Chicago has reportedly taken meetings with illegal alien advocates from St. Louis, Missouri, about a deal to ship thousands of border crossers from the Windy City to the Gateway City.
EAGLE PASS, Texas — According to a source within CBP, the influx of Special Interest Migrants across the U.S./Mexico border continues early in the NEW fiscal year as nearly 100 Syrian and 50 Iranian nationals have been apprehended by the Border Patrol since the beginning of October. The source says the influx of Syrian and Iranian Special Interest Migrants is concerning, considering the turmoil unfolding in the Middle East.
The Syrian and Iranian migrants were apprehended in multiple sectors across the southwest border during October. The latest arrest of an Iranian national by the Border Patrol occurred near Eagle Pass, Texas, on Saturday. The Iranian national was discovered within a single group of more than 300 that crossed into the small border city. A debrief of the Iranian migrant is pending as of press time, according to the source.
The source says the continued encounter of Syrian and Iranian nationals is more concerning considering the recent U.S. air strikes against Iran-linked sites in Syria in response to drone and missile attacks on U.S. military bases in the region. According to the source, the arrivals of Special Interest Migrants at the southwest border are appearing with little to no advance intelligence warning.
“We are receiving no advance warning of the arrival of Special Interest Migrants from the region with any specificity,” the source explained. “We are left to sort through the grab-bag of migrants in small and large groups to figure out who is in the group and why they are coming.”
Eleven Special Interest Migrants from Middle Eastern countries were apprehended in just one sector of the border patrol in one week alone.
As reported by Breitbart Texas, during the week of October 8 to October 14, Border Patrol agents apprehended six Iranian nationals, three Lebanese nationals, one Egyptian national, and one Saudi Arabian national that made landfall in Texas on the banks of the Rio Grande in the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector that includes Eagle Pass.
The Syrian and Iranian Special Interest Migrants are mostly single adult males. Both countries are subject to travel warnings by the U.S. State Department. The State Department has issued a Level-4 advisory regarding travel to Syria due to terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, armed conflict, and the risk of unjust detention.
Iran is also subject to a Level-4 travel warning by the State Department due to the risk of kidnapping and the arbitrary arrest and detention of U.S. citizens.
The source says, absent any significant intelligence indicting a Special Interest migrant may pose a known threat to the United States, they are generally released into the U.S. to pursue asylum claims.
As reported by Breitbart Texas, more than 61,000 Special Interest Migrants were encountered by the Border Patrol in Fiscal Year 2023, which ended on September 30. The number of migrants from Special Interest countries climbed by more than 140 percent from Fiscal Year 2022, when more than 25,500 were apprehended. In all, more than 86,000 Special Interest migrants have illegally entered the United States in the previous two fiscal years.
According to a 2019 DHS fact sheet, the term “Significant Interest Alien” is defined as follows:
Generally, an SIA is a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests. Often, such individuals or groups employ travel patterns known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism. DHS analysis includes an examination of travel patterns, points of origin, and/or travel segments that are tied to current assessments of national and international threat environments.
This does not mean that all SIAs are “terrorists,” but rather that the travel and behavior of such individuals indicate a possible nexus to nefarious activity (including terrorism) and, at a minimum, provide indicators that necessitate heightened screening and further investigation. The term SIA does not indicate any specific derogatory information about the individual – and DHS has never indicated that the SIA designation means more than that.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on Twitter @RandyClarkBBTX.
Chuck Schumer: Amnesty and Migrants Prevent Labor Shortages
226AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
NEIL MUNRO
Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Monday amnesty and migrants are needed to prevent labor shortages.
Schumer made his claim as many employers say they must raise wages for Americans in a national labor shortage.
Since early 2020, many Americans quit their jobs in low-wage sectors, such as bars, restaurants, retail stores and for home-healthcare contractors. That resulting labor shortage has boosted wages for millions of blue-collar Americans.
Schumer spoke the morning after the Senate’s debate referee, the Parliamentarian, blocked the Democrats from putting an amnesty for illegal migrants in a special funding bill. The bill can pass with only 51 votes instead of the usual 60 votes in the Senate.
Schumer said:
The last year and a half … have shown how vital our [illegal] immigrants have been to keeping our economy going during the time of crisis … We’re short of workers from one end of America to the other — one of the reasons? The Trump administration dramatically cut back on immigrants in this country. We need them. We need them in our labor force. We need them to continue American vitality. We need them because they’re part of the American dream.
