White House: We’re Extracting Migrants from Central America
President Joe Biden’s government is responding to its migration crisis by letting more into the country and by extracting additional migrants from Central America, according to a White House statement.
“This administration is working to establish lawful pathways for individuals to migrate or seek protection,” said the June 15 statement, titled, “Action the Biden-Harris Administration Has Taken to Address the Border Challenge.”
The statement said Biden’s officials have (emphasis added):
[…] announced the availability of 6,000 temporary, non-agricultural worker – or H-2B – visas for nationals of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala for FY 2021 … reopened the Central American Minors (CAM) program to reunite children who are nationals of El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras with their parents in the U.S. … resumed interviewing individuals via the Protection Transfer Arrangement (PTA) to expand protection for vulnerable nationals of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras … [and] opened the first Migration Resource Center (MRC) in Guatemala to provide individuals with protection screenings and referrals to asylum, refugee resettlement, and parole options.
“The Biden administration is participating in predatory colonialism” to benefit U.S. employers and investors, said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies. “They’re pilfering that population and then just dropping them off in the United States with a work permit,” he said.
The illegal delivery of workers and consumers to the U.S. economy drains the economies of Central America, he added. “They are extracting Central Americans who could be agents of [democratic] change in their home countries.”
The White House statement does not address migration’s damage to Americans’ opportunities, wages, rents, productivity, and political status. Instead, it reframes the chaotic migration as a threat to the migrants that can best be resolved by more federal support to the migrants.
So far, few GOP politicians have recognized the political and legal strategy behind the White House’s immigration strategy, which is led by Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security,
For example, at a June 17 hearing of the House’s Committee on Homeland Security, GOP members complained about the migration and quizzed Mayorkas about whether he had personally talked with border agents or visited the border — as if the would ensure Mayorkas would agree with them.
“I want to say that the situation at the border is a crisis of epic proportions,” said Rep. Austin Pfluger (R-TX). “When’s the last time that you talked to a Customs and Border Protection agent in the El Paso sector or the Rio Grande Valley or for any sector in Texas?”
“I speak to the border patrol multiple times every week, if not multiple times every day,” Mayorkas answered.
“Mr. Secretary, those agents, are they saying the word ‘help’ to you? Because that’s what they’re saying to me,” Pfluger responded.
“Congressman, we have a strategy. We are executing that strategy,” Mayorkas said. “I am confident in the strategy, and I’m confident in the [budget] proposal that we have submitted to this Congress.”
The leading GOP member of the panel, Rep. John Katko (R-NY), asked Mayorkas about diversity, cybersecurity, the increasing retirement of border agents, and Mayorkas’ plans to visit the border.
In March, business-backed pro-migration groups help to spend $200,000 on a campaign ad in Katko’s district.
Migrants gesture from a pick-up truck while riding along a road in Choloma, Cortes department, Honduras as they take part in a caravan to Corinto, in the border with Guatemala, on their way to the US. (WENDELL ESCOTO/AFP via Getty Images)
In contrast, the Republican Study Committee posted a policy memo on April 14 which urged Republicans to defend working Americans from the government’s extraction-migration policies.
“We believe U.S. immigration policy should be designed to primarily serve the interest of American citizens, families, and workers …Immigration policy should prioritize American workers, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents,” said the statement from the committee, which is headed by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).
Federal law protects working Americans and their families by barring corporate hiring of aliens, yet the administration is shuttling many thousands of foreigners into the U.S. labor force, Law said.
“This recruitment of economic migrants is really an affront to American workers, and it is a complete disregard for our immigration laws,” he said.
Section 1324a in the 1965 immigration law bars the “Unlawful employment of aliens,” saying “It is unlawful for a person or other entity- (A) to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien.”
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to the labor migration and the temporary contract favored by business groups. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent because it stands on the normal solidarity Americans owe to each other.
To justify their award of work permits, the administration is stretching the law, Law said, adding:
They’re citing the law, saying that they’re creating legal channels and legal pathways, but there is no actual legal basis for what they are doing. They’re just making it up as they go along […] They’re implementing a system that they wish the law was, as opposed to actually following the laws as passed by Congress.
For example, Mayorkas is using his “parole” authority to invite many lawfully deported migrants back into the United States and to invite many thousands of the left-behind children of economic migrants to join their parents in the United States. But according to the Cornell Law School, “the parole of aliens … would generally be justified only on a case-by-case basis for ‘urgent humanitarian reasons’ or ‘significant public benefit,’ provided the aliens present neither a security risk nor a risk of absconding.”
“That’s a very narrow authority,” said Law. “How in the world is it a ‘significant public benefit’ for this country and our citizens to basically allow economic migrants into the country to take jobs from Americans?”
