George W. Bush Deputy Urges Removal of Title 42 Anti-Migration Barrier
Former President George W. Bush wants President Joe Biden to accelerate the inflow of wealth-shifting migrants into the U.S. economy, and he also wants Republicans to rally behind GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
“The Biden Administration should exercise its unilateral power to … remove the arbitrary and harmful border policies under Title 42” that was imposed by President Donald Trump, said an op-ed in the El Paso Times by Laura Collins, the director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative.
The Title 42 barrier barred the inflow of migrants during the epidemic. Biden’s deputies are keeping the barrier in place — but they are letting more than 50 percent of migrants through the barrier.
The Biden inflow of 1.5 million migrants during 2021 is reducing Americans’ wages, driving up their housing prices, and shifting investment and wealth from the GOP-led heartland states to the Democrat-dominated coastal states.
The op-ed comes as Bush is quietly helping McConnell to recruit anti-Trump Republicans for Senate races, according to a February 13 article in the New York Times:
PHOENIX — For more than a year, former President Donald Trump has berated Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, savaging him for refusing to overturn the state’s presidential results and vowing to oppose him should he run for the Senate this year.
In early December, though, Mr. Ducey received a far friendlier message from another former Republican president. At a golf tournament luncheon, George W. Bush encouraged him to run against Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, suggesting the Republican Party needs more figures like Mr. Ducey to step forward.
“It’s something you have to feel a certain sense of humility about,” the governor said this month of Mr. Bush’s appeal. “You listen respectfully, and that’s what I did.””
“Mr. Ducey also has been lobbied by the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, the liaison to Mr. Bush, who sought to reassure the governor that he could win,” the article reported.
Bush has championed business-first, cheap-labor migration policies for decades. Those policies were so unpopular that Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, lost the 2016 nomination to a political outsider, Donald Trump.
When Bush was in office from 2001 to 2009, he pushed a plan — dubbed “Any Willing Worker” — that would have allowed U.S. employers to hire foreigners when the offered wages were too low for Americans. “New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country,” Bush announced on January 7, 2004. “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job,” he said.
The plan extended his father’s 1990 immigration expansion bill, which doubled immigration and allowed high-tech companies to import their own labor supply from India and China instead of hiring Americans laid off by free trade with China.
Bush is still pushing the cheap-labor policies that shift wealth and political power from ordinary Americans to investors on Wall Street. For example, throughout 2021, Bush worked with business groups — including the diverse Koch network — to help Biden push his immigration-expansion bill.
In her February 4 op-ed, Collins described the job-seeking economic migrants as merely “vulnerable migrants,” but betrayed her agenda by arguing that they should be released once they are caught at the border:
Make no mistake, reopening ports of entry and reverting to normal processing of border crossers under immigration law will cause initial capacity constraints … [and] may temporarily increase the numbers of migrants. But the U.S. government has effective tools to manage this, such as alternatives to detention for migrants who aren’t a public safety concern.
Collins also argued that the migrants be fast-tracked into the labor market, saying:
… it’s our obligation as Americans to be a beacon of freedom and opportunity to migrants who have lived under oppression and persecution. Streamlining how we adjudicate asylum requests could drastically reduce the backlog while also respecting the asylum seekers’ human rights.
But none of these recommendations will matter if we don’t substantially reform our legal immigration system. A robust, functioning legal immigration system, with many opportunities across skills and education levels, is necessary to fill open jobs in the United States and reduce pressures on the border.
Collins also insisted that Biden’s deputies revive his January bill that would dramatically increase the inflow of blue-collar workers, foreign graduates, consumers, and renters into the U.S. economy:
The U.S. Citizenship Act, the administration’s proposal to modernize the immigration system, was unveiled a year ago, but we’ve seen little public leadership since. Without an overhaul of our legal migration policies, we will never appropriately manage the migrants who show up at our door, desperate for just a chance at better economic opportunities for themselves and their families.
The 2022 push is echoed by Bush’s former deputies, including Stuart Verdery, who now runs a business-funded pro-migration advocacy campaign. In a February 7 op-ed for TheHill.com, Verdery wrote:
Additionally, legalization of agriculture workers always has attracted bipartisan support, and the spike in food prices makes it even more essential that our crops can be harvested on time and without disruption.
