Buzzfeed: White House, Mayorkas Fight over Migration Policy

White House officials are alarmed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ mismanagement of the border, according to a report Thursday in Buzzfeed News.

The article relies on comments from unnamed sources. But author Hamed Aleaziz has a good record of getting scoops from many senior and mid-level pro-migration advocates in government. The article is titled:

Biden’s Approach To Immigration Is Causing A Huge Internal Rift And Leading To A Lot Of Confusion

The article lists many pro-migration measures adopted by Mayorkas, but the quoted sources lament the White House’s continued use of the Title 42 rule to block almost half of the migrants who walk up to agents at the border.

The sources also blame Biden’s political aides in the White House for not opening the border up to more migration:

“There is a complete lack of direction,” said one administration official. “Everything is deferred to the White House National Security Council, which can’t see past low polls on immigration and are terrified their own shadow may be a pull factor. Career and political staff are equally concerned.”

[…]

“They are almost exclusively focused on detention, deterrence, and generally treating asylum-seekers with as much violence and inhumanity as the prior administration,” this official said. “Honestly, I don’t know how much longer I can stay at DHS if this continues. I stayed because I believed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris when they promised to build it back better. The despair I am feeling about what they are doing now is indescribable. I can’t go on like this.”

However, Mayorkas’ aides are determined to further open the border, according to the article.

For example, one “senior DHS official” argued to Buzzfeed that the U.S. superpower cannot stop an army of foreign high-school dropouts from penetrating the nation’s border and taking jobs and income away from Americans:

One senior DHS official [said that migrant] “Flows are going to continue. It would be better for the administration to focus on how to process them in a faster and more humane manner instead of focusing on how to convince desperate people not to make the journey.”

In reality, Mayorkas’ DHS works hand-in-glove with the cartels and with U.S. non-profits that are funded by elite donors to help economic migrants cross the border and get into Americans’ jobs and housing.

The semi-concealed official support for migrants is best understood as an establishment-run economic policy of extraction migration. The policy is intended to aid coastal investors and their progressive dependents by pulling cheap foreign workers, taxpayer-aided consumers, room-sharing renters into the U.S. economy, via many legal, illegal, and conditionally legal routes.

The Buzzfeed report is interesting because major political outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have provided very modest insight into the clashing politics of Mayorkas’ DHS and Biden’s political staff.

The insight is difficult to get. Mayorkas is an immigration zealot who has repeatedly misled the many journalists and GOP politicians who do not understand the migration issue, and he rarely accepts public questioning by skeptical and knowledgeable reporters.

Moreover, many journalists, top editors, and producers do not want to follow the money through migration politics, in part, because they prefer to see migration as a social issue, akin to civil rights.

But Biden is clearly concerned about Mayorkas’ handling of the border — and Biden’s poll ratings are clearly in decline because of Mayorkas’ support for mass migration.

“We will get it under control,” Biden told a reporter on September 21.

Public opinion has shifted 17 points against President Joe Biden’s loose migration policies, according to polls by Morning Consult for Politico. The August 28-30 poll of 1,997 registered voters shows Biden with 55 percent opposition and just 36 percent support.

In April, Biden had 45 percent opposition and 43 percent support on immigration.

Curiously, the article does not mention Mayorkas, nor influential outside groups, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us. Nor does it mention any of the White House officials who are concerned about Mayorkas’ management of the borders.

Aleaziz explained his reporting:

BuzzFeed News spoke with 20 government officials — some Biden appointees, others career staffers at DHS and the Department of Justice who focus on immigration — to understand how the policies that arose in January are being implemented and understood internally. They spoke with BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity due to the fact that they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The report mention’s two pro-migration groups, including the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which has been funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents. Migration also curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture.

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 pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan,  rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.