Similarly, the administration’s centers in Central American are offering asylum to young workers people who can walk up to the U.S. embassy to claim persecution, he said. “If it is safe enough for you to be in your home country and to go to a United States government office to submit paperwork, you are clearly not being persecuted,” he said.
The White House statement touted many other plans to import more people into Americans’ workplaces (emphasis added):
HHS has surged case management resources to dramatically increase the rates by which children [and youths] are united with their sponsors.
[…]
The President issued a new FY 2021 Presidential Determination on refugees that created 4,000 additional slots for refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean, which includes the Northern Triangle.
Mayorkas is using his bureaucratic and regulatory powers to open more doorways through the border for foreign workers.
Mayorkas is helping economic migrants get jobs by letting them file for political asylum in the United States. He is helping teenage economic migrants walk into jobs via a side door created in 2008 law for victimized children. He is helping economic migrants stay in the United States by letting them use the same 2008 law — and rules for refugees — to pull their left-behind children and spouses up into the United States.
Mayorkas is also using his parole power to invite lawfully deported migrants to rejoin their left-behind migrant children who are applying for asylum. In addition, he is using the U Visa program to provide work permits and Social Security Numbers to migrants who say they were victimized by a crime in the United States.
The Department of Justice is also revising asylum rules so Mayorkas’s deputies can offer citizenship to migrants who claim their home-country governments do not protect them from spousal abuse or routine crime.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
Administration officials and their backers in business “would like to extract much of the entirety of Central America and drop them into the United States for economic purposes,” said Law.
But that extraction “will permanently destroy those Central American countries,” he added. It “is harmful to those home countries because there’s no accountability, so there’ll never be any change so that corruption and poverty will continue.”
Leftists praise sky-high home prices and the new renter nation
How's this for taking a leftist lemon and trying to make lemonade from it?
Leftist columnists closely aligned with Democrats and their policies are now praising unaffordable home prices and the coming U.S. future as a renter nation.
They think that all of us deplorables out there would actually prefer to pay landlords overpaying for homeownership.
No, not for the nakedly obvious reason that renters tend to vote Democrat.
The new arguments out there, sure to be picked up by leftist pols, are more like this...
In a column titled "America Should Become a Nation of Renters" Bloomberg's Karl W. Smith writes:
Rising real-estate prices are stoking fears that homeownership, long considered a core component of the American dream, is slipping out of reach for low- and moderate-income Americans. That may be so — but a nation of renters is not something to fear. In fact, it's the opposite.
He argues that homes are easier to sell now that huge investment companies are buying them up:
This process is painful, but it's not all bad. Slowly but surely, most Americans' single biggest asset — their home — is becoming more liquid. Call it the liquefaction of the U.S. housing market.
That, he notes, means that the old wisdom that it's cheaper to buy than rent is going out the window. Houses are no longer "safe" investments that naturally grow in value for the little guy. Big investors will make more on rents as more renters come on the market even if rent prices drop, certainly a good deal for them. He concludes it's actually more American, though:
To see the U.S. as a nation of renters requires a revision of the American dream of homeownership. This country was always more about new frontiers than comfortable settlements, anyway.
Blech. This certainly explains the enthusiasm that Democrats have for rent, rabbit-warren living, plus rent control in the age of COVID. They also are really fond of forcing the public into public transport run by unions, and are hell-bent on destroying the suburbs through the importation of inner city-subsidized housing in the name of "equity."
But there's even more, and now-left-leaning columnist Froma Harrop, in a piece titled "The American dream can be rented," tells us:
As lockdowns sent city dwellers "fleeing" to the suburbs for more space, the prices of homes offering that space took off. To play in the bidding wars, homebuyers had to cough up big money and chain themselves to giant mortgages. This painful scenario led many to choose renting over buying, and that's not a bad thing.
Why can't the American dream of a detached house with a family room be rented instead, like an apartment? Actually, it can. Houses have been available for rent forever, but now real estate investors are building entire subdivisions for the purpose of renting, not selling, the homes.
For generations, the real estate industry has promoted a cult of homeownership, portraying it as a rite of passage for the upwardly mobile. Realtors pushed it. Lenders pushed it. Developers pushed it. And so did the government, with easy mortgages.
Those darned deplorable culties.
She points to the "glamorization of urban hipster living" as one reason people choose to rent now, we deplorables being easily led by the nose by "image," it seems. She was a bit behind the times — that idea was big in 2008 when President Obama was elected. Today, in the Joe Biden nightmare era, it's all about the homeless setting up tent camps and defecating in one's big-city doorway, buying and selling drugs without being busted by cops, pharmacies shutting down in big numbers due to shoplifting rings, and soaring crime rates with random pushes in front of subways along with anti-Asian slurs. Sound hipsterly? Sound worth growing a beard for and forgetting about homeownership? Well...
She concludes her argument by saying Americans would prefer the nomad lifestyle, living among strangers, moving around every few months to the dreadful prospect of being glued to a community. I'm gonna guess that's not the majority.
