Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas was caught in panic mode, warning pro-migration advocates against making demands that jeopardize President Biden’s 2024 re-election. In an interview with Ahilan Arulanantham, a former ACLU lawyer who now runs the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, Mayorkas urged open border activists to curb their ambitions and stressed the reality of the situation at the border. Despite President Biden’s promises during his 2020 campaign to enact large-scale border reform to end the policies of President Trump, his vision of a ‘humane border’ has become wildly unpopular. Now, his administration is attempting to about-face. Since President Biden took office, roughly 4.2 million migrants have been imported across the southern border, and over a million illegal immigrants and workers cross into the country each year. This has ostracized young Americans from entering a highly competitive workforce while benefiting profit-focused entities that exploit cheap labor. Finally, it seems Washington is taking notice of their detested border policy, making moves to take a different approach to how they will handle border security.
BREITBART: Mayorkas Says Biden’s New Border Rules Leave Many Open Gaps
By Neil Munro; March 20, 2023
President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief is rebuking pro-migration advocates for making demands that threaten Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.
“This is about governing,” border chief Alejandro Mayorkas told a pro-migration university lawyer who objected to the administration’s new curbs on unpopular border migration.
Mayorkas outlined the many exceptions and loopholes in the promised curbs, and he urged progressives to manage their own ambitions:
It is about taking one’s ideals, taking one’s ambitions, in seeking to realize those ideals, and meeting the moment, the reality with that we confront … How do you propose that we handle 8,000 people each day when we are not [funded by Congress] for that?
“We’ve done so much and we have so much more to do that we will do,” the Cuban-born Mayorkas said during the March 15 interview with Ahilan Arulanantham, a former ACLU lawyer who now runs the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.
Pro-migration progressives want even more migration in 2023 and 2024, regardless of the damage to Americans.
“I want the world that President Biden defended in the [2020] debates,” said Arulanantham:
[Biden] said when families come here, we should have the capacity to bring them in and protect them … I want the world where we treat everyone [emphasis added] like we treat Ukrainians, and we don’t worry about whether it will overwhelm the system.
Arulanantham is the U.S.-born son of migrants from Sri Lanka who were welcomed into the United States. For two decades, he has made a career by championing more migration from Sri Lanka and other countries.
Arulanantham’s demand for easy global migration is shared by many elite layers and business advocates who deeply resent President Donald Trump’s wage-raising enforcement of the nation’s border laws. Those wealthy progressives profit from migration and are an important part of Biden’s voting and donor base.
Biden’s migration policy has been very good for wealthy interests.
He has imported roughly 4.2 million people across the southern border, in addition to the inflow of roughly 1 million legal immigrants and 1 million temporary workers each year. This huge flood of workers, renters, and consumers aids investors by lowering the hourly wages — and inflating the price of housing — that are needed by the roughly 4 million young Americans who enter the job market each year.
Legislators in Congress do not want to be seen supporting such a huge and unpopular inflow. Mayorkas told the lawyers that Congress does not want to fund the high level of migration that he and they prefer. “I was given a recommendation to seek money from Congress,” Mayorkas said in response to Arulanantham’s plea for more border migrants. “That is not particularly helpful — I’ve tried that,” he added.
But Biden is not promising to end this politically risky and unpopular southern inflow.
Instead, his team is trying to reduce the risk by announcing deceptive curbs that do very little to reduce migration.
The first apparent curb is the decision to stop the cross-border inflow of people from four countries — Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela. But that “parole pathway” plan simply diverts the migrants to airports so they can fly directly from their home countries to job offers and apartment rentals in America.
The second is a draft policy that would apparently curb asylum applications by migrants crossing from Mexico. But it contains so many exemptions that it likely will stop few migrants.
Both policies are being described by establishment media sites as successful curbs on illegal migration. For example, CBS News’s Colombian-born reporter declared on March 14:
El Paso, Texas — Unlawful crossings along the U.S. southern border in February remained at a two-year low for the second consecutive month, illustrating the dent that stricter policies enacted by President Biden this year have made on the unprecedented migration flows recorded since he took office.
“Biden takes heat for border measures, but illegal crossings are down,” said a March 15 Washington Post article that detailed complaints from pro-migration groups.
