President Joe Biden’s border disaster is “politically toxic” for Democrats, according to the Washington Post‘s editorial board.
“For the most part, the administration’s impulses are humane,” the pro-migration board wrote August 8, adding:
However, they have driven a policy whose incoherence has yielded pressure at the border that may cost the Democrats control of one or both houses of Congress in next year’s midterm elections. So far, there is nothing in the administration’s short- or long-term strategizing that is likely to shift that dynamic.
The editorial is titled, “President Biden needs a coherent strategy for the border.”
The board is eager to pin the “toxic” policy on poor P.R.:
The convoluted messaging — telling migrants not to seek entry to the United States while at the same time relaxing or scrapping an array of measures that would actually dissuade them, and providing relief to migrants on both sides of the border — has been a failure.
That failure is measurable, and it is politically toxic.
In reality, the semi-open border policy is powered by the self-serving and very deliberate political alliance of progressives and investors. That same alliance can also explain the Washington Post‘s narcissistic and minimal coverage of migration economics.
But that rational alliance is dangerous to the Democratic Party’s traditional goals because the public is deeply opposed to wealth-shifting, wage-cutting economic migration. One symptom is a deep internal split in the Democratic Party, which is largely hidden by the media’s refusal to cover migration’s pocketbook impact.
However, GOP leaders have also ignored the economic damage caused by massive levels of illegal, semi-legal, and legal migration.
Under pressure from GOP donors who also gain from migration, the GOP leaders are trying to boost their base turnout by spotlighting the border chaos while they use inflation and crime to win over swing voters.
By downplaying the pocketbook issues of immigration in the 2022 races, GOP leaders hope to avoid making any migration promises for action in 2023 and 2024. That strategy is risky for GOP legislators, said Chad Bohnert, a pollster with Zogby Analytics:
There’s 15 percent, 20 percent, of the grassroots, maybe 25 percent, that are pissed at the Country Club Republicans. They won’t go Democrat, but they won’t show up … We know turnout is the key to everything, and it always will be.
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, contradicts their political preferences, and fractures their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture. Amid Biden’s inflow of migrants, the “median weekly earnings of the nation’s 113.6 million full-time wage and salary workers were $990 in the second quarter of 2021 … 1.2 percent lower than a year earlier,” Breitbart reported July 16.
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.