Washington Post Absolves Biden Administration as Migrants Drown, Work for $5 per Hour
Poor migrants work for as little as $5 per hour and drown in flooded New York basements, according to two articles by seven reporters in Sunday’s online Washington Post.
But neither Washington Post article mentioned the federal government’s role in creating the high-migration, low-wage economy that delivered the poor migrants — and pushed many Americans — into New York’s submerged apartments.
One small portion of the toll was sketched on Sunday, in the September 5 Washington Post:
When the remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped seven inches of rain on the New York City area in about three hours … 11 of the 13 people who were killed were found in basement apartments that, in most cases, were never legally converted into residential space.
Most of the dead were immigrants; they’d come to New York from Trinidad, Nepal and China. They were busboys and kitchen helpers and 7-Eleven clerks, and in a city where apartments rent for far more than many immigrants’ first jobs pay, the only [affordable] housing they’d been able to find was below ground.
The federal government’s immigration policy deliberately extracts legal and illegal workers, consumers, and renters from many poor countries so they can be exploited by U.S. employers, landlords, and investors. Those migrants cluster into coastal cities, pushing up rents for migrants and Americans alike.
The four authors of the article — Stephanie Lai, Vera Haller, Samira Sadeque, Marc Fisher — did not acknowledge the government’s delivery of migrant victims to the flood.
Instead, they invited New York leaders to blame the drownings on other aspects of the federal migration problem, such as the city’s inability to enforce housing rules, or the possibility that federal migration laws might be enforced:
“At least 100,000 people — and there’s a strong possibility there’s a lot more — are living in those apartments,” Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said Friday. “So many people who end up in the illegal basements are fearful to communicate for fear they might be evicted or, worse in their mind, deported.”
But for many years, New York’s elite praised the inflow of migrants for boosting the city’s wealth.
The New York Times posted a similar article on September 2, which also remained 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.
Like the Post, the New York Times downplayed the poor Americans who are forced by government-engineered high rental costs to live in basement apartments. Four reporters wrote the New York Times article – Mihir Zaveri, Matthew Haag, Adam Playford, and
The Washington Post‘s second article on Sunday, September 5, described the economic conundrum where roughly 8 million Americans are refusing to return to their low-wage jobs:
At heart, there is a massive reallocation underway in the economy that’s triggering a “Great Reassessment” of work in America from both the employer and employee perspectives. Workers are shifting where they want to work — and how. For some, this is a personal choice. The pandemic and all of the anxieties, lockdowns and time at home have changed people. Some want to work remotely forever. Others want to spend more time with family. And others want a more flexible or more meaningful career path. It’s the “you only live once” mentality on steroids. Meanwhile, companies are beefing up automation and redoing entire supply chains and office setups.
…
[Cindy] Lehnhoff has been helping a child care center in northern Virginia recruit more staff. Their infant room remains closed, because they don’t have enough people, and one of their veteran workers was just poached by a nearby elementary school. As she spoke with The Washington Post, Lehnhoff pored over the Indeed.com job portal. It showed more than 2,000 job posts in the Fairfax County, Va., area for child care teaching assistants. Most paid $12 to $13 an hour, a bit less than many nearby fast food restaurants and retail stores.
The article has three authors — Heather Long, Alyssa Fowers, and Andrew Van Dam — but not one mention of immigration.
The federal government has inflated the annual new labor supply by at least 15 percent per year since around 1995. President George W. Bush promoted cheap migrant labor, and President Barack Obama invited Central American job seekers to ask for asylum. The result was a massive inflow of cheap labor and an economic bubble of low-wage jobs.
That bubble burst once President Donald Trump, the coronavirus, and federal unemployment aid slashed the supply of Americans and migrants who were willing to take the low-wage jobs.
In response, companies are now raising wages and buying labor-saving machines to help employees do more work. But the employers are also demanding yet more migrants to do the low-wage work Americans refuse to do.
In response, the labor bubble is being inflated again by President Joe Biden and his progressives deputies, including homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas.
They are pulling hundreds of thousands of migrants across the union line that marks the borders of the United States.
They have restarted the policy of extraction migration, and are likely to add roughly 1.6 million migrants during 2021. That global race for Americans’ jobs includes tens of thousands of Afghans, and hundreds of thousands of people from Central America, including at least 25,000 older teenage boys who are deemed “Unaccompanied Alien Children.”
The flood of new labor allows employers to refill many of the low-wage jobs — the restaurant jobs, the subcontractors’ day-labor jobs, the meatpacking jobs, delivery jobs, the construction jobs, and many more.
Biden knows a tight labor market is good for Americans. Judges have directed him to protect Americans by barring job-seeking migrants from crossing the 50-state union’s line. Multiple polls show his policies are increasingly unpopular.
