers at warehouses and Whole Foods locations in the US alone.
Given the poor record of testing and tracing within the US since the start of the pandemic, with some public health experts estimating that the true level of community spread to be as much as 10 times the number of confirmed cases, the number of infections at Amazon warehouses given by the company is no doubt substantially lower than reality.
Amazon’s workers largely remained at their stations throughout the pandemic, being subjected to frantic speedups to meet the demand for home delivery of internet purchases. In conversations with WSWS reporters, Amazon workers reported that social distancing measures are arbitrarily and inconsistently enforced, when they are enforced at all, due to the nature of warehouse work.
This exploitation has led to repeated tragedies. On March 1, 48-year-old Paul Vilscek jumped to his death at the LAS7 fulfillment center in Las Vegas while his co-workers watched in horror. On January 8, 38-year-old Poushawn Brown died suddenly of unexplained causes after working as a coronavirus tester at the DDC3 warehouse in Springfield, Virginia.
Awash in cash, Amazon is now expanding its operations in other areas of the economy. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday, the cargo airline Air Transport Services Group reported that Amazon had purchased a minority stake in the company. Amazon already owns a minority stake in the only other major cargo airline used by Amazon, Atlas Air, and is developing its own air service called Amazon Air.
The conglomerate has extended its reach into consumer products, streaming video and music, prescriptions and telehealth, books and e-books, smart devices and voice assistants, cloud computing services, groceries and other logistics operations, among others. In the last two years, it has increasingly invested in its own delivery operations by aggressively expanding its network of fulfillment and sorting centers, delivery stations and other facilities.
Amazon’s sprawling influence also extends to robotics, electric vehicle companies such as Rivian, autonomous vehicle startups like Aurora Partners and delivery robots called Amazon Scout that are being tested in Southern California and could be rolled out elsewhere in the near future. Amazon Kuiper is creating a satellite network capable of delivering high-speed internet.
Additionally, it serves as the e-commerce platform for over 2.5 million third-party vendors selling millions of items. With so many interests across crucial sectors of the economy, Amazon has faced growing criticism over its monopolistic behaviors. But politicians in North America, Europe and India, while occasionally offering various denunciations of the company, have not taken any significant actions to counter Amazon’s meteoric growth or its exploitative practices.
Amazon warehouses have been found to have twice the rate of serious injuries per 100 employees compared to the industry average. A major factor in these injuries is management’s fanatical insistence on speed, with workers in some cases expected to perform a task every six to nine seconds. Like the number of officially reported cases of the coronavirus, the tally of reported injuries is surely an undercount.
Earlier this year, Amazon agreed to pay a $61.7 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission over claims it withheld tips from its Flex delivery drivers, who are categorized as independent contractors and deliver for Prime Now and Amazon Fresh. Starting in 2016, the company had been taking its drivers’ tips to pay a portion of their delivery rates, and only halted this practice after becoming aware that the FTC was investigating the matter.
In light of Amazon’s giant revenues and expanding operations, the settlement is such an insignificant sum that it will not leave so much as a dent in the company’s annual profits or future plans.
Number of super-rich individuals grew worldwide during the pandemic
The global real estate consultancy Knight Frank published its “Wealth Report” for 2020 on March 1. The 15th annual report shows that the number of Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) around the world grew by 2.4 percent over the past year to more than 520,000 people.
As always, Knight Frank enthusiastically defines UHNWI as “someone with a net worth of over US$30 million including their primary residence.” Knight Frank sees no problem whatsoever in celebrating the expansion of the number and wealth of the richest people in the world during a year dominated by the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic.
Like the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans or the Institutional Investor’s “Rich List,” Knight Frank’s wealth report hails the unprecedented expanding economic inequality that is a primary characteristic of the world capitalism in the 21st century. This celebration took on a particularly ghastly shade during 2020 when COVID-19 infected 100 million, killed more than 2 million and—due to the drive by the capitalist elite to take advantage of the public health emergency to increase its wealth—has plunged hundreds of millions of people around the world into the greatest social crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Knight Frank is marking its 125th anniversary this year. Dealing in residential, commercial and agricultural real estate since 1896, the agency currently has more 500 offices in 60 countries and is involved in nearly $1 trillion in property asset transactions on behalf of its ultra-rich clientele each year.