Schumer sought to shame Americans into supporting the mass migration policies which allow New York’s employers and landlords to become reliant on plentiful and cheap legal immigrants and illegal migrants:
It’s estimated in my city [New York] by some that one-third of the healthcare workers at the height of COVID who risked their lives for us were immigrants. Having a strong law that helps our immigrants is vital. The American people understand that fixing our broken immigration system is a moral imperative [emphasis added] and an economic imperative.
Immigration reform has been one of the most important causes of my time in the Senate, and I will not stop fighting to achieve it.
Schumer blamed President Donald Trump’s 2020 curbs on migration for the labor shortage. But that admission indirectly credits Trump’s 2020 policy with helping to raise 2021 wages for millions of Americans.
Schumer’s claim the economy needs migrants is in direct contradiction to President Joe Biden’s inconsistent support for wage raises amid labor scarcity, technically known as “a tight labor market.”
Biden, age 78, explained his support for the long-standing and very popular goal of a tight labor market in a May 28 speech:
Rising wages aren’t a bug; they’re a feature. We want to get — we want to get something economists call “full employment.” Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract wrk. We want the — the companies to compete to attract workers.
[…]
Well, wait until you see what happens when employers have to compete for workers. Companies like McDonald’s, Home Depot, Bank of America, and others — what do they have to do? They have to raise wages to attract workers. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Many economists say labor shortages make the economy more efficient and productive per person.
“The labor scarcity we’re experiencing is real … [but] this is an opportunity, not a crisis,” David Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a September 4 op-ed for Schumer’s home-town newspaper, the New York Times. He continued:
Couldn’t raising wages spur employers to automate many low-paid service jobs? Yes — but that’s not bad. There’s no future in working the fry station at White Castle. We should welcome the robot that’s now doing that job at some locations. Automating bad jobs has positive consequences for productivity. When employers pay more for human labor, they have an incentive to use it more productively … And one way to use people more productively is to train them. This may be one reason that employers provide more training opportunities in a tightening labor market — something happening now.
However, lobbyists have persuaded Biden to back the amnesties that would deliver roughly six million workers — at least — into many of the jobs needed by Americans.
To a large extent, Biden has been pushed to back amnesties — and to forget about tight labor markets — because of face-to-face pressure by lobbyists from Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group of West Coast investors.
On September 17, Biden’s economic advisors downplayed the wage damage to Americans as they issued a pro-amnesty memo. Notably, the memo did not endorse lobbyists’ claims that an amnesty would raise wages for Americans, and promised that wage losses would disappear “in the longer run.”
People attend a protest supporting DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, at Foley Square in New York, on August 17, 2021. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
The economic damage caused by migration to Americans was made clear September 1, when several Americans and illegal immigrant were drowned in the their cheap basement apartments in New York. The apartments were all they could afford in a city where migration has swelled real-estate values.
The New York Times posted an article on September 2, which was discreetly silent about the federal government’s role in the drowning of migrants — and of poor Americans — in New York’s cheap basements:
In one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, they have offered low-income New Yorkers, including many working-class families who work in restaurants and hotels, affordable places to live. The basement apartments also provide some extra income for small landlords, many of whom are also immigrants.
[…]
Deborah Torres, who lives on the first floor of a building in Woodside, Queens, said she heard desperate pleas from the basement apartment of three members of a family, including a toddler, as floodwaters rushed in. A powerful cascade of water prevented anyone from getting into the apartment to help — or anyone from getting out. The family did not survive.
Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents. Migration also curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
However, donor-funded GOP leaders have downplayed the pocketbook impact of migration on Americans’ communities. Instead, they try to steer voters’ concerns towards subsidiary non-economic issues, such as migrant crime, the border wall, border chaos, and drug smuggling.
Democrats Want $5.5 Billion Bailout of New York City’s Illegal Population
fundexcludedworkers.org/
NEIL MUNRO
17 Nov 20201,148
3:37
The coronavirus crash has completely impoverished New York City’s huge illegal-migrant population, so it needs a bailout from billionaires, says a far left group of open border activists.
The advocacy group, Make the Road NY, wants to raise $5.5 billion from 120 New York billionaires to provide roughly $750 per week in aid for up to 1.2 million illegal migrants and their dependents. Numerous Democratic legislators back the campaign.
The New York Times gave the draft legislation a boost on November 15, with an excellent video report that showcased some of the unemployed, illegal migrants who were trying to earn some cash as street vendors:
On one corner, Cristina Sanchez stood forlornly at a produce stand. She had not sold a single thing. During the pandemic she had lost her job, and then her rented room, triggering a frantic hustle to survive: First she sold produce, then tacos, then produce again …
…
“This has affected my children [in Mexico] a lot,” Cristina said, as she started to cry. “I try to tell them that because there’s no steady work, whatever I make is only enough for me to survive for the day.”