Yet his deputies — such as immigration zealot Mayorkas — continued to pull global migrants into the U.S. labor market, where many are happy to earn $7.50 for their hourly labor.
But this big-picture macroeconomics story is hidden by the Washington Post, which prefers to miniaturize and personalize every aspect of immigration policy.
Washington Post author Maria Sacchetti, for example, posted a third article on Sunday that allows amnesty lobbyists to praise and flatter Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for promising to push an amnesty through Congress.
But Sacchetti does not even refer to the economic damage done to Americans by companies’ government-granted ability to hire millions of illegal foreign workers, nor the windfall gains that go to wealthy employers, investors, and coastal cities, such as New York. Her article does not quote a single critic of cheap-labor migration.
Instead, she builds her article on personal stories, such as an illegal-migrant couple that lost their low-wage jobs when the coronavirus shut down the city:
“We went to bed and the city woke up paralyzed,” said Maria Mejia, who dreams of becoming a U.S. citizen and opening her own buffet-style restaurant. “But the city kept going. And who kept it going? We did. The undocumented.”
But those personal stories lift the corner on the city’s welcome for low-wage, rent-paying migrants:
[Mejia’s] husband returned to work at a mom-and-pop supermarket last year, but like many undocumented immigrants, he has no health insurance, no overtime pay and no vacation time. He is paid $5 an hour, six days a week. The official minimum wage in New York is $15 an hour.
Another migrant, Oscar Lopez, 34, works as an “air-conditioner installer,” wrote Sacchetti. “He hadn’t returned to Mexico since he left 17 years ago. He needs the $21-an-hour job that pays his family’s expenses in both countries.”
Glassdoor reports that New York’s HVAC technicians earn roughly $31 per hour.
But Sacchetti does recognize that New York’s government welcomes the poor migrants who crowd into the city’s real estate market:
New York has attempted to integrate undocumented immigrants, providing them legal aid, issuing them city identification cards and state driver’s licenses, and creating a $2.1 billion state fund for “excluded” workers ineligible for federal pandemic aid.
Sacchetti’s guides to New York’s economic underground include both the National TPS Alliance and Make the Road New York.
Both groups are part of Mark Zuckerberg’s network of pro-migrati0n and pro-amnesty groups that are lobbying the media and Congress to pass a reconciliation amnesty this fall.
The lobbying campaign has urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media. The network is also funding online ads praising Schumer for promising to push the amnesty through the Senate this year.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters.
The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His fast-growing retail empire gains from the government’s inflow of additional consumers and workers.
Evacuated Afghans Demand Chain Migration of Extended Families, Complain Accommodation Is Inadequate
Two of the Afghan men evacuated from the Taliban-run country with their wives and children under the government’s generous refugee programme have called for extended families to be brought over as well, with one complaining that it was taking too long to get permanent accommodation.
Shams, a former communications officer who worked at the British embassy in Kabul, was brought over with his wife and six children and had been staying for over a month in a hotel in Buckinghamshire.
Speaking to the Evening Standard, Shams said that he appreciates the opportunity to be in the UK, but more should be done for his “colleagues and relatives… in hiding from the Taliban”.
Asked whether the UK owed it to his extended family and the rest of the embassy colleagues, Shams replied: “Yes.”
“I just remind Priti Patel of her words, when she said that she owes a debt of gratitude to the Afghan people, I think that’s the best way to put it, and we really hope the UK will continue to try its best to evacuate the people who deserve it,” he said.
Former interpreter Nazir, also brought over with his wife and children, likewise said he is trying to have his relatives evacuated from Afghanistan, saying they are being tortured and intimidated.
Shams also seemed dissatisfied with his accommodation, saying the “noise levels” at the hotel are “not manageable” and that the Home Office should “speed up the process to help us find suitable housing” so that the family of eight can “start our life properly”.
Men like Shams and Nazir arrived thanks to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP), which safeguards former employees of the British military and other UK authorities and their families. Initial estimates had put the number of those eligible to 5,000, but that figure could be as high as 10,000. So far, the UK has admitted 8,000 under the ARAP scheme.
Last week the British government announced that ARAP refugees would be granted immediate Indefinite Leave to Remain, or the chance to upgrade their temporary status to ILR, rather than the five years’ residency initially offered. This means they can settle in the UK permanently, with the right to work.
Under Operation Warm Welcome, there would also be made available millions of pounds for extra school places, the NHS, and accommodation, as well as hundreds of university scholarships and additional forms of support.
The Home Office is also running a second Afghan refugee scheme, the Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), which will evacuate mostly women, minorities, and children. The government has pledged to bring over 20,000 in the coming years, aiming to resettle 5,000 by the end of this year alone.