The report contains a Wealth Sizing Model that predicts an increase by 27 percent in the number of UHNWIs over the next five years to 663,483. Significantly, the report also contains information about High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI)—also known as millionaires—and points out that the number of these individuals declined over the past year.
Although the report does not make the point, the separation of the ultrawealthy from the “merely” wealthy is the material basis for much of the conflict within bourgeois politics including that within the US between the Republicans and the Democrats. As has been analyzed by the World Socialist Web Site, the identity politics of the Democrats is an expression of the desire by better-off layers of the middle class to gain entry into the upper echelons of the financial elite.
The 88-page wealth report is introduced by Rory Penn, Head of the Knight Frank Private Office in London. Penn says he is “delighted” to present the report and makes a passing reference to the pandemic, “I can honestly say that during my career in property, I have never seen things changing as quickly as they are now. ... Some of the long-term trends that we examined last year, such as the changing role of the office, have been supercharged by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Penn concludes that his firm will help its customers to “capitalize on the opportunities that are being created by this acceleration of trends,” that have taken place during the pandemic. If he were honest, Penn would say that the global wealth gap has been “supercharged” by the trillions in government and central bank funds that have been poured into the financial markets for plundering by the super-rich under the guise of “stimulus.”
Liam Bailey, Knight Frank’s Global Head of Research, reviews the key findings of the wealth report. Bailey writes that the objective of the Knight Frank report is “to assess how the fortunes of UHNWIs are changing, where they spend time, what they invest in and what they are likely to do next. From policymakers to investors, a lack of insight into the behaviour and attitudes of the ‘1%’ risks a serious misreading of economic trends. This is the knowledge gap we fill.”
In other words, according to Bailey, Knight Frank has its finger on the pulse of the financial oligarchy that controls world capitalism. The wealth report, based upon an Attitudes Survey, declares itself a guide for governments and hedge fund and institutional investors because it knows what makes the ultrawealthy tick.
The report explains, “The 2021 instalment is based on responses provided during October and November 2020 by over 600 private bankers, wealth advisers, intermediaries and family offices who between them manage over US$3.3 trillion of wealth for UHNWI clients.”
There are 11 wealth trends that Knight Frank analyzed, the primary of which is that “the global response to the pandemic supported the wealthy.” The report says, “With lower interest rates and more fiscal stimulus, asset prices have surged” and this was a major factor in the 2.4 percent growth in the number of UHNWIs in the past year.
A section of the report called “Wealth: resilience through turmoil” explains further “why wealth populations kept growing despite the last year’s economic turmoil” and there were “winners and losers” in 2020 among the ultrawealthy. The report’s findings show that half of UHNWIs increased their wealth in the past year.
Noting that these differences were regionally based, “The expansion in wealth was not universal, with a fall in the number of UHNWIs in Latin America, Russia and the Middle East as currency shifts and the pandemic undermined local economies.”
Another identified trend is the rise of UHNWIs in Asia, “The US is, and will remain, the world’s dominant wealth hub over our forecast period, but Asia will see the fastest growth in UHNWIs over the next five years.” The report then goes on to point out that Asia is home to 36 percent of the world’s billionaires and that “The Chinese Mainland is the key to this phenomenon, with 246 percent forecast growth in very wealthy residents in the decade to 2025.”
That these international and regional differences in wealth accumulation indicate anything significant or fundamental about the direction of geopolitical conflict and the intensification of national antagonisms is glossed over by the researchers as Knight Frank. Although geopolitics and trade war are included as a topic in the Attitudes Survey, it comes in at number four in the top “wealth worries” among the wealthy elite behind concerns about COVID-19, domestic government policy and taxes.
The same subjective approach is taken to all of the major objective economic, social and political trends in 2020. The fact that outgoing US President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 elections through a fascist coup is given exactly one sentence in the wealth report, noting, “with the democratic process being called into question, by the then sitting US president no less, we could see populism come to the fore once more.”
It is clear from this that the Knight Frank real estate investment advisers see the emergence of fascism in the United States and elsewhere in the world as a potentially beneficial wealth generating opportunity for the superrich.
