Top Democrats responded to President Donald Trump’s call for a border wall by urging a federal welcome for more “refugees.”
“The fact is, the women and children at the border are not a security threat,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in response to the Trump Oval Office address. “They are a humanitarian challenge, a challenge that President Trump’s own cruel and counter-productive policies have only deepened.”
The flow of Central American migrants topped 300,000 in 2018 and is predicted to reach 600,000 in 2019. Half of that inflow is of women and children who use Democrat-defended asylum laws to bypass border detention.
If the migrant inflow rises to 600,000 in 2019 and is added to the regular inflow of 1.1 million legal immigrants, the Democrats would import almost one new migrant for every two Americans who will be born in 2019.
“We can hire the personnel to facilitate trade and immigration at the border,” Pelosi said.
“We can secure our border without an ineffective, expensive wall,” responded Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, who helped draft the Gang of Eight amnesty and cheap labor bill in 2013.
Schumer’s expensive amnesty would have doubled legal immigration rates, removed any limits on the inflow of college-graduate migrants, and spent up to $40 billion on a series of ineffective border security measures.
Schumer suggested the Central American economic migrants are “refugees.”
“We can welcome legal immigrants, refugees, without compromising safety and security,” Schumer declared, adding, “a symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall.”
On January 4, Pelosi revealed a similar aesthetic and ideological argument against Trump’s proposed wall, saying on MSNBC that a wall “is an immorality — it builds walls in peoples’ minds about who should come here.”
Pelosi has repeatedly argued that American is “a nation of immigrants” — not of Americans — and that migrants are “more American” than the children of Americans.
“Legalize the people where so they can participate fully … [and] energize America,” she said in the MSNBC event.
In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton promised to deport only migrants who commit violent crimes. That policy would have barred the deportation of migrants who are not convicted of crimes, so offering a welcome to millions of migrants who are eager to work low wage service jobs in Democrat-run cities while living in crowded and expensive apartments.
Nationwide, the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor of blue-collar and white-collar employees.
The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices, pricing poor U.S. Latinos and blacks out of prosperous cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland.