Former President George W. Bush wants President Joe Biden to accelerate the inflow of wealth-shifting migrants into the U.S. economy, and he also wants Republicans to rally behind GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
“The Biden Administration should exercise its unilateral power to … remove the arbitrary and harmful border policies under Title 42” that was imposed by President Donald Trump, said an op-ed in the El Paso Times by Laura Collins, the director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative.
The Title 42 barrier barred the inflow of migrants during the epidemic. Biden’s deputies are keeping the barrier in place — but they are letting more than 50 percent of migrants through the barrier.
The Biden inflow of 1.5 million migrants during 2021 is reducing Americans’ wages, driving up their housing prices, and shifting investment and wealth from the GOP-led heartland states to the Democrat-dominated coastal states.
The op-ed comes as Bush is quietly helping McConnell to recruit anti-Trump Republicans for Senate races, according to a February 13 article in the New York Times:
PHOENIX — For more than a year, former President Donald Trump has berated Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, savaging him for refusing to overturn the state’s presidential results and vowing to oppose him should he run for the Senate this year.
In early December, though, Mr. Ducey received a far friendlier message from another former Republican president. At a golf tournament luncheon, George W. Bush encouraged him to run against Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, suggesting the Republican Party needs more figures like Mr. Ducey to step forward.
“It’s something you have to feel a certain sense of humility about,” the governor said this month of Mr. Bush’s appeal. “You listen respectfully, and that’s what I did.””
“Mr. Ducey also has been lobbied by the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, the liaison to Mr. Bush, who sought to reassure the governor that he could win,” the article reported.
Bush has championed business-first, cheap-labor migration policies for decades. Those policies were so unpopular that Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, lost the 2016 nomination to a political outsider, Donald Trump.
When Bush was in office from 2001 to 2009, he pushed a plan — dubbed “Any Willing Worker” — that would have allowed U.S. employers to hire foreigners when the offered wages were too low for Americans. “New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country,” Bush announced on January 7, 2004. “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job,” he said.
The plan extended his father’s 1990 immigration expansion bill, which doubled immigration and allowed high-tech companies to import their own labor supply from India and China instead of hiring Americans laid off by free trade with China.
Bush is still pushing the cheap-labor policies that shift wealth and political power from ordinary Americans to investors on Wall Street. For example, throughout 2021, Bush worked with business groups — including the diverse Koch network — to help Biden push his immigration-expansion bill.
In her February 4 op-ed, Collins described the job-seeking economic migrants as merely “vulnerable migrants,” but betrayed her agenda by arguing that they should be released once they are caught at the border:
Make no mistake, reopening ports of entry and reverting to normal processing of border crossers under immigration law will cause initial capacity constraints … [and] may temporarily increase the numbers of migrants. But the U.S. government has effective tools to manage this, such as alternatives to detention for migrants who aren’t a public safety concern.
Collins also argued that the migrants be fast-tracked into the labor market, saying:
… it’s our obligation as Americans to be a beacon of freedom and opportunity to migrants who have lived under oppression and persecution. Streamlining how we adjudicate asylum requests could drastically reduce the backlog while also respecting the asylum seekers’ human rights.
But none of these recommendations will matter if we don’t substantially reform our legal immigration system. A robust, functioning legal immigration system, with many opportunities across skills and education levels, is necessary to fill open jobs in the United States and reduce pressures on the border.
Collins also insisted that Biden’s deputies revive his January bill that would dramatically increase the inflow of blue-collar workers, foreign graduates, consumers, and renters into the U.S. economy:
The U.S. Citizenship Act, the administration’s proposal to modernize the immigration system, was unveiled a year ago, but we’ve seen little public leadership since. Without an overhaul of our legal migration policies, we will never appropriately manage the migrants who show up at our door, desperate for just a chance at better economic opportunities for themselves and their families.
The 2022 push is echoed by Bush’s former deputies, including Stuart Verdery, who now runs a business-funded pro-migration advocacy campaign. In a February 7 op-ed for TheHill.com, Verdery wrote:
Additionally, legalization of agriculture workers always has attracted bipartisan support, and the spike in food prices makes it even more essential that our crops can be harvested on time and without disruption.
Lastly, the need to retain high-skilled students and temporary workers as long-term citizens in the information economy is the most critical element of immigration reform. Attracting and keeping the best and the brightest is no different in business and medicine than in sports and entertainment. Can you imagine telling the Yankees that they can only look for shortstops among U.S. citizens?
Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.
That economic strategy has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.
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