Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign is promising amnesty for millions of illegals, the inflow of more migrants, and more government power over Americans’ private and public economies.
Those promises also show how she and her White House allies use immigration to manipulate Americans’ wages, housing, and economy for the benefit of her investor and progressive allies.
Late on September 7, her website was updated with her campaign promises, including a section on migration:
As President, she will bring back the [February 2024] bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law. At the same time, she knows that our immigration system is broken and needs comprehensive reform that includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.
“Earned pathway to citizenship” is a euphemism for a mass amnesty of at least 15 million illegal foreign migrants, giving them the legal authority to compete for Americans’ jobs and to vote in Americans’ elections.
Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President, J.D. Vance, slammed the Harris platform of more amnesty and more migration:
What she won’t tell you is that the [February] bill also codifies catch-and-release, allows up to 1.8 million illegals to enter before the border could be closed, gives billions of taxpayer dollars to the same NGOs that are driving the invasion and expands the executive parole powers used by Biden [to import quasi-legal migrants] instead of limiting them. The bill’s author Sen. Murphy put it best when he admitted that, under his bill, “the border never closes.”
I think all of that is totally unacceptable when our nation is facing a historic border crisis, which is why I and my Republican colleagues opposed it.
If Harris was serious about raising border security, Vance added, “Kamala Harris should have instead pushed for a standalone vote on new border agents and scanners.”
Harris is also promising to hire a small number of extra guards for the border. But these guards will have little impact because her immigration policy also promises to welcome many more migrants via legally contested loopholes in the border.
The February bill that she promises to sign “would merely codify the illegal actions that this administration — including herself — has already undertaken,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Of course, she would sign that bill: Her colleagues in the administration wrote the thing.”
The giveaway bill would have allowed officials to provide fast-track citizenship at the border, grant work permits to millions of illegal migrants per year, and allow employers to fly in cheap foreign workers instead of hiring better-paid Americans. In effect, it would allow the second branch of government, the president’s Executives, to import as many foreign workers, renters, and consumers as it deemed best, with the advice of lobbyists, of course, and regardless of what Americans prefer.
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Since 2021, Biden and his deputies have imported roughly 10 million legal and illegal migrants migrants. Those migrants have absorbed nearly all of the extra lower-wage jobs created by Biden’s deficit spending, which muffled wage-related inflation amid Congress’ deficit spending. That combination of deficit spending, more migration, and more low-wage jobs is the core of Bidenomics.
“These newly arrived immigrants are the main reason the U.S. economy has defied pessimistic forecasts, with 200,000 jobs added a month, real growth in gross domestic product at 3% in the past year, and an inflation rate that has fallen dramatically in the past few years,” a former Obama economic advisor — Jason Furman — wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June 2024.
But the Bidenomics’ combination of migration and government spending has also boosted the deficit, spiked the cost of housing, flatlined wages, and depressed per-person productivity, The Bidenomics drop in wealth-generating productivity has even been recognized by Obama’s advisor, Furman.
Biden’s immigration chief is Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban-born, pro-migration zealot. He runs the Department of Homeland Security and drafted most of the February 2024 bill that Harris is promising to sign in 2025.
Mayorkas is powerful because he is backed by much of Wall Street, and Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group for West Coast consumer-economy investors. He is also strongly supported by many progressive leaders — including President Barack Obama — and by officials who filled top jobs in Biden’s administration.
Zuckerberg’s West Coast investors have also backed Harris’ national rise since her career in California
In 2021, Biden briefly tried to override Mayorkas’s policies by giving Harris a large role in migration policy. But Harris declined the request and instead supported Mayorkas by focussing on the vague issue of the “root causes” of migration from Central America.
Their support for more migration is a core element of Bidenomics.
In a balanced economy, unemployment is low and the supply of labor is tight. The result is a constant push and pull on a level playing field between employers and customers, employees and their communities. This give-and-take is worked out as employers decide how much to pay in wages, and how much to invest in labor-saving machinery, and as employees decide whether to keep their jobs or move to a better-paying job in a different city. In May 2021, Biden explained his support for this very popular goal of a tight labor market:
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 workers. We want the companies to compete to attract 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.
But Mayorkas and Harris have very powerful backers and very different views about wages and labor than did Biden — and their views created Bidenomics, even as Biden feebly protested the Mayorkas migration.
Harris and Mayorkas see the White House “as having plenary [total] power over immigration, rather than Congress,” said Krikorian:
The Executives over the past several decades have come to dominate foreign policy, where Congress no longer declares war, and the President has basically taken the War Power away from Congress … Obama laid the groundwork for [the Executive] is to turn immigration into a unilateral presidential policy rather than something that Congress has control of.
Mayorkas’ clout in the White House made him the nation’s “labor czar,” said Krikorian, adding:
That is a phenomenal level of power to give to the federal government period, regardless of whether it’s one guy or not. Even the President shouldn’t have that power … [But Harris’] campaign supports that.
His power was acknowledged by Biden’s first labor secretary: “The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told Fox Business in December 2022.
But that power also gives Mayorkas the ability to create or dissipate the tight labor markets that allow Americans to win higher wages from profit-seeking employers, the power to push up or press down housing prices, and the power to pressure companies into raising or lowering corporate investment in labor-saving, productivity-boosting workplace technology.
It also gives him the power to decide if investors, Americans, or foreigners should gain or lose wealth in the next decade: “We are building an immigration system that is designed to ensure due process, respect human dignity, and promote equity,” Mayorkas tweeted in August 2021, as he sketched out his plans for easy asylum rules that would encourage a mass migration of poor job-seekers into Americans’ homeland.
He is now exercising unprecedented power in Springfield, Ohio, where his Bidenomics policy is shifting wealth and wages from 60,000 ordinary Americans over to his imported and government-funded population of 20,000 Haitian migrants.
In August, the local Springfield News-Sun newspaper reported how a national food-services company was able to hire illegal migrants — dubbed “New Americans” — via a special program that excluded Americans who expect higher wages. “Kindred is basically a program which we hire new Americans, so all the people who are refugees, asylum seekers or literally anybody could be a part of this program as long as they’re new Americans, they’re new to the country,” company recruiter Mehr Un Nisa Jahed told a roomful of migrants, according to the newspaper’s report.
Mayorkas’ policy is also fracturing many American communities, such as Springfield, Ohio, where his migrants have brought chaotic diversity, car accidents, huge hospital bills, education expenses, Nazis, and many bitter arguments about the behavior of the Haitians.
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C-SPANMayorkas’ Bideomics economic policy is also ruthless towards the migrants’ countries. For example, Mayorkas’ Haitian migrants include a large slice of the island’s most educated Haitians and trained workers whose extraction starves the island’s communities of vital police and college graduates.
Unfortunately for Harris and Mayorkas, their easy migration policy is also very unpopular among Americans. It is also so popular among foreigners that they have had great political difficulty in scheduling and managing the rush of migrants into the United States.
Moreover, Donald Trump is building his 2024 campaign on the chaos and crimes caused by Mayorkas’ migration. “This is one of those areas where he does channel the emotions of much of the public,” said Krikorian. “His emotions are focused on illegal border jumpers … that’s what motivates him more, and that’s why he’s actually a lot better than other Republican politicians on the issue of enforcement.”
However, both Harris and Trump are ignoring the policy alternative to large-scale migration.
The alternative policy of shared high-tech growth and trade was outlined in April by Larry Fink, the founder of the $7 trillion BlackRock investment firm on Wall Street:
We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
“If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” said Fink.
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