More than one million migrants will try to push through the southern border this year, warns a former senior official in former President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The 78,000 arrivals in January were “nearly double the figure for the same month last year and the highest for January in a decade,” Juliette Kayyem wrote in a January 18 article for the Atlantic. “If the current pattern holds, the U.S. is on track for more than 1 million encounters in 2021.”
One million migrants adds up to roughly one migrant for every four Americans who turn 18 this year.
Kayyem’s warning, however, is not about the impact on many millions of Americans whose wages and neighborhoods face damage from the government-delivered flow of workers, buyers, and renters to the U.S. consumer economy. “People who are fleeing persecution and violence deserve refuge,” she insists as senior lecturer of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Instead, her concern seems to be that the flood of migrants will prompt American voters to step in and reassert control of the border which has now been delegated to Biden’s team of ethnic advocacy groups, open-borders progressives, and corporate allies.
That intervention would be bad for Harvard because it would likely derail Biden’s amnesty bill — a bill includes a massive giveaway to the elite university sector.
The Biden bill, if passed, would effectively allow Harvard and other universities to recruit fee-paying foreign students by offering an unlimited number of work permits — complete with a 15-year “path to citizenship.” In effect, the bill allows the universities to train fee-paying foreigners to take the careers the universities’ American graduates need.
Kayyem cautiously tries to blame the flood on the progressive wing of the Democrats. She wrote:
Many Democratic candidates during the 2020 presidential-primary season supported decriminalization of unlawful border crossings, and activists and officials on the party’s progressive flank support the outright abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Both positions, however, are unpopular among an American public.
The Democrats’ support for the migrant flood is very unpopular across a wide range of American society.
Yet Kayyem offers no plan to reduce the approaching migrant flood that threatens the giveaway to Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League. Instead, she pleads from Boston, saying “for the moment, the United States’ humanitarian interest lies not just in showing kindness to those who reach the border, but also in stemming the flow of people who undertake the journey in the first place.”
“Biden will have more maneuvering room, both operationally and politically, if he succeeds in signaling to migrants that they should not travel to the border immediately — and that an easing of Trump’s policies is not the same as an unconditional welcome,” she concludes.
Correction Note: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated Kayyem was “head” of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Kayyem is a senior lecturer there and the article has been updated to reflect that.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.