Mexico Tells Biden: Expect ‘Constant and Growing’ Migration

More migrants are coming to the United States, and the solution is more U.S. foreign aid to Central America, says Mexico’s foreign minister.

“If you look at the region from different points of view, but especially demographics and economics, it is clear the flows are going to be constant and growing in coming years,” said foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard, according to an Associated Press April 8 report.

“The United States will have to allocate $2 billion per year for development in these countries, in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador,” said Ebrard, who is involved in the slow-motion negotiations with the White House about the migration surge into the United States.

The $2 billion per year is roughly twice as much money as the $1 billion per year that President Joe Biden has suggested the U.S. should spend in Central America.

But Biden’s offer of $1 billion is equivalent to just $30.22 per person in Central America — and is only a tiny slice of the economic damage caused by U.S. extraction-migration policies to ordinary Americans, Mexicans, and the people in Central America.

More importantly, there is little evidence the U.S. wants to stop migration from Central America, said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Many U.S. business groups and donors want to extract migrants from nearby countries because they stimulate the U.S. economy,  minimize wage gains by Americans, pump up consumer sales, and boost rental prices.  The 2021 inflow under Biden’s border welcome is likely to add roughly 1 million people — or about one migrant for every four Americans who turn 18 and begin looking for jobs.

Biden’s extraction-migration policy is also damaging to Mexico, said Law, because it “just gets trampled on by caravans and further fuels, the integration of the [armed] cartels and the [migrant-smuggling] coyotes.” Law added:

Mexico is trying to really figure out what the actual [White House] position is because there’s so much wink and nod language coming out of the Biden administration.

[U.S. officials] say they don’t want the border crisis, and say they’re sending all of this [aid] money down to address root causes [in Central America], even though the root cause is the Biden administration itself.

By rewarding the movement of migrants into the United States, Biden’s White House is “colonizing Central America by extracting the populations and bringing them here, so destroying those [Central American] countries,” said Law.

In March, Biden handed the migration portfolio to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has enthusiastically supported migration from Central America into the United States. Since then, her staff has claimed she is trying to resolve the “root causes” of migration, but not to curb the current inflow.

This week the State Department also torpedoed negotiations with Nayid Bukele, the popular president of El Salvador. The very popular president has urged the United States to help stop young people’s migration from El Salvador to U.S. workplaces. Migration “is bad for the United States because immigration will go up, and it’s bad for our country because [of] people leaving the country … so it’s bad for both of us,” he told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in March.

In contrast, former President Donald Trump moved decisively in 2019 by pressuring Mexico to block the flow of migrants into the United States. Trump’s policy raised Americans’ wages and also proved very popular in Mexico, where many people oppose the cartel-aided trafficking of migrants across Mexico into the U.S. economy.

The $2 billion per year in foreign aid suggested by Mexico is a large amount of money — but is a tiny share of the annual cost of legal and illegal migration.

For example, migrants cost state and local governments roughly $57 billion per year, according to a 2016 report by the National Academies of Sciences.

But that is good for U.S. business because the taxpayers’ $57 billion in extra welfare, education, and healthcare spending eventually end up in company revenues.

This month, New York’s government allocated $2.1 billion to the poor migrants who support the city’s elite-run economy. The resulting payout of $15,600 per illegal migrant helps to preserve a labor force that allows city elites to extract wealth and political power from blue-collar and white-collar Americans.

Joseph Salvo, New York City’s chief demographer, told the New York Times why the city of eight million needs new bodies to replace the legal and illegal migrants who exited the city because of the coronavirus crash:

In the pandemic, [migrants] are trying to make a living and coming home and living in close proximity to other people. And they work the cash-only jobs, service jobs, services in buildings, home health aides, that we start to lose. Our growth is going to depend on giving support to these immigrants, many of whom suffered and lost family members.

…

What we pray will happen is that the city will come back with a ferocity we have never seen in food, beverage, entertainment and hotels. All of that is going to come back. And hopefully the immigrant population will prosper because of that. That’s the key.

…

The city is 37 percent foreign-born, and if you add the next generation, it’s more than 50 percent. We have more than three million immigrants. The largest groups are from China, Dominican Republic and Mexico.

“The city will rise — It will rise through the power of immigration,” Salvo said.

If Biden does not supply the city with a new wave of needy low-wage migrants, the city’s business and government leaders will have to attract young Americans from interior states with offers of higher wages, better housing, and improved law enforcement.

In effect, Biden’s policy helps elites and investors hire foreigners and ignore Americans from poor states and regions, such as Sen. Joe Manchin’s West Virginia.

For years, GOP leaders — such as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) or Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) — have done nothing to stop the nation’s migration system from shifting wealth from interior GOP-led states to the Democrat-run coastal states.

Correspondingly, Americans would gain economically if the U.S. government paid poor people in the Central American countries to stay home and build up their own economies, writes David North, an analyst with Law’s Center for Immigration Studies.

The U.S. should offer vaccinations and cash to young people in Central America “in exchange for a pledge on the part of the recipients that they would make no effort to come to the U.S., legally or illegally, in the following two or three years.”

He added, “In exchange for these benefits, they would sign a piece of paper permitting their immediate deportation should they be found in the U.S.”

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans.

It moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.