Former Vice President Joe Biden will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his role in creating huge Latin American migration and his involvement in several visas-for-sale scandals.
Mayorkas “is a gift for Republicans who want to make an issue of Biden’s immigration policies,” said Jessica Vaughn, at the Center for Immigration Studies. She continued:
He is the exact kind of nominee that people didn’t want to see — someone in favor of corporate interests on immigration, of looking the other way on fraud, of rubber-stamping every [migration] application. This should be an easy softball for them to hit out of the park. This is something that’s going to be helpful to them in the Georgia Senate races — I mean, [Sen. David] Perdue [R-GA] and [Sen. Kelly] Loeffler [R-GA] should be commenting on this.
All of the stars align here — cronyism, corruption, swampiness, and the immigration issue.
Mayorkas is a Cuban immigrant who ran President Barack Obama’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2009 to 2014. The Senate approved him on a party-line vote to serve as deputy chief to DHS.
During his term in office, he won acclaim from pro-migration groups as he reduced fraud detection projects and maximized migration inflows.
But his open-door policy exploded in 2014 as a flood of 350,000 migrants — including 68,000 youths and children — from Latin America and Mexico arrived to accept the welcome offered by Mayorkas and Obama. For example, a July 2014 AP poll of 1,044 Americans showed 68 percent disapproval of Obama’s immigration policies, up eight points after March 2014. The “wrong track” number spiked to 72 percent, up ten points after March.
Obama’s policies imported more than 2 million migrants to compete for blue-collar jobs, reducing wages for lower-skilled Americans.
Many polls show the public likes individual immigrants and conditionally tolerates migration — providing it does not cost Americans jobs or money. Under President Donald Trump’s pro-American, lower-immigration policies, Americans’ median household income rose 7 percent in 2019. In 2020, many lower-skilled Americans — including many Latinos — voted for Trump to help prevent another flood of cheap labor.
Advocates for cheap labor applauded Mayorkas’s nomination.
Mayorkas’s focus on maximizing immigration into Americans’ neighborhoods and job markets was spotlighted by a November 2010 letter to DHS from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA):
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that Director Mayorkas is fostering an environment that pressures employees to approve as many applications as possible and condones retaliation against those who dissent.
According to the USCIS employees:
During a recent visit to the CSC, Director Mayorkas became “visibly agitated” when advised that the employees were interested in learning more about fraud detection efforts. Mayorkas asked, “Why would you be focusing on that instead of approvals.” One witness stated that “his message was offensive to a lot of officers who are trained to detect fraud.”
In 2015, a report by the DHS Inspector General (IG) said Mayorkas “intervened improperly” in several decisions involved the distribution of valuable visas:
In three matters pending before USCIS, however, Mr. Mayorkas communicated with stakeholders on substantive issues, outside of the normal adjudicatory process, and intervened with the career USCIS staff in ways that benefited the stakeholders. In each of these three instances, but for Mr. Mayorkas’ intervention, the matter would have been decided differently.
We were unable to determine Mr. Mayorkas’ motives for his actions.
“An IG report found that he behaved that he acted improperly — and this was Obama’s IG report!” said Vaughan. “He’s a total transactional guy,” she added.
Once he finishes his term at DHS, “he will monetize his appointment for sure — maybe even while he’s there, considering how he behaved before.”