Lastly, the need to retain high-skilled students and temporary workers as long-term citizens in the information economy is the most critical element of immigration reform. Attracting and keeping the best and the brightest is no different in business and medicine than in sports and entertainment. Can you imagine telling the Yankees that they can only look for shortstops among U.S. citizens?
Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.
That economic strategy has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.
Josh Hawley: Bush’s Globalist ‘New World Order’ Has Made the Elites Rich, Eroded ‘Middle Class Way of Life’
MOHD RASFAN/AFP via Getty Images
1 Nov 2019500
3:22
President George H.W. Bush’s plan for a “New World Order” with global integration of the United States’ economy has made the ruling class richer while eroding “the middle class way of life” in America, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley described how the long-held push by both political establishments to massively globalize the American economy has been at the expense of U.S. workers while the ruling class and their allies in the donor class have profited.
Hawley said:
If I have to give you a sense of the kind of vision that I think voters rejected, President Bush … gave a speech to Congress in 1990 where he talked about a ‘New World Order,’ and he was saying this of the situation in the context with Iraq, but he talked broadly about a ‘New global liberal order’ that of course America would lead, that it would involve America making the world much more like America and the rest of the world kind of blending in with America … and there wouldn’t be the need for hard borders any longer, and we’d have free trade, and we’d have great multinational cooperation, and we’d have these multinational corporations that can do business in any country, and it would be a whole new era. [Emphasis added]
…
Well, as it turns out — first of all, China and Russia didn’t get the memo on that — secondly, as it turns out, that ‘New World Order’ wasn’t good for American workers. And as it turned out, it didn’t protect American middle class values. As it turned out, it undermined the middle class way of life. [Emphasis added]
Hawley said the ruling class is primarily a “small group of people” from a “fairly narrow band of colleges and graduate schools” who largely agree on the most challenging issues facing the nation and oppose the traditionalism of middle American communities.
“They also tend to be the winners of this global integration. George Bush’s ‘New World Order,’ the people who have been in charge of the parties who run the media, who hold commanding heights in our culture; they win from that agreement,” Hawley said of the ruling class. “They’re doing great; they are the wealthy in our society. They are the ones who are globally integrated and global facing.”
Hawley continued:
They also tend to be skeptical of places like Missouri and of things like home and community. So they say that they value those things, but you listen to somebody … and somebody says, “I’m not going to move from this small town even though I’m having trouble finding a job because my family is here and because this is where we’ve lived for generations and this is where my friends are and I want to make a life here.” A lot of D.C. elites in both parties listen to that and they’re like, “That’s crazy.”
As Breitbart News has chronicled, free trade has helped gut working and middle class American jobs and stripped whole middle American towns of their industries and livelihoods.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed and China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO), five million American manufacturing jobs and more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities have been eliminated from the U.S. economy. This mass elimination of jobs due to free trade has coincided with an almost 600 percent increase in trade deficits.
In recent years, the economic recovery from the Great Recession disproportionately benefitted elite zip codes. For example, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While populations have grown in major cities where the wealthiest of Americans live, rural communities have continued to shrink.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
YOU DON'T GET ANY MORE CORRUPT THAN THIS OLD WHORE!
Feinstein Accepts Lifetime Achievement Award From Bush Scion’s CCP-Backed Group
The California senator has come under fire for her stance on China
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) / Getty ImagesChuck Ross • June 14, 2021 4:30 pm
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) last week quietly accepted a lifetime achievement award from a foundation with deep ties to a Chinese Communist Party front group.
The George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations honored Feinstein for her commitment to "a robust and mutually beneficial U.S.-China relationship." The group is heavily funded by the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, a Hong Kong-based think tank considered a key player in the Chinese Communist Party's united front propaganda system. Axios reported last week that the Exchange Foundation gave the Bush foundation a five-year, $5 million grant in 2019 to promote ties between the United States and China.
U.S. officials have expressed concern that the Exchange Foundation serves as an influence agent for the Chinese government. CIA director William Burns testified at his February confirmation hearing that he ended a partnership with the group when he served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, citing the think tank's influence activities. Feinstein attended that hearing as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Feinstein has come under scrutiny for China-related matters before. She said last year that China was "growing into a respectable nation" and cautioned against holding China accountable for the coronavirus pandemic. Feinstein also employed a suspected Chinese spy as a congressional aide for nearly two decades. She supported expanded trade relations with China while her husband sought business deals in the country.
