Democrats and other pro-migration advocates quickly blamed America’s popular border laws for the Texas deaths of roughly 50 illegal migrants in an overheated trailer.
“This is devastating,” tweeted Beto O’Rourke, the Democrats’ candidate for Texas governor, after more than 40 bodies were found in a closed and abandoned truck near San Antonio. “We need urgent action — dismantle human smuggling rings and replace them with expanded avenues for legal migration that reflect our values and meet our country’s needs,” he added.
The nation’s border laws are popular because they protect the value of family wages, the country’s need for housing, and Americans’ political rights, from a potentially limitless flood of foreign migrants.
“This is horrific,” tweeted Mexico-born Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL). “We need to end Title 42 and fix our broken immigration system so these unimaginable tragedies stop … People fleeing violence and poverty deserve a chance at a better life.”
Local priests from the San Antonio Archdiocese near the scene where a tractor-trailer was discovered with migrants inside outside San Antonio, Texas on June 27, 2022. (SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty)
“The politics of President [Donald] Trump and Governor [Greg] Abbott to build the wall, deport them all, and Operation Lone Star have all been abysmal failures,” said a press statement from the League of United Latin American Citizens. “It’s time for politicians in Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reforms to address these issues and avoid other tragedies.”
“This is terrible,” tweeted Mayra Macías, the chief strategy officer at Building Back Together. “It’s long past time that Congress fix our broken immigration system so folks can have the recourse to come here without risking their lives to do so.”
“Enraging,” said Jean Guerrero, a migration advocate at the Los Angeles Times. “Border militarization’s worst mass casualty event in years, and the @nytimes first quote in the story is of nativist Abbott scaremongering about immigration.”
Republicans, however, called on President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border deputies to enforce the nation’s border laws in a face of global, for-profit, cartel-managed, labor trafficking. “The deaths are on Biden,” Texas Gov. Abbott tweeted. “They are a result of his deadly open border policies.”
GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) also tagged Biden’s policy of welcoming migrants:
Many millions of poor and ill-educated foreigners want to move to the United States. Many see hope as Biden’s pro-migration border chief — Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas — works with the cartels to open more pathways through the border to jobs in the United States.
Democrats justify mass immigration by touting the invented 1950s claim that the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants.” For example, Leah Boustan, the university author of a new book advocating for more migration, Streets of Gold, claimed June 7:
Well, one thing is clear to us: Our immigmass imration system does not need to pre-select immigrants based on their wealth or their level of Education … we can continue to accept immigrants from poor countries who can do any of the jobs that need [to be done in] agriculture and in services, with the confidence of the American economy will allow their children to thrive.
The progressives’ demand for mass migration is backed up by some religious groups for Christianity’s universalist cause:
Some pro-migration groups count the death of migrants — at sea, on highways, in deserts, rivers, jungles, and snow — as they try to slip through the growing number of loopholes carved in the border by Mayorkas.
But those counts are usually kept to help the groups lobby against popular border rules:
Many progressives downplay their role in the deaths and instead blame the toll on Americans’ reluctance to open their nation, job market, and housing to endless migrants.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, for example, is a policy director at the American Immigration Council who argues that the U.S. must be a “Beacon of Freedom” for migrants:
But few Americans support those open-ended demands, especially as the progressives in Biden’s administration admitted more than 2 million legal migrants in 2021. Those migrants included more than a million poor southern migrants who have helped to reduce Americans’ wages and spike housing costs.
Unsurprisingly, business groups and investors also favor the large-scale inflow of foreign consumers, renters, and workers.
The business groups support both Republicans and Democrats, and they bitterly resisted President Donald Trump’s effort to curb the legal and illegal migrations in all four years of Trump’s presidency.
“Absolutely horrible, devastating news,” tweeted Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, a D.C.-based advocacy group for West Coast investors, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. “The dozens who lost their lives came to the US in search of a better life, they certainly wouldn’t have ever hoped to have come in these horrific, deadly conditions into which our country pushes people,” [emphasis added] he added.
Libertarians also oppose curbs on migration. For example, Reason magazine recently posted an article headlined, “America’s Harsh Immigration Restrictions Mean Haitians Drown Trying To Get Here.”
Most voters oppose mass migration into the jobs and houses needed by themselves and their adult children, according to a wide variety of polls. These polls show much sympathy for migrants — but also deep and broad public opposition to labor migration, and the inflow of foreign contract workers into careers sought by young U.S. graduates.
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