In a section entitled, “New social order,” the wealth report addresses the growth of extreme wealth inequality, which came in seventh out of the nine items on the “wealth worry” list. The report states, “While only 8 percent of our respondents cite inequality as a direct issue affecting their clients’ wealth, it could have an impact on domestic government policy and tax issues, which 49 percent and 42 percent respectively of them do cite as a concern.”
According Filippo Noseda, a private client lawyer at Mishcon de Reya cited by Knight Frank, “We could see a shift to more wealth taxes as governments scramble to cover the huge costs of the pandemic, and targeting the wealthy tends to be uncontroversial with voters.” The coming revolutionary confrontation of the working class that will be “targeting the wealthy” is not something that the advisers at Knight Frank care to admit or discuss.
Krikorian: Pro-Migration Zealots Control Joe Biden’s Border Agencies
President Joe Biden has handed control over the nation’s immigration agencies to pro-migration zealots, and neither he nor his top aides may be able to contain the approaching worldwide wave of migrants, says Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Biden’s picks “see this as a moral issue and [think] that people who present themselves at the border who come from dysfunctional countries have to be led in, regardless of what the effect on the United States,” Krikorian told Breitbart News. He added:
These folks look at the asylum issue without considering any of the other aspects like labor market and the rest of it … What they’re taking into consideration is not what the broad national interest is in this policy. Rather it’s a moral claim that we have no right to not to let them in.
Biden’s choice to run the Department of Homeland Security is Alejandro Mayorkas, who fled from communist Cuba in 1960 to the United States as a child refugee with his Cuban father and his Romanian-born mother.
In a March 6 interview with NBC News, Mayorkas showed his deep sympathy for migrants, saying:
I believe that asylum seekers, individuals who claim credible fear by reason of their membership in a particular social group, should have the opportunity to present those claims to the United States authorities, and they should be able to present those claims in an orderly, efficient, and safe way.
Mayorkas did not suggest any limits to the potential number of asylum seekers, nor any protections for Americans who lose wages and cheap housing when the government inflates the supply of labor.
Immigration is about migrants and the “values of our country,” according to Mayorkas:
To address the needs of the migrants themselves, and the American public, we’re taking a look at the immigration system writ large and seeing what reforms we can achieve to ensure that the manner in which we address the needs of individuals looking for a better life adheres to the principles and values of our country and its proud traditions.
I’m going to take a look at the immigration system writ large and decide what reforms are needed. I’m going to do that in partnership with community stakeholders, of course the agencies that I oversee, [plus] state and local law enforcement. We’re going to be collaborative, we’re going to be a partnership, and I’m going to make the ultimate decisions in executing the President to the Vice President’s vision for a better nation, and to build back better. That’s what I’m going to do.
A flood of cheap migrant labor is actually good for Americans’ pocketbooks, according to Mayorkas. “Creating a new immigration system will help create jobs, raise wages, and grow our economy, not just for immigrant communities, but for all our families across this great, great country,” Alejandro Mayorkas told a pro-amnesty group, the American Business Immigration Council, on December 3.
In reality, Americans’ wages have stagnated since the government began inflating the labor supply in the 1970s, and especially after the bipartisan 1990 immigration expansion. Many business groups openly say that additional migrants reduce wages.
Mayorkas also blamed the rising migrant wave in 2021 on so-called push factors from other countries — not the eagerness of himself and progressives to pull migrants from their home economics and steer them into better lives in America, regardless of the damage done to the migrants’ home countries: “We understand the significance of the number of children: It speaks to the fact that there is, quite frankly, pent-up desperation from three countries that have suffered so much violence, so much poverty, and other adverse conditions.”
But more than 70 percent of the younger migrants are teenagers, many of whom are being sent north by their parents to get jobs amid Joe Biden’s welcome. Yet Mayorkas portrayed the younger migrants as young children during a March 1 event at the White House:
We are not apprehending a 9-year-old child, who has come alone, who has traversed Mexico … whose loving parents sent that child alone. We’re not expelling that 9-year-old child to Mexico when that child’s country of origin was Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.
The Title 42 anti-epidemic barrier against the migration of people should be taken down as soon as possible, Mayorkas told NBC. The healthcare barrier is the most successful — and the most lawsuit-proof — of President Donald Trump’s border measures. But Mayorkas said, “it is our effort to reduce reliance on Title 42 as swiftly as possible to address the public health imperative on the one hand and to be able to process asylum claims of individuals on the other.”