But this favorable media coverage also means that Mayorkas has to talk down the progressives who oppose even symbolic or temporary curbs on migration into Americans’ increasingly chaotic society of poor workers, wealthy investors, and a shrinking middle class.
Mayorkas has credibility among the open-border progressives.
He is a Cuban-born pro-migration zealot who has said his border management is “all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country.” Mayorkas’ demands imply equity between U.S. citizens and foreign citizens, and he has opened many loopholes for millions of economic migrants to cross into the United States.
So Mayorkas used his interview to corral the pro-migration zealots behind Biden.
For example, Arulanantham claimed that “the administration has promulgated a rule that would limit asylum.”
“That’s an inaccurate summary,” Mayorkas replied.
“What we’re trying to do is incentivize a lawful, safe, and orderly way to make that claim and disincentivize the [cartel] treachery that we see in between the ports of entry,” he said,
Mayorkas then described the loopholes and exemptions in the apparent curbs on asylum-seeking migrants:
So what we have done is we have issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to solicit comments …. The proposed rule provides that if one wants to make a claim for asylum in the United States, then one can make an appointment through a mobile [cellphone] app, CBP One …
If they have not made a claim of asylum [in a country they travelled through] … they are not banned from seeking asylum, they encounter a rebuttable presumption of ineligibility that they can overcome.
…
There are exceptions in the proposed rule. If one for example, has no access to CBP One [agency online portal] … if one is in imminent risk of danger by reason of the threat that one seeks to escape, [or] an acute vulnerability, an urgent medical or other humanitarian exemptions.
And we’re soliciting public comment to see whether this rule should indeed be promulgated, and if so, how it should be changed.
Currently, about 20,000 migrants per month — or 240,000 per year — are being let into the United States after using the CBP One app.
Mayorkas also explained the parole pathway in the supposed border blockage against migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela:
So what we did was, we established a parole program for people from those [four country] populations who can apply [online] for relief in the United States … If they are approved, they can travel safely by plane here … We’ve seen a tremendous uptick in the number of people using the parole program.
Mayorkas’s deputies are allowing an inflow of 360,000 migrants from the four countries.
This combined Mayorkas inflow adds up to roughly 600,000 migrants — or 60 percent above the annual cap of 1 million legal migrants set by Congress.
Advocates for American solidarity criticize Mayorkas’ pro-migrant policies.
“The Biden administration has basically moved a lot of people — who might otherwise have crossed the border illegally — off the books … [so] they don’t appear on the illegal border-crossing tally” each month, Ira Mehlman, the media director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform told Breitbart News. He continued:
The objective is just to get as many people in here as they possibly can, knowing that once people are here, then the odds are that they’re going tostay. Obviously, the migrants themselves get something out of it, their direct employers certainly get something out of it, but it comes at the expense of pretty much everybody else.
On March 8, a federal judge declared Mayorkas’s parole pathway illegal. Mayorkas noted the decision in his comments to Arulanantham, who declined to ask Mayorkas what he would do next.
Similarly, Arulanantham declined to ask Mayorkas about his diplomatic deals with Mexico. The deals have been kept under tight wraps, but Mexico is reportedly regulating the flow of migrants to the U.S. border, and Mayorkas is reportedly allowing more Mexicans to travel through the border to get U.S. jobs.
Instead, Arulanantham asked him to adopt policies that would aid his foreign clients to gain access to Americans’ jobs and homes.
Mayorkas curtly rejected the request:
[The law] is not based on whether an individual here in the United States will benefit from the grant so that they can send remittances to their family and other people in need … I would explain to your clients and others that there’s a legal basis for Temporary Protected Status that we adhere to, because that is our obligation.
Mayorkas also reminded Arulanantham that Biden’s first two years of chaotic migration — which Arulanantham supported — has cost the lives of at least one thousand migrants:
What we did [in January] was we executed on an effort to build lawful, safe, and orderly pathways for individuals to come to the United States, to incentivize them to use those pathways. Frankly, [to] liberate them from the clutches of the smuggling organizations that wreak so much death and tragedy.
Mayorkas’ declared concern for migrants’ safety of migrants is sincere. But his concern is also subsidiary to his determination to pull many into the United States on his watch with the dangled offer of jobs for adults and teenagers, and free K-12 education for kids.
Extraction Migration:
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
Photo: John Moore/Getty, AP/Cliff Owen, SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images