Feinstein's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Founded by Neil Bush, a son of George H.W. Bush, the Bush China Foundation also gave a lifetime achievement award to former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Neil Bush has faced criticism for his pro-Beijing views and business dealings in China. In an interview with Chinese state media in December 2019, Bush suggested that the U.S. government was stoking pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
"It makes you wonder whether there's something driving this movement, because people aren't out on the streets in some educated way, as far as I can tell," he said in an interview with CGTN, a state-controlled Chinese TV network.
Other Chinese outlets have used Bush's commentary to peddle propaganda to American news organizations. The Wall Street Journal published an article from Communist Party-controlled China Daily in which Bush criticized U.S. tariffs against China and accused Donald Trump of hijacking the Republican Party.
Neil Bush said Feinstein and Kissinger played a prominent role in shaping key U.S. legislation related to China.
"Like my father was, they have long been powerful and effective advocates for the idea that America's vital interests are best served by a U.S.-China relationship that is functional, constructive, results-oriented, mutually beneficial and politically sustainable," Bush said in a statement.
"We need more people-to-people contact to show how our nations can get along, and I look forward to continue working toward that goal," Feinstein said in a statement accepting the award.
The China-U.S. Exchange Foundation was founded by Tung Chee-hwa, the vice chairman of a Communist Party advisory panel. The group has spent years cultivating relationships with American think tanks and universities as part of its efforts to shape perception of China in the United States.
The group's strategy is laid out in a consulting agreement it signed in 2010 with BLJ Worldwide, a public relations firm. According to the agreement, BLJ said it would initiate a campaign in the United States to "influence key constituencies," including politicians and academics, regarding China's controversial policies toward Tibet.
BLJ also said it would "leverage" outside spokespeople in order to "effectively disseminate positive messages" about China to the media, key policy influencers, and opinion leaders. The lobby shop arranged trips to China for prominent American journalists in order to obtain favorable coverage about the country.
The Case Against George W. Bush Hardcover – November 10, 2020
by Steven C. Markoff (Author), Richard A. Clarke (Introduction)
chronicles the presidency of George W. Bush through almost 600 quotes from over ninety authors, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and writers and journalists such as Steve Coll, Frank Rich, Craig Unger, and Bob Woodward. Steven C. Markoff presents sourced evidence of three crimes committed by George W. Bush during his presidency: his failure to take warnings of coming terror attacks on our country seriously; taking the United States, by deception, into an unnecessary and disastrous 2003 war with Iraq; costing the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and 500,000 others; and breaking domestic and international laws by approving the torture as means to extract information. While Markoff lays out his case of the crimes, he leaves it up to the reader to decide the probable guilt of George W. Bush and his actions regarding the alleged crimes.
Bush's sordid Saudi ties set template for Trump – he was just more subtle
President George HW Bush is greeted by King Fahd on his arrival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in November 1990. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
The former president has been widely praised for his command of foreign policy. The reality, writes the author of House of Bush, House of Saud, was much more complex – and dark
Craig Unger
Tue 4 Dec 2018 01.00 EST
Days after his death, reverent tributes continue to pour in for former president George HW Bush, celebrating his adroit handling of the end of the cold war and his victorious leadership in the 1991 Gulf war, all leavened with nostalgia for a bygone era in which an American leader could stand astride the world stage without causing the entire planet to titter in nervous laughter.
George HW Bush thought the world belonged to his family. How wrong he was
Ariel Dorfman
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Refined, gracious and genteel, Bush, in many ways, was the polar opposite of the current resident of the White House. Nevertheless, his decorous manner often concealed objectives that were far darker than the “kinder, gentler” vision he promoted.
As head of the CIA under Gerald Ford, and later as vice-president, Bush was a consummate pragmatist capable of rapidly changing political positions as expediency demanded. Highly disciplined, he mastered the arts of compartmentalization and secrecy. Nobody in government was better at keeping secrets. With his posh pedigree and Ivy League credentials, Bush had the perfect résumé to be a spy, and an effective mask with which to disguise his real agendas.