The New York Times showcased one of the group’s members, “Gerardo,” a Mexican who arrived in 2006:
He decided to sell tacos de alambre — made with steak, chiles, bacon and cheese — on the street. The owner of a local deli let him use an enclosed sidewalk stand at night, free of charge. During the day it sells smoothies.
…
Gerardo’s sales have not been brisk. His tacos cost two for $5. He needs to sell at least 130 each day, a target he often misses by half.
Many excluded workers have become street vendors in the past few months as a new source of income.
Our member Gerardo, also featured, has fought to #FundExcludedWorkers after losing his job and having to sell his car to make ends meet.https://t.co/Z9AwjTqiIH
— Make the Road NY (@MaketheRoadNY) November 16, 2020
The group also wants the state legislature to approve more licenses for street vendors — even though the extra supply of vendors would reduce income for the native-born and immigrant who operate the existing stands.
The Make the Road group said its surveys showed that:
92% of respondents reported that either they or another earner in their household has lost their job or income as a result of the crisis.
84% of respondents are now themselves unemployed, with 88% of them reporting job loss due to COVID-19.
Only 5% of respondents received unemployment benefits in the last month.
90% of household cleaners had lost their jobs. Those that were working had fewer clients than usual and had lost income.
The group’s survey says that 28 percent of renters in New York pay more than 50 percent of their wages on housing in the city’s migrant-crowded neighborhoods.
The scale of the imported poverty is huge but unclear.
Make the Road claims 1.2 million people “who haven’t received any aid,” while the New York Times says the city includes roughly half a million illegals.
The leaders in New York City choose to build their service and real-estate economies on cheap imported labor, so denying wages, jobs, and home to the many Americans who did live – or want to live — in the city.
Now the coronavirus crash is threatening the city’s economy by pushing out impoverished migrants, and their departure is pressuring employers to raise wages high enough to attract Americans to jobs in New York.
New York’s problem with impoverished illegal migrants is mirrored in Boston, Massachusetts, and in Los Angeles.
Mass immigration shifts investment, jobs & wealth from the central states to the coastal states.
NY shows how Trump partly reversed the wealth transfer by curbing migration.
Yet GOP pols keep voting for immigration that makes their states poorer. #H1B https://t.co/NsKy7qY76V
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) September 19, 202
0
Democrats Want $5.5 Billion Bailout of New York City’s Illegal Population
fundexcludedworkers.org/
NEIL MUNRO
17 Nov 20201,148
3:37
The coronavirus crash has completely impoverished New York City’s huge illegal-migrant population, so it needs a bailout from billionaires, says a far left group of open border activists.
The advocacy group, Make the Road NY, wants to raise $5.5 billion from 120 New York billionaires to provide roughly $750 per week in aid for up to 1.2 million illegal migrants and their dependents. Numerous Democratic legislators back the campaign.
The New York Times gave the draft legislation a boost on November 15, with an excellent video report that showcased some of the unemployed, illegal migrants who were trying to earn some cash as street vendors:
On one corner, Cristina Sanchez stood forlornly at a produce stand. She had not sold a single thing. During the pandemic she had lost her job, and then her rented room, triggering a frantic hustle to survive: First she sold produce, then tacos, then produce again …
…
“This has affected my children [in Mexico] a lot,” Cristina said, as she started to cry. “I try to tell them that because there’s no steady work, whatever I make is only enough for me to survive for the day.”
The New York Times showcased one of the group’s members, “Gerardo,” a Mexican who arrived in 2006:
He decided to sell tacos de alambre — made with steak, chiles, bacon and cheese — on the street. The owner of a local deli let him use an enclosed sidewalk stand at night, free of charge. During the day it sells smoothies.
…
Gerardo’s sales have not been brisk. His tacos cost two for $5. He needs to sell at least 130 each day, a target he often misses by half.
Many excluded workers have become street vendors in the past few months as a new source of income.
Our member Gerardo, also featured, has fought to #FundExcludedWorkers after losing his job and having to sell his car to make ends meet.https://t.co/Z9AwjTqiIH
— Make the Road NY (@MaketheRoadNY) November 16, 2020
The group also wants the state legislature to approve more licenses for street vendors — even though the extra supply of vendors would reduce income for the native-born and immigrant who operate the existing stands.
The Make the Road group said its surveys showed that:
92% of respondents reported that either they or another earner in their household has lost their job or income as a result of the crisis.
