Call it establishment theater: Vice President Kamala Harris is making a trip to the border to showcase the White House push for “a humane, orderly and safe immigration system.”
But the GOP leaders will likely take safe positions to shout about universally bad things — open borders, crisis, chaos, and drugs — and to avoid the internal political donor vs. base fight that could help them promise the popular alternative of lower migration and higher wages.
“They’re not talking about the effect on American jobs and American wages, and they certainly should be because that is definitely on everyone’s mind,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations at NumbersUSA.
“They’re just too afraid of making a broader critique of the Biden administration’s [pro-]migration policies,” added Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Any presidential or vice-presidential visit of this kind is a theatrical performance. That’s not even criticizing it. That’s just inevitably what it is … [But GOP leaders] are confining themselves to talking about how [President Joe] Biden is helping the cartels and is helping to put women and children in danger.
He is, in fact, doing those things, so that’s not an illegitimate critique or even a dishonest or tendentious critique. It’s just a partial critique, and you need to make a broader point if you’re going to lay the groundwork for legislative or policy changes in the future.
Democrats and their business allies touted their claims the day before her visit to the relatively quiet city of El Paso, which has long been protected by a border wall.
“She’s done a great job so far,” Biden said on June 24. “The reason why it’s important that she go down [is that] she’s now set up the criteria [for migration], having spoken with the President of Mexico and Guatemala [and], visited the region to know what we need to do.”
She will be accompanied by Alejandro Mayorkas, the pro-migration secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. He has far more authority over the border and migration rules than Harris. But they share many allies in the business-backed, max-migration left. In a June speech, Mayorkas said his border agency will put the dignity of foreign migrants “foremost in our efforts.”
Mayorkas is now opening up many side doors in U.S. border law to help extract many economic migrants from poor countries and to also eventually provide them with green cards, regardless of the harm to Americans — or to the migrants and their homelands.
“Voters in battleground states overwhelmingly support President Biden and the Vice President’s approach to manage the border and migration and create a humane, orderly and safe immigration system,” said a Thursday press e-mailed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s empire of amnesty advocates.
The favorable polling results, the groups claim, are “despite Republican attempts to distract the public with narratives about a ‘border crisis’ and ‘invasion,’ attacks against Vice President Harris, and photo ops centered at the border.”
The Democrats’ choice of words shows they do not want to reduce the growing wave of economic migrants — they simply want to manage the flow, said Krikorian.
“It is not ‘secure.’ It’s not ‘protect.’ It’s not ‘sovereignty,’ because they define success as the expeditious and comfortable processing of illegal immigrants into the United States,” he said, adding:
Vice President Harris’s [border] show will try to demonstrate that the administration is making progress in dealing with the border … [that] the so-called unaccompanied minors are being delivered to their illegal immigrant relatives who paid to have them smuggled in the first place, more quickly and more expeditiously.
I pretty much guarantee you that one of the places she’s gonna go is a [government] shelter where the so-called unaccompanied so-called minors are kept until their parents can be located. The point will be to show that there are no cages … especially to her constituency, which is to say the media and the Democratic Party. Showing happy, smiling children is an important scene in this theatrical performance.
“I think the only message they can try to show is that they have everything under control,” added Jenks.
They will try to show that they’re managing the flow efficiently, they’re moving unaccompanied children from border patrol custody to HHS [Health and Human Services] custody and to their illegal-immigrant families very quickly. They’re doing it so very quickly. They’re moving family members onto buses and planes and trains just as fast as they possibly can, so everything’s fine.’
But, she added, Americans “don’t care about processing them quickly; they want them not here.”
“Americans want the border actually secured so that these people are not coming in,” Jenks said.
The FWD.us group has repeatedly urged allies to focus on personal stories of migrants and to avoid mention of jobs and wages. And most independent polls show majority public opposition to Biden’s loose border policies.
But, so far, GOP leaders have relied on their donor-approved chaos-crisis-and0-drugs messages while avoiding the family-oriented, wages-and-jobs messages that get strong emotional responses in polls.
Democrats are not concerned about protecting Americans from employers’ use of cheap migrants, or protecting Americans from housing spikes caused by migrants, because they really prefer a world where people are not contained by international borders, Krikorian said:
They believe if people want to move here, we don’t have a right to stop them. They say the idea of “Us” and “Them” dehumanizes them.
But even the benign, or I would say, the morally necessary concept of [national] belonging, is something that by definition would exclude those who don’t belong, [that] is something they cannot accept.
That is almost a litmus test view for the administration and for the modern Democratic Party establishment. When you ask them, “Okay, if you want to let in 5 million immigrants, what about number 5,000,001? That last guy is not a criminal, he’s not a murderer, and he just wants to move here. What are you willing to do to that guy [to stop him]?” And their answer is, “Nothing.”
Mayorkas’ “dignity” speech shows that he does not see himself as an American, Krikorian said.
He just does not consider himself to have any greater responsibility to his own country [than to other countries] … It’s fundamentally contrary to the Constitution and to the idea of democratic governance, but it’s a consistent worldview. It is just not one that the people running a Republic have any business having.
The administration’s pro-migration policy is so extreme that the GOP can gain some voters even with a poor message, said Krikorian:
If Republicans are smart, they’ll say, you know, “Good for Harris to have visited the border because she is the Border Tsar. And, you know, it hasn’t gotten any better, and now it’s her responsibility.” So every time there’s another report of some tragedy at the border or another monthly statistics report, the Republican response should be, “What are you going to do about it, Madam Vice President?”
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce. Their government forces them to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants, and also the resident workforce of roughly two 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 immigration, visa workers, and illegal migration undermine democratic self-government, fracture Americans’ society, move money away from Americans’ pocketbooks, and worsen living costs for American families.
Migration does move wealth 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.