As Murray Waas and I wrote in the New Yorker, that was precisely the case in the summer of 1986, when Bush received a call from William J Casey, the gruff, perpetually disheveled spymaster who succeeded Bush as CIA director. Casey wanted Bush, then vice-president under Ronald Reagan, to run a covert operation that was part of what became known as the Iran-Contra and Iraqgate scandals.
Obstinate Iranian leaders had declined Casey’s secret offer to exchange arms for hostages who were being held in Beirut by terrorists tied to Tehran. Casey decided he had to force Iran’s hand. In August, Vice-President Bush was scheduled to visit the Middle East to “advance the peace process”, as the New York Times reported.
Bush’s true objectives were exactly the opposite of his stated goals. He was there to escalate the war between Iran and Iraq. Specifically, he had been tasked with delivering strategic military intelligence to Saddam Hussein, so that Iraq would intensify its bombing inside Iran. After a series of brutal air attacks, Bush and Casey reasoned, Iran would be forced to turn to the US for missiles and other weapons of air defense.
'A different command': how George HW Bush's war shaped his work for peace
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And they were right. Forty-eight hours after Bush executed his mission, Iraqis launched hundreds of strikes targeting oil facilities deep into Iran. Within a few weeks, Iran was back at the negotiating table. But that wasn’t the end of it. Every time hostages were released, new ones were seized.
As for the Iraqi side of ledger, Bush and Casey were far less wary of Saddam than one might expect. “He and Casey both had great naiveté, thinking you could be friends with Saddam Hussein,” said Howard Teicher, who served on Reagan’s National Security Council.
When Bush became president in 1989, his administration blithely ignored Saddam’s military buildup and human rights violations and proceeded to send funding, intelligence and hi-tech exports, some of which could potentially be used in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. All of which left Saddam emboldened – and that paved the way for the Gulf war of 1991.
A key factor in Bush’s Middle East policies was his friendship with Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US. The two men were so close that Bandar was known to pop in unexpectedly at Bush’s summer retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine. They went on hunting trips together. Later, when Bush was out of the White House, he even tasked Bandar with teaching his eldest son – George W, then a presidential aspirant with no experience in international affairs – all about foreign policy.
After his presidency was over, Bush and a number of his former cabinet officers also began participating in the Carlyle Group, a giant private equity firm heavily funded by Saudi billionaires – including the Saudi family of Osama bin Laden. As I reported in House of Bush, House of Saud, in the end, nearly $1.5bn made its way from the Saudis to individuals and institutions tied to the extended family of Bush cabinet officials and associates.
President George W Bush speaks to Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar in Crawford, Texas in 2002. Photograph: Reuters Photographer / Reuters/REUTERS
Such ties were particularly noteworthy because of the House of Saud’s alliance with strident and puritanical Wahhabi fundamentalists, many of whom supported a violent jihad against the west. All of which raised disturbing questions after terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people on 11 September 2001 in attacks orchestrated by Bin Laden.
George HW Bush's presidential campaign was nothing to be proud of
Walter Shapiro
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George HW Bush was long out of office and his son had become president. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, when US air traffic was all but shut down, how is it that the White House approved the departure of more than 140 mostly Saudi passengers, many of whom were kin to Osama bin Laden? Why did Saudi Arabia – birthplace of 15 out of 19 hijackers – get preferential treatment from George W Bush’s White House at a time when Arab-Americans all over the country were being apprehended and interrogated? Had the Bushes’ close ties to the Saudis led them to look the other way – even after the worst terrorist attack in American history?
Seventeen years later, of course, a very different White House has turned a blind eye to a very different but equally horrifying Saudi atrocity – namely, the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi after he was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
In response, Trump, predictably, could not have more deeply insulted the intelligence services Bush once led. Just a few days after the CIA determined that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the murder, Trump baldly defied CIA analysts and sided with the Saudis, asserting that Khashoggi’s murder might never be solved.
“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr Jamal Khashoggi,” he said. “In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
With his understated style and his understanding of the diplomatic niceties, George HW Bush, of course, would have handled it very differently. But let us not forget that America’s mercenary relationships with brutal foreign powers began long before Donald Trump.
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Craig Unger is the author of House of Bush, House of Saud and House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. His Twitter handle is @craigunger
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