Mark Zuckerberg’s astroturf empire is promoting a plan by border security officials to vaccinate many job-seeking migrants who are now excluded by the Title 42 anti-coronavirus barrier.
The plan to provide the economic migrants with taxpayer-funded vaccines was leaked Tuesday to the Washington Post by two DHS officials:
Vaccine would be provided to those facing deportation as well as migrants likely to be released into the United States pending a court hearing, said one of the two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the tentative plan.
Migrants who are quickly sent back to Mexico under the Title 42 public health law would not be offered a [vaccine] dose, at least during the initial phase [emphasis added], the person said.
“This is just smart policy,” said a response tweet from Ali Noorani, president of the Zuckerberg-funded National Immigration Forum, which advocates for the importation of compliant and cheap workers for agriculture and retail employers.
“If the administration expands vaccine access to those who are expelled due to current Title 42 restrictions, it puts reopening of the border to a greater level of trade, tourism and immigration within reach,” he said.
The Zuckerberg-backed DHS plan to vaccinate migrants was leaked as President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is arguing against a Zuckerberg-boosted ACLU-led lawsuit against the Title 42 rule. The rule now holds back roughly 100,000 migrants per month from undermining Americans’ access to decent jobs and homes.
The ACLU is using the existence of the vaccines to argue that Biden’s Title 42 rule is illegal. “The policy was never justified and certainly is not now, given the availability of testing and vaccines,” a top ACLU lawyer told CBS reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez.
The DHS offer of vaccines to migrants proposal clearly undermines the Justice Department’s legal arguments to preserve the Title 42 barrier on behalf of Biden, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
The DHS officials “are hoping the judge will lift Title 42 [and] if they’re not thinking about the lawsuit [when they leaked the plan], then they’re morons,” added Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA.
Migrants say they want the vaccine to help them get into the U.S. job market. “We have to have it to cross the border, the lawyer had asked for it,” one migrant told BorderReport.com. “They told us to keep the [vaccination] paper in case we cross the border tomorrow, next week or the next two weeks, just to show them this and get the second shot over there,” the migrant added.
The vaccine offer also provides an extra taxpayer-funded sweetener — alongside jobs and the hope of residency — to people who are considering the expensive and risky trip to the border, Krikorian added.
Regardless of the coronavirus disease, Zuckerberg’s activists oppose the Title 42 barrier to the inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and renters.
“Title 42 was wrong in 2020. It’s wrong in 2021 and should end,” said an August 2 tweet from Todd Schulte, the president of Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group for West Coast investors. “Very disappointed to see Title 42 extended,” he tweeted after Biden’s White House staff extended the barrier, which allows border officials to reject asylum-seeking migrants.
Documents released by Zuckerberg’s groups show that Noorani’s group is just one of very many groups that have gotten funding from Zuckerberg or FWD.us. This orchestra of advocacy groups includes the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the National Foundation for American Policy, the Niskanen Center, and the Cato Institute, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center, Make the Road New York, United We Dream, Families Belong Together, polling groups, and many others.
Zuckerberg’s group is also eager to portray Biden’s Title 42 endorsement as racist and claimed on August 3 that Title 42:
targets primarily Black, Brown, and Indigenous asylum seekers and presents them as a threat to U.S. public health … [It] is a troubling reminder of the health screenings previously used as pretext to push back non-European migrants and Haitian asylum seekers.
The same claims of racism are made in the ACLU-led lawsuit. “It’s racist, it’s illegal, and it has no valid basis in public health,” said one of the plaintiffs.
“My suggestion for Zuckerberg is to take his billions and go into Mexico and start vaccinating people,” responded Jenks, who opposes the Zuckerberg-led push for more migration.
Zuckerberg’s very expensive and no-holds-barred push for wide-open border spotlights the expanding conflict between Biden’s West Coast backers and his East Coast insiders.
The West Coast faction is run by investors who want to stimulate their business and stock-market values by extracting lower-wage migrant workers, taxpayer-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters from poor countries.
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.
Breitbart has extensively reported on the close ties between the group‘s lobbying and the investors‘ economic interests.
But the members of the East Coast faction have their eyes on elections, and on Americans’ jobs and wages. Their partisan perspective requires balanced management of the migrant inflow amid deep public hostility to the labor migration sought by the investors.
The East Coast faction is also pushing for various big-government spending programs in the pending $3.5 trillion spending plan — and their priority is complicated by the West Coast demand that the bill also includes at least three amnesties for at least 8 million illegal migrants.
That East-West conflict plays out in Biden’s zig-zag speeches.
For example, in June and July, Biden has welcomed the tight labor market where CEOs must bid for workers with offers of higher pay. But in late July and August, he also called for Congress to pass a politically risky, no-safeguards amnesty via the reconciliation process. The amnesty would help flood the labor market and so cut the earning power of blue-collar Americans, including African-Americans, disabled people, and new legal immigrants.
