President Joe Biden’s activist deputies are pushing for an increasingly “ideological” immigration policy, according to a report in the Washington Post.
“The basic tools of immigration enforcement — detention, deportation and strict bans on who can enter — remain … unacceptable to former activist leaders who now hold key positions in the White House,” the newspaper reported July 17.
Biden is “in a vise, caught between the [politically] costly reality of a historic border influx and supporters who erupt in anger when his administration hints at tighter controls,” the article claims.
Amid the rising cross-border inflow, Biden is looking for ways to improve his sinking migration polls, the newspaper reported:
The official, who maintains close ties to the Biden team, described the president as “super concerned” about the political ramifications of the tumult at the border. “He knows the damage this can do and what a gift this is to Republicans,” said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
The report also included a comment from a border state Democrat who is endangered by his voters’ opposition to Biden’s semi-open border:
“Biden is a centrist, but he depends on his staff like any other president,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.), who represents a border district and has urged the administration to toughen its approach. When it comes to immigration policy, Cuellar said, “the more ‘open borders’ vision is winning out at the White House.”
The article noted that at least one claimed moderate is leaving the administration, which “could mean more [pro-migration] ideological figures are in place, while relatively pragmatic ones are not.”
The article cited several of the former activists, including Alida Garcia, a long-standing supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris, and most recently, a top lobbyist at Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us investor group. The lavishly-funded FWD.us group runs a huge network of astroturf groups to surround Democrats — and Republicans — with pro-migration voices.
Another named activist was Tyler Moran, who previously directed the Immigration Hub group. That group was formed by billionaire amnesty advocate Laurene Powell Jobs.
The article did not mention Zuckerberg, Powell Jobs, or the investors who created FWD.us. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, whose deputies have lobbied hard — often in cooperation with FWD.us — for the inflow of more consumers and white-collar workers.
The article also did not mention Alejandro Mayorkas, who was picked to run the Department of Homeland Security — with political support from FWD.us. His agency is now implementing a pro-migration policy by extracting migrants from many poor countries for use in the U.S. economy by Zuckerberg’s allies and other Wall Street investors.
The article also ignored Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain. Before being hired by Biden, Klain worked for two co-founders of Zuckerberg’s FWD.us.
Breitbart News has extensively reported on the investors’ influence over the progressives, and throughout the Biden administration, including in the Oval Office:
The article noted that the pro-migration faction is promising to fix illegal immigration by legalizing the illegal migrants by opening many bureaucratic and regulatory side-doors in the immigration law:
Administration officials also say they will reduce illegal migration by making it easier for temporary workers and immigrants’ relatives to come to the United States legally. They plan to implement a new system to expedite asylum claims. And they hope to expand the use of electronic monitoring, so migrants will not have to stay in detention while awaiting a ruling on their asylum claims.
But converting illegal migrants into legal migrants will only exacerbate the economic damage of migration on Americans’ job opportunities, workplace conditions, wages, salaries, and rents.
In general, migration moves 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.
The administration’s record suggests that Biden sympathizes with both sides, and has been unable or unwilling to resolve the contradictions of his rhetoric or the policy battle between the rival West Coast investor faction and his East Coast moderate staffers.
Biden has repeatedly defended migration, he has not rebuffed the FWD.us and the other investors, and he has not rebuked Mayorkas and his other pro-migration deputies. His January amnesty bill includes nearly all of the investors’ demands, including a law that would allow Fortune 500 companies to hire an unlimited number of compliant foreign graduates and then pay them with government-provided green cards.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at the other sites.
Yet Biden has also repeatedly suggested steps to curb migration that his pro-migration deputies have ignored. In March, Breitbart reported:
In Biden’s first presidential press conference, on March 25, Biden appeared to reverse his administration’s border policy, saying that all migrant families should be sent back into Mexico: “They should all be going back, all be going back,” he said.
That dramatic statement was met with silence throughout the D.C. establishment and media …
Biden also hinted in his press conference that he would change policy on “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UACs) in border shelters, saying, “I asked my team … [to] focus on the most vulnerable immediately,” Biden said.
Also, Biden has repeatedly called for a tight labor market that would raise Americans’ wages, even as his deputies are importing hundreds of thousands of cheap workers. In May, he declared:
Rising wages aren’t a bug; they’re a feature. We want to get — we want to get something economists call “full employment.” Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract wrk. We want the — the companies to compete to attract workers.
[…]
Well, wait until you see what happens when employers have to compete for workers. Companies like McDonald’s, Home Depot, Bank of America, and others — what do they have to do? They have to raise wages to attract workers. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
In May, Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, argued that the policy zig-zagging is just PR:
The administration would like nothing more than to fully implement FWD.us’ agenda — but it is just that they have political concerns. They’re not stupid, they read the polls, they know that immigration is the President’s major weakness with voters.
[…] It’s a theatrical performance where they pretend to be reluctant and ambivalent while the outside groups like FWD.us push them [for more]. That serves both of their purposes because the administration gets to say [to voters]; “Look, we’re not crazy, we’re in the middle.”
In other areas, Biden — or his deputies — are making 180-degree turns to fix declining poll numbers. For example, the White House is ditching its lax law-enforcement rhetoric so it can blame the GOP for the rising murder rate. It also seems to be backtracking on the public advocacy for racially divisive education curricula.
Still, while the GOP officials have been aggressively using Democrat-driven crime and racial divisiveness to rally their supporters, they have been loath to make the popular and non-partisan economic case against Biden’s wage-cutting, rent-raising, immigration policies.
Without a Biden intervention, the White House’s radical faction of entwined progressives and investors is now pushing harder to win a sweeping amnesty — and more — in a rushed budget reconciliation bill.
The escalation makes sense to investors who now gain from federal policies that encourage the export of manufacturing and research jobs to China and the import of consumer demand and real-estate customers from poor countries.
But in 2013, the investor push for amnesty backfired disastrously and cost the Democrats five seats in the Senate. That crushing defeat helped a New York real-estate investor to jump into the race and provided him with a GOP Senate majority for four years while Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer fumed from the sidelines.
The Democrats may be heading for the same disaster in 2022 because of the investor-driven push for reconciliation amnesty in 2021.
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.