Now let's briefly get to why these arguments are bad, yet Democrats are embracing them.
Number one: Renter-nation under Democrat-favored rent control certainly has some side-effects, as I reported at Forbes in 2001. There's also Fort Apache, in the Bronx, the logical culmination of a rent-control nation, combined with high crime in tight spaces all to look forward to.
Number two: Buying a home is the American Dream for a reason. Owning property does something to the soul and spirit, so many homeowners say. I certainly heard that at a recent party in May in Lake Elsinore, California for a friend who was moving to South Carolina. Virtually everyone there was black, Mexican, or Asian, with many immigrants, and as property-owners, they said they had achieved their dream. Democrats can't stand people like this, the idea of people of all colors owning their own homes with garages full of expensive sporting equipment. It makes them sick, this idea of peons moving about the country and "escaping all proper control," as the Duke of Wellington put it, as noted by Eric Hoffer. The idea that Americans prefer to take orders and rent hikes, even little ones, from landlords, with no discounts for consistent payments, is not a happy thing. It's similar to being ordered around by union bosses in involuntary membership unions or nickel-and-dimed by homeowner associations, mostly at condos, two other Democrat enthusiasms.
Homeownership creates commitment to community, which is the foundation for the building of civil society. It's the creation of trust, the fostering of community commitment. A life among strangers, moving around from rental unit to rental unit, is a recipe for high social distrust...and racial tensions. If it's all about rents and remittances, it makes a place run down. Just tour San Fernando, or Van Nuys, California, for a whiff of that. The homeownership, with the pristine but empty homes, is back in Zacatecas. There's a reason city-dwellers never smile at strangers. It's owing to just this low social capital.
Homeownership is also about the importance of building capital and wealth — by the little guy. Smith praises renter-nation because he considers the high home prices that have driven people to renting the "liquefaction of housing markets," in that they can be bought and sold more easily, but only by big-shot investors. Instead of the little guy building a nest egg with wealth with his homeownership, it's now the big guy who gets to build wealth. Wealth-building and the freedom to create capital out of one's own earnings are central to why America is America and no pinched, immobile Europe, or worse yet, the Third World. Hernando de Soto, the great Peruvian economist, wrote about this Mystery of Capital and the importance of being able to have property rights as critical to eliminating the third-world shantytown life. Without property rights, which includes access to having property at all, life can get pretty rotten.
Democrats are all in for this kind of rotten. It transfers human wealth and autonomy into money and power for themselves. And come 2022, Republicans must make an issue of this absence of access to homeownership through sky-high housing prices, all the work of Democrat policies, overspending, and inflation, on the double.
Gavin Newsom Assaulted by ‘Aggressive’ Homeless Man on Oakland Street
A man has been arrested on suspicion of assaulting California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) during his visit to downtown Oakland, authorities said Friday.
Newsom was walking to a barbershop and pizzeria on Washington Street in Old Oakland to promote small businesses when he was “approached by an aggressive individual,” said Fran Clader, director of communications for the California Highway Patrol, which provides security for the governor.
Officers removed Newsom from the situation and arrested the 54-year-old man, she said.
Newsom did not appear injured, the East Bay Times reported, and quipped to reporters that different people have different ways of saying hello. The assailant allegedly threw a water bottle at the governor, according to law enforcement sources who spoke to the East Bay Times.
The man was taken to Alameda County jail, where he was booked for investigation of resisting an executive officer and assaulting a public official.
Reached by phone, a woman who identified as the suspect’s sister described him as a homeless man with severe mental health problems. She said the allegation made by authorities was “consistent with his past behavior.”
Friday’s assault highlights the growing homeless problem in California. Last month, Newsom announced a plan to spend $12 billion to combat the homelessness crisis as part of his $100 billion “California Comeback Plan.”
The California Democrat has defended his record on this issue in response to national criticism from Republicans. However, the homeless problem has continued to grow in the Golden State, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Alameda County where Oakland is located. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2019 that Oakland’s homeless population rose 47 percent in a two-year period. Last month, a group of Oakland residents built a “community center” at a homeless camp under a highway overpass.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s latest budget includes a request for $1 billion to stem the homeless epidemic in the city. The San Francisco city and county website estimated the number of homeless individuals to be over 8,000 in 2019, but some sources have estimated the number to be as high as 17,000, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Last month it was reported that San Francisco is spending $16.1 million for 262 tents to house the homeless in empty lots around the city in what officials call “safe sleeping villages.” The cost of this endeavor breaks down to $190 a night or $61,000 per tent per year.
California’s homeless crisis has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, San Francisco officials housed the city’s homeless population in city-leased hotels and even distributed alcohol, tobacco, medical marijuana, and other substances in order to keep the quarantined homeless from leaving the hotels to obtain these substances on the street.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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