Former President Barack Obama’s unilateral award of work permits to roughly 800,000 illegal migrants during the Great Recession has been an “overwhelming success,” according to President Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
“This extraordinarily successful policy has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of young ‘Dreamers’ by making them eligible for work authorization and providing a measure of protection from deportation,” said the June 15 USA Today op-ed by Mayorkas, who is the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Mayorkas does not say how Americans gained from Obama’s flood of cheap labor — or from the Democrats’ subsequent emotional shift towards the concerns of migrants.
He hints that Americans gain from the amnesty by saying, “the simple truth is that while DACA has been overwhelmingly successful for all our families and communities.” But Mayorkas — who arrived in 1960 as a refugee child from Cuba — provides no evidence that ordinary Americans gain wages or dignity from DACA’s flood of cheap labor.
The op-ed underscores the growing evidence that the nation’s border chief cares about the needs of migrants, not about Americans’ right to a national labor market, wages. and a government that cares about their circumstances:
I am proud of the effectiveness with which we were able to implement the policy, working with advocates to make a real-life impact on so many. I continue to be proud of the steps the department is taking, at the direction of President Joe Biden, to do everything in our power to continue to protect DACA recipients and help them thrive.
…
Citizenship made this possible for me, and my own story is not so different from that of the many young people who hold DACA right now. It is long past time for them to be able to earn citizenship, too. On this ninth anniversary, we recommit to this renewed opportunity and to putting the American dream within reach of the young people who are Dreamers.
Mayorkas’s silence on the issue of costs and benefits is important, partly because he is now using his bureaucratic and regulatory power to widen small loopholes in the nation’s immigration law. He is widening the loopholes so he can extract even more foreign migrants from poor countries for use as consumers, renters, and workers in the U.S. economy.
Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) amnesty in 2012 exempted roughly 800,000 migrants from deportation on the grounds that their parents brought them into the U.S. society and economy while they were children.
In a Rose Garden speech that was later converted into a campaign ad, Obama claimed he had the right to exempt the illegal migrants from deportation law. He also claimed the legal authority to give them work permits, even while many millions of Americans were being impoverished by the housing crash caused by the bipartisan establishment.
In 2014, Obama tried to extend the DACA amnesty to the illegal migrant parents who had children born on U.S. soil but was slapped down by a federal court of appeals.
In 2020, the Supreme Court split evenly over the program’s fate amid a massive astroturf campaign by wealthy investors to preserve the amnesty in the face of cancellation orders by then-President Donald Trump.
The investor group that helped fund many of the protest groups was FWD.us, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other West Coast investors. In November 2020, the group strongly supported Mayorkas’s nomination for the DHS job.
Mayorkas’s op-ed does refer to DACA migrants as being doctors — but the vast majority of DACA migrants compete against blue-collar Americans for jobs, wages, and housing. In 2017, for example, a pro-migration group showed that DACA migrants graduated from colleges at just one-quarter the rate of American youths.
Also, the data provided by the Migration Policy Institute showed the sectors worked in by the 382,000 illegal aliens who held jobs because of their DACA work permits:
The occupations most commonly employing DACA holders are food preparation and servicing (16 percent, or 60,000 workers), sales (14 percent, or 54,000 workers) and office and administrative support (2 percent, or 47,000 workers) … About 5,000 work as health-care practitioners…. Almost 3,000 each work in business operations and in computer or mathematical operations.
Few of the DACA illegal aliens work as medical professionals, although many hold support jobs at hospitals that sidelined Americans can also fill.
In reality, except for the most skilled or inventive migrants, migration cut wages earned by Americans, regardless of the migrants’ diligence or decency.
Migration — both legal and illegal — also pushes up housing costs and minimizes Americans’ access to the labor-saving machines that would otherwise help them to be more productive.
Migration also impoverishes regions by shifting wealth from heartland states to the wealthy coastal cities favored by investors.
Moreover, while Mayorkas insists that his agency must protect the dignity of migrants, his migration flood threatens to damage the dignity of Americans by pushing them out of jobs and careers, homes, and status. Migration also impoverished regions by shifting wealth from heartland states to the wealthy coastal cities favored by investors.
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce — and are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants and the resident workforce of roughly one million temporary guest workers.
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.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
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