On August 3, Biden equivocated on the Title 42 issue by noting that he continues to admit young migrants through the Title 42 barrier:
We have not withdrawn the [Title 42] order that is sometimes criticized [for] saying that unvaccinated people should go back across the border. But unaccompanied children is a different story, because that’s the most humane thing to do is to test them and to treat them and not send them back alone.
The confusion was noted by the Washington Post in a July 17 article:
The White House is pursuing what even some allies regard as a muddled immigration strategy, embracing policies that make it easier for migrants to come while often deploying stern rhetoric warning them not to.
[…]
Nearly six months into his presidency, Biden’s inability to shake off early struggles on immigration is creating growing anxiety for Democrats in swing districts and border areas who face tough congressional elections next year.
Amid the unresolved conflict, Harris’ West Coast faction seems to be beating Biden’s East Coast faction, including his National Economic Council, led by Brian Deese.
Since March, several of Biden’s proposals for managing the border have been brushed aside by Harris and Mayorkas.
Biden’s failure to resolve the contradictions is allowing Mayorkas to expand migration via his agency authority and tank Biden’s poll ratings on migration. For example, a July 24 Yougov poll of 1,500 U.S. citizens showed only 11 percent strong approval — but 39 percent strong disapproval.
In June, Mayorkas used that leeway to welcome another 84,000 migrants while rejecting 105,000 would-be migrants. The welcome migrants included 21,000 single adults, 48,000 parents and children, plus 15,200 younger migrants, most of whom are young men seeking jobs. So far, Mayorkas has imported roughly 700,000 migrants, so pressuring wages downwards.
On August 3, Mayorkas rolled out an offer of work permits and residency to millions of Venezuelans who have fled from their home country’s dictatorship.
Migrants admitted by Mayorkas are carrying the coronavirus into Americans’ neighborhoods, giving the GOP an easy talking point. Breitbart News reported from McAllen, Texas, on August 3:
The [city’s] official announcement also disclosed that more than 1,500 migrants released locally have tested positive for COVID-19 in the last “seven days.”
[…]
In the statement, the City revealed that its commission had acted following a disaster declaration and ordered its staff “to assist local non-governmental organizations to swiftly expand their operations, including identifying additional locations for emergency shelter should the need arise.” The commission also instructed its staff “to demand relief from the federal government for the alarming number of immigrants that are being released into the city of McAllen.”
Hidalgo County has also declared a disaster amid the flood of migrants worsened by coronavirus infections.
On August 4, Florida’s GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, slammed Biden’s border and coronavirus policies:
You have over 100 different countries where people are pouring through. Not only are they letting them through, they’re then farming them out all across our communities across this country, putting them on planes, putting them on buses. You think they’re worried about COVID? Of course not.
So he’s facilitating who knows what new variants are out there, and I can tell you, whatever variants there are around the world, they’re coming across that southern border.
And so he’s not shutting down the virus, he’s helping to facilitate it in our country. And what is his big solution? What is he so upset about Florida? His solution is he wants to have the government force kindergarteners to wear masks in school. He doesn’t believe the parents should have a say in that. He thinks that should be a decision for the government. Well, I can tell you in Florida, the parents are going to be the ones in charge of that decision.
Zuckerberg has many allies in the administration who are pushing Biden to support the investors’ priorities.
The Cuban-born Mayorkas is an immigration zealot who grew up, graduated, and worked in California as a prosecutor during the 1990s.
He was sworn into office on February 2, 2021, by his fellow Californian, Vice President Kamala Harris, amid cheers from his supporters at FWD.us and from the other pro-migration advocacy groups that rely on funding from the technology investors in California and Washington state.
This West Coast faction also includes some White House deputies who have held — or hope to win — lucrative Silicon Valley jobs.
Officials working for Mayorkas leaked the proposal to give vaccines to illegal migrants, according to the Washington Post:
The Biden administration is preparing to begin offering coronavirus vaccine to migrants in U.S. custody along the Mexico border, where illegal crossings are at their highest levels in over two decades and health officials are struggling with soaring numbers of infections, according to two Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the plan.
Zuckerberg also gets much friendly coverage from establishment reporters, few of whom are allowed to follow the money in migration policy.
Overall, investors and business coalitions want to import more migrants — even impoverished, ill, aging, or criminal migrants — because the migrants spike consumer sales, boost rental rates, cut wages, minimize management hassles, and so raise profits and stock values. The migrants also serve as clients for Democrat-run welfare agencies, and eventually, as voters for Democratic candidates.
But migration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, and fractures their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture.
Biden’s decision to restart the economic extraction of valuable consumers, renters, and workers from poor countries also helps move wealth — and social status — from heartland red states to the coastal blue states. The extraction policy also helps move wealth and status from GOP rural districts to Democrat cities within each state.
In general, legal and illegal 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.