84% of respondents are now themselves unemployed, with 88% of them reporting job loss due to COVID-19.
Only 5% of respondents received unemployment benefits in the last month.
90% of household cleaners had lost their jobs. Those that were working had fewer clients than usual and had lost income.
The group’s survey says that 28 percent of renters in New York pay more than 50 percent of their wages on housing in the city’s migrant-crowded neighborhoods.
The scale of the imported poverty is huge but unclear.
Make the Road claims 1.2 million people “who haven’t received any aid,” while the New York Times says the city includes roughly half a million illegals.
The leaders in New York City choose to build their service and real-estate economies on cheap imported labor, so denying wages, jobs, and home to the many Americans who did live – or want to live — in the city.
Now the coronavirus crash is threatening the city’s economy by pushing out impoverished migrants, and their departure is pressuring employers to raise wages high enough to attract Americans to jobs in New York.
New York’s problem with impoverished illegal migrants is mirrored in Boston, Massachusetts, and in Los Angeles.
Mass immigration shifts investment, jobs & wealth from the central states to the coastal states.
NY shows how Trump partly reversed the wealth transfer by curbing migration.
Yet GOP pols keep voting for immigration that makes their states poorer. #H1B https://t.co/NsKy7qY76V
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) September 19, 2020
Joe Biden Delivers Flood of Cheap Migrant Labor to New York
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty
NEIL MUNRO
4 Mar 20220
11:34
President Joe Biden’s deputies have delivered so many illegal migrants into New York that some of the female migrants cannot find work to pay their smuggling debts, according to claims by advocates for migrants.
“This intersection in Williamsburg, New York City, known as LaParada, or the stop, is a place where [illegal migrant Ecuadorian] women find a job for the day, primarily doing domestic work,” NBCNews.com reported on February 28. The report continues:
Every day up to 150 [illegal migrant] women wait here, bargaining for hourly pay that is often below minimum wage, according to data collected from the Workers Justice Project last year. Often these day laborers are undocumented [illegals] and in recent months, many come from Ecuador. Rosa migrated from Ecuador and eventually settled in New York city nine years ago. She still comes to La Parada at least five days a week to look for work: [She said] “Now it is very, very difficult because there are a lot of people”
With more women, looking for work there’s more competition. Desperate to find a job and with little to no English, many new arrivals don’t negotiate their rate … [NBC asked] So you were here for a month before you could get a first job? [A migrant answered] Yes, one month.
The inflow is illegal because long-standing laws passed by Congress generally bar the admission of foreign workers into Americans’ labor market.
But Biden’s deputies — chiefly, the pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas — helps tens of thousands of migrants from the country of Ecuador in South America walk through the U.S. border. Roughly 500,000 Ecuadorians walked through the southern border between 2000 and 2017, and another 97,000 Ecuadorians were recorded in 2021 while trying to cross the border.
“I left my country because of the economic situation that all of us Ecuadorians are living,” a recently released migrant told NBC.
“I’ve been here almost 34 years and I’ve never seen the wave of Ecuadorians coming in the short time,” said Walter Sinche, the executive director of the Alianza Ecuatoriana Internacional, or the Ecuadorian International Alliance. “I knew a family, for example, they came with five kids. Not only undocumented but also people that come with visa, they overstay, so that’s also a large number,” he told Breitbart News on March 2.
“Most of the ‘[female migrants arrive] with some kind of relatives, some on their own with no relatives,” said Sinche.
The female migrants are being exploited because employers pay them less than the minimum wage of $15 per hour, Sinche said “It’s a new wave of new migrants coming to the U.S. and that’s why they [employers] take advantage,” he told Breitbart News. He continued:
The minimum wage in New York, it’s $15 an hour. But since they are new in the country, the people sometimes get paid that amount and sometimes they pay them less. I know people, they get paid like $7, $8 an hour … Like I said, a new generation.
“I earned very little and it was not enough,” one of the migrant women told NBC.
State governments and federal agencies do little about wage theft against illegal migrants. The lax enforcement of labor law hels to push down wage levels for Americans. For example, NYSFocus.com reported in June 2021:
“Employers were using the pandemic as an excuse to not pay workers,” said Glendy Tsitouras, an organizer with the Workers Justice Project, a Brooklyn-based worker center that serves day laborers and domestic workers. “They would tell workers that something happened and that they will pay next week—but that never happened.”
In April of 2020 alone, Tsitouras said, her organization was flooded with between 30 and 35 cases. Pre-pandemic, they typically received around 15 cases a month.