Mayorkas’ views are widely shared by the Democrat Party.
“We’re nothing if we’re not a nation of immigrants,” Democrat leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told a December meeting of pro-migration business leaders. “Immigrants built this country with their hands, enriched our culture with their minds and spirit, and provided the spark that drives our economy.”
The view is reflected in the Democrats’ legislation. For example, the Democrats’ new amnesty for agriculture workers would replace much of the U.S. agriculture workforce with an extracted population of low-wage, indentured, temporary foreign workers. That switch from an American to an H-2A visa workforce would slow technology upgrades, push many Americans out of agricultural jobs and rural districts, and so shrivel the spending and taxes needed by small towns.
Similarly, Biden’s major amnesty legislation allows Fortune 500 companies to sideline American graduates and to fill all their white-collar jobs with low-wage, indentured foreign graduates.
But Mayorkas’s policies are causing distress among some Democrats who fear the public will blame them for the inflow.
“It’s imperative we get this situation under control or we are looking at another crisis on our hands,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) said in a March 8 statement whereby he asked to meet with Biden’s deputies. “I look forward to meeting with President Biden and Secretaries Mayorkas … to discuss the challenges and potential solutions to the influx of people at our border.”
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to legal immigration, illegal migration, and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that 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.
On March 7, amid growing media focus on the border, Mayorkas traveled to the border with a group of administration officials. Several of those officials are like-minded pro-migration activists, including Esther Olavarria, the deputy assistant to the president for immigration; Katie Tobin, senior director for transborder at the National Security Council; and Marsha Espinosa, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS.
Some of the officials, however, are long-time staffers for Joe Biden who may subordinate Mayorkas’ migration priorities to Biden’s broader political agenda.
“The Democratic Party has become radicalized on immigration in a way that it just wasn’t in 1980,” said Krikorian. Back then, President Jimmy Carter eventually blocked the Cuban government’s deportation of many Cubans to America after seven months of rising political pressure.
“Who in the President’s party is going to say, ‘Okay, we need to go back to [President Donald] Trump’s approach, and, you know, shut this down.’ There isn’t anybody,” Krikorian said.
Besides, Mayorkas and his progressives may prefer to ignore the public’s opposition, said Krikorian. “It could well be that they figure they’re going to lose the House anyway [in 2022], so go for broke for a year and a half.”
Also, he added, Biden and his immediate staff may not have the clout to block Mayorkas and his many fellow zealots:
Biden is weak in a whole variety of ways, and if you’ve got competing interests [in an administration such as] the [pro-migration] Human Rights Crusaders tussling with the green-eyeshade election guys, who’s going to put his foot down and make a decision? It’s not Biden, He’s incapable of that. If you don’t have somebody in charge, things like this can get out of control.
In the next several months, Mayorkas is more likely to widen the avenues for migrants to enter the United States by writing regulations to create new “particular social groups” that are eligible for asylum, Krikorian said.
“They’re going to be issuing new asylum rules that will essentially grant asylum to every one of these people if they come from a place where there is violence or domestic violence, or there’s gangs or whatever. They’re going to include all of that under a ‘particular social group’ so that these people will all just get asylum eventually.”
The establishment media may not save Biden from Mayorkas and his pro-migration appointees, Krikorian said. Right now, “they aren’t totally carrying Biden’s water … There is a certain amount of bogus politically slanted ‘fact check’ stuff going on. But the numbers are numbers, and they’re reporting them. So there’s a limit to how much even the semi-official legacy media can do to protect Biden here.”
The radical policy put in place by Mayorkas is likely to discredit the public’s support for the nation’s asylum rules, said Krikorian. “Because of what they’re putting into motion, there’s a really good chance we’re gonna have a Republican President and a Republican Congress in 2024. And if the Democrats have delegitimized the asylum process, we will see a real push to dramatically restrict asylum far more than it was before Biden took over.”
Estb. media is posting many stories about migrant"'children" crossing the border — but 70%+ are teenagers, many of whom are (rationally) seeking jobs.
IOW, Biden's DHS & estb. media are waiving in huge numbers of Latino child workers. #CharlesDickenshttps://t.co/cfWf1Bz9ic— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 5, 2021
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