Last week it was reported that two-thirds of local government authorities were reluctant to house the refugees because they were struggling to ensure social housing and school places for locals. Britain has also seen a record arrival of illegal aliens crossing the English Channel, needing to be housed. To date, nearly 12,500 illegals have landed this year alone.
WashPost: Officials Welcome Afghan Migrants Who Did Nothing to Help U.S.
President Joe Biden is helping many poor Afghans who did not help the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan to now migrate into Americans’ communities and workplaces, according to a Washington Post report.
The admission was buried under a bland, don’t-read-this headline, “New Arrivals Don’t Fit Neat Categories,” the Washington Post reported June 6:
A senior administration official said in an interview that the vast majority of Afghans who pass security screenings at transfer points abroad and want to enter the United States will be allowed to come. That includes a potentially sizable number who raise no red flags — but who also cannot demonstrate close ties to the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, acknowledged the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
The Washington Post did not identify the official. But the article did include evasive comments from Alejandro Mayorkas, the zealously pro-migration head of the Biden’s Department of Homeland Security:
Mayorkas said in an interview that he also could not specify how many of the evacuees worked with the United States. “I can’t really quantify it or measure it against expectations,” said Mayorkas.
The comments mark another step beyond Biden’s August claim that the United States would admit people who earned “Special Immigrant Visas” after fighting alongside U.S. soldiers. “The estimate we’re giving is somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 folks total, counting their families,” Biden told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos on August 19.
Biden’s deputies now describe the accepted migrants as “vulnerable” Afghans, as if the migrants all face political or criminal penalties if they return to Afghanistan.
Refugees are led through the departure terminal to a bus at Dulles International Airport after being evacuated from Kabul following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on August 31, 2021 in Dulles, Virginia. The Department of Defense announced yesterday that the U.S. military had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending 20 years of war. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Biden’s anti-border allies want at least $8 billion in taxpayers’ money to resettle at least 50,000 Afghans. Other groups are calling for at least 1 million Afghan migrants — regardless of the vast civic distance between Afghanistan’s pre-modern Islamic culture and the United States’ civic life.
A majority of Americans oppose the resettlement of more than 50,000 Afghans in the United States, according to an August 18-19 survey of 1,000 likely voters by Rasmussen.
Many Afghans forced their way into the evacuation, and there is little evidence that Biden’s deputies want to exclude Afghans who did not work or fight with Americans during the last 20 years. The Washington Post reported an anecdote on the chaotic lack of screening Biden’s airlift:
“Nobody knows who was the good guy and who was the bad guy getting into the plane,” said Mustafa, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect relatives still in Afghanistan. He added, “It’s a risky thing that I believe happened.”
The New York Times reported August 31:
Instead, in the first few frenzied days under the Taliban, when rumors swirled of American planes transporting Afghans directly to the United States, thousands of people without passports, visas or identification cards flooded Kabul’s airport and were placed on Doha-bound planes.
There are shopkeepers whose stores were next to the airport, members of the security forces who abandoned their posts there and employees of Kam Air, an Afghan airline, still in their uniforms after jumping on planes.
Other unidentified Afghans simply force-landed their aircraft on an American airbase in the nearby country of Qatar.
Many of the Afghan migrants will impose more chaotic diversity to Americans’ society, in part because many are fundamentalist Muslims who lack passports. For example, wealthy men in Afghanistan can wed multiple wives. Families often arrange marriages between cousins to conserve wealth within the extended family. The marriages often bind young girls to older men because women have little or no status in Islamic law.
Those Islamic cultural norms are being imported into the United States, the Associated Press reported September 3
“Intake staff at Fort McCoy [in Wisconsin] reported multiple cases of minor females who presented as ‘married’ to adult Afghan men, as well as polygamous families,” the document says. “Department of State has requested urgent guidance.”
Overall, Biden’s government is expected to import 1.6 million migrants from poor countries in 2021, or roughly one migrant for every two American births that year.
Refugees board a bus at Dulles International Airport that will take them to a refugee processing center after being evacuated from Kabul following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on August 31, 2021 in Dulles, Virginia. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
This policy extracts many new workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries for the benefit of U.S. employers, investors, and government agencies — and also to eventually deliver many potential voters to the Democratic Party.
This policy of extraction migration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages and raises their housing costs.
More migration also means that coastal investors can hire cheap foreign labor on the coasts instead of investing in heartland jobs or deploying wage-boosting robots. Immigration also shrinks Americans’ political clout and wrecks their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture.
Many pro-migration lobby groups are lavishly funded by wealthy pro-migration donors, including Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, and others who hide their identity.
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