President Joe Biden’s border chief has appointed a like-minded advisory council dominated by CEOs and pro-migration executives in place of the diverse groups assembled by President Donald Trump’s deputies.
The advisors picked by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Alejandro Mayorkas include the CEOs of General Motors, Oracle, Corp. Duke Energy, American Airlines, United Airlines, Bank of America, and Chobani, plus top investors from Andreesen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, plus a top manager at Walgreens Boots Alliance.
“These are not subject matter experts on DHS ‘ critical law enforcement mission,” said Jon Feere, a former agency official under President Donald Trump and now an expert at the Center for Immigration Studies.
This council is intended to be the Secretary’s think-tank, to be made up of subject matter experts who can help advance the department’s mission. With the exception of a few people, it seems this new list is made up primarily of establishment business and cheap labor/open border advocates … And I don’t see any entities on this new list that seek to promote the interest of American workers, and nor do I see anyone on this list who has made a career of demanding a serious commitment to the enforcement of immigration laws.
Mayorkas’ choices include the heads of ethnic identity groups, including for an Indian tribe, Unidos — formerly known as La Raza — and Asian-Americans and African-American cops. “We know [Unidos] is very much hostile to DHS’ mission of enforcing immigration laws,” said Feere.
He also picked advocates for more migration, including managers at an elite-backed group that helps get economic migrants anchored in U.S. society, the head of a D.C.-based group that helped the Indian government lobby for more H-1B workers, the head of the Brookings Institution, plus at least two members of The Chertoff Group, a secretive advocacy firm for well-paying special interests.
“That’s a very swampy list of people,” Feere said.
The panel is meeting for the first time on March 21.
The pro-migration panel exemplifies Mayorkas’ plans to accelerate the extraction of foreign workers and consumers for use in the U.S. economy, despite plentiful evidence of massive economic harm to American employees, renters, and home-buyers. For example, Mayorkas is completing a regulation that would allow his pro-migration deputies to bestow U.S. citizenship on economic migrants without oversight by judges or congressional caps.
In 2021, Mayorkas allowed roughly 1 million economic migrants across the southern border, despite the existence of laws that allow him to block and detain economic migrants and asylum seekers. That huge flow of foreign workers and rents has helped to minimize wages gains for Americans and to maximize real-estate gains for landlords.
Meanwhile, roughly 20 million American men have been pushed out of the U.S. labor market by the federal government’s policy of extraction migration. The Washington Post reported March 20 on an American family in Lincoln Park, Mich.:
Now Dave [Ramsey] looked up at the laminated menu of funeral home prices posted on the wall. “One-day visitation: $5300.” “Funeral service director: $1800.” “Limousine: $450.” His family couldn’t afford any of it, so Dave Sr.’s body had remained in a freezer at the funeral home for three weeks while Dave Jr. scrapped metal and raised money from friends. His 17-year-old daughter had worked extra shifts at A&W and his girlfriend had sold some of her electronics, until finally they’d come up with $1,400 for basic cremation.
“I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing,” Dave said, as he got ready to leave. “This is the bare minimum.”
“Believe me, the bare minimum is normal,” the [funeral home] employee said.
Mayorkas is a Cuban immigrant and a pro-migration zealot. In 2021, for example, Mayorkas told the Wall Street Journal that he would allow companies to employ illegal workers providing they paid wages approved by Mayorkas. “Businesses that merely employ [illegal] immigrants not authorized to work but offer them fair wages and safe working conditions wouldn’t be a priority for immigration enforcement, he added.”
In 2013, Mayorkas declared that Americans’ homeland is “a nation that always has been and forever will remain a Nation of Immigrants.” In April 2021, he said migrant-owned companies “are the backbone of our communities — and of our country.” In May 2021, he staged the televised reunification of migrant families to distract media coverage from his border chaos. In June, Mayorkas promised that he would put the dignity of foreign migrants “foremost in our efforts.”
Mayorkas’ CEO-heavy advisory panel is very different from the panels picked by pro-American President Donald Trump’s deputies.
For example, in August 2020, Trump’s DHS chief, Chad Wolf, announced several new advisors, including “Dr. Sharon Cooper is a developmental and forensic pediatrician who evaluates and treats children who have been victims of all forms of abuse … Mr. John F. Clark, former director of the United States Marshals Service and longtime child advocate, is the president and CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.”
In November 20022, Wolf added, “Catherine Lotrionte is a Senior Researcher at Georgetown University, a Senior Associate in the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security at Auburn University [and] Tom Jenkins was appointed Fire Chief for the City of Rogers, Arkansas on January 16, 2009.”
In November 2020, Trump’s panel produced a report about Chinese spying and technology theft. For example, it recommended more oversight over student visas and the EB-5 citizenship-sale program, noting that “as other avenues of immigration have closed, EB-5 is likely to be exploited more systematically by the Chinese government.”
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
The self-serving economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point. It is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their housing costs, and shoves tens of millions of Americans out of the labor force.
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. It allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic strategy also kills many migrants, undermines U.S. workplace standards, splits families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.
Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls.
The polls show deep and broad public 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 one another.