The workplace migrant abuse tends to come from Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants, Sinche said. There are “not many” complaints about Americans “like, for example, [Americans] from Ireland, Italians, Germans,” he said, adding:
Because they’re more conscious about their past, their history and they know also their grandma, their grandparents, came to the U.S. almost the same situation and [so] they are less abusive with new migrants on a high percentage. I’m talking about new communities, the Asians, they came a little later, and they start purchasing homes, for example, in the Corona area … They [are] not bueno, can be really bad … mainly Chinese … I’m just talking about the facts of what people have been telling me … They take advantage of new migrants and also basically if you’re trying to claim [legal protections] they say they will call immigration.
New York City’s government encourages and funds illegal migration into the city, despite the damage to Americans’ wages and housing costs. In September 2021, for example, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared:
The last year and a half … have shown how vital our [illegal] immigrants have been to keeping our economy going during the time of crisis … We’re short of workers from one end of America to the other — one of the reasons? The Trump administration dramatically cut back on immigrants in this country. We need them. We need them in our labor force. We need them to continue American vitality. We need them because they’re part of the American dream.
“The main driver of both new business formation and population growth in New York has historically been international immigration,” says a September 2020 Axios.com article. If international “immigration remains suppressed, New York will suffer,” says the article, which was titled “The math of New York City’s recovery.”
Migrants in New York need jobs to live in the expensive city, but they also need money to pay off their debts of about $15,000 to $20,000 per person.
They also need cash to re-hire the coyotes so they illegally deliver the migrants’ children to them via the federal government’s Unaccompanied Alien Children child-delivery program.
If the migrants cannot get jobs, they cannot pay their smuggling debts, Sinche said. “All over, coyotes are lending money [to migrants] but they have to sign a document saying ‘If you’re not paying [the debt], I’ll take your land or house or any other property,'” he said. When the debt is not paid, “most of the time, they ended up taking the properties … That’s a corrupt system that’s happening in Ecuador.”
If the women cannot get jobs, they also cannot save enough money to pay coyotes to bring their children to U.S. border officials, Sinche said.
The rise in Ecuadorian migration during 2021 is partly caused by migrants hiring coyotes to deliver their children to the border, William Murrillo told BorderReport.com in August 2021. “It’s parents who haven’t seen their children in many years and send for them,” said Murillo, a former government official in Ecuador who now runs a binational legal firm for Ecuadorians.
Murillo’s “personal experience as an undocumented migrant marked his life and he decided to serve our community of Ecuadorians in the world,” according to the firm’s website.
The migrants try to save wages for debt payments by crowding into apartments, Sinche said. “They have to struggle — they cannot afford to spend too much money … because they want to save,” he said.
“For example, a two-bedroom apartment, it’s supposed to be for a family, maybe two [people per bedroom. But now] sometimes, it is five to six or seven in a two-bedroom apartment,” he said. Rents are “way too crazy, especially here in the area of Queens Corona. A single studio will go for $1,500 to $1,600, and a two-bedroom, sometimes it goes to 2000 to $2,400,” which is up about $150 since rents declined during the coronavirus crash, he said.
City officials do not stop landlords from subdividing apartments to extract more rent, he said. In an August rainstorm, 11 migrants drowned in their basement apartments.
Migrant men are in a better position because they can take construction jobs, Sinche added. “They do pretty good,” said Sinche, who offers government-designed safety training to the illegal migrants.
Without domestic work, some women are trying to get construction jobs, he said.
What I find out was that women are taking the men’s positions, even construction. I just got a conversation yesterday with a couple of women that they do concrete work, they do carpentry works. I know one woman is doing electrical work. So since I’m an electrician for many years, I never seen so many Hispanics on the electrical trade, for example. I mean it’s good for them, but they do because there’s no other options to pick up my new skills.
The migrants’ money generates profits for many businesses in New York, according to Sinche: “They also pay for taxes, regardless of immigration status … they make money circulate in society … They have to eat, they have to wear clothes, they have to take transportation, [when] they get sick, they take medication.”
“They make money circulate in society,” he said.
But the huge inflow of migrants cuts Americans’ wages and raises their housing costs. A 2021 report by New York City’s government says a couple with two children would need to earn at least $154,000 to count as middle-income in the city.
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of immigrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters in the U.S. economy.
The economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while also raising 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. The economic strategy also kills many migrants, separates families, and damages the economies of the home countries.
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.
The wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. The polls show deep and broad public 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 one another.
“Currently, China remains the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked through international mail and express consignment operations environment, as well as the main source for all fentanyl-related substances trafficked into the United States,” the report states: