Joe Biden's Border Chief: Jobs for Migrants, Jail for Coyotes

President Joe Biden’s deputies are simultaneously touting their efforts to jail cartel-allied migrant smugglers and to guide their migrant clients into U.S. jobs.

The two-sided policy won’t reduce the inflow of economic migrants, said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “If you’re inviting illegal immigrants, going after the smugglers isn’t going to help,” he told Breitbart News.

The agency’s unofficial two-sided policy — jobs for migrants, jail for coyotes — was spotlighted by competing September 13 press releases from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agency is run by Biden’s zealously pro-migrant, Cuban-born border chief — Alejandro Mayokras.

The first DHS statement was headlined, “DHS Hosts the Five Country Ministerial Meeting in Washington, D.C.,” and said agency officials talked about the importance of helping poor people migrate to jobs without relying on criminal networks:

The [five] Ministers discussed the need to partner to expand lawful pathways for regular migration [emphasis added], thereby fulfilling critical labor needs and addressing disadvantaged persons’ hope for a better life.  They redoubled their commitment to end the scourge of forced labor and human trafficking.

The second statement was headlined “DHS and DOJ Announce Significant Enforcement Operation” and said:

In April, the Biden Administration launched a first-of-its-kind effort, unprecedented in scale, to disrupt and dismantle these human smuggling networks. DHS has committed over $50 million and surged over 1,300 personnel in Latin America and along the Southwest Border, to bolster efforts through JTFA, Operation Sentinel, and others.

The statements did not promise to enforce the laws that protect Americans from companies’ replacement hiring of coyote-delivered foreign workers.

Instead, the statements promised to protect the illegal migrants from the people they hire to get into U.S jobs — the coyotes and cartels.

“We are unwavering in our commitment and sending a strong message: if you manipulate and imperil and take advantage of struggling migrants [emphasis added], we are coming for you,” said a statement attributed to Deputy DHS Secretary John Tien.

The agency “strives to be flexible, adaptable, and to think outside the box when it comes to disrupting these criminal organizations and protecting migrants [emphasis added] from harm,” said Deputy Commissioner Troy Miller of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“The Justice Department will continue to bring our full resources to bear to combat the human smuggling and trafficking groups that endanger our communities, abuse and exploit migrants [emphasis added], and threaten our national security,” said a statement from Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Amid the administration’s threats against smugglers, Mayorkas declines to punish economic migrants caught at the border, or even working illegally at jobs alongside Americans. He rarely mentioned the government’s duty to help its citizens get decent jobs.

For example, a September 9 report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University showed that almost 40 percent of migrants at the border — or roughly 450,000 migrants — were able to make more than two efforts to cross the border.

The migrants were able to make repeated attempts because Mayorkas and his deputies oppose trump’s policy of flying detained migrants back to their foreign homes.

Mayorkas and other progressives favor migration, but they have no reasons to like the cartels and coyotes.

One important factor is that many migrants die on the Hunger Games-style pathways to the welcome that progressives offer at the U.S. border. Many others are raped.

Progressives in the media periodically mention those progressive-caused deaths and rapes, but usually in a distant, nothing-to-do-with-us aside. For example, the New York Times reported on September 15:

Ardenis Nazareth, newly arrived from Venezuela, was standing in a McDonald’s parking lot across the street from a San Antonio shelter a few days ago contemplating his next steps.

After a monthslong odyssey through seven countries he had finally made it to the United States. It was time to banish from his thoughts the worst moments — when he was robbed at gunpoint and people dropped dead of exhaustion beside him as they crossed a lawless jungle, and when he watched helplessly as his friend was swallowed by the turbulent waters of the Rio Grande, just before touching U.S. soil in Texas.

Now Mr. Nazareth had one objective in mind: make money to support the two young daughters he had left behind.

Similarly, on September 17, the Washington Post skipped past the deaths and rapes, as well as the laws and economics:

In the evening, [Martha’s Vinyard resident Katrina Lima] pulled up an empty gray foldable chair next to her and invited the migrants to talk about what they’d gone through. She heard about people getting robbed and tricked and watching their friends struggle to survive. So many had started the journey with more people. Some were kidnapped or drowned or died of dehydration.

The two-sided policy, said Krikorian, can be viewed “as a purely political measure to show they’re being responsive to the border crisis” before the November election.

Mayorkas and his allies want to minimize their connection to the shameful death toll caused by their off-the-books welcome for economic migrants.

But their higher priority is to move the diverse migrants into Americans’ increasingly chaotic society, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

So they have been working for years to build a quasi-legal, network of many alternative and safe migration backdoors and pathways into U.S. workplaces and homes.

For example, the progressives have extracted about 70,000 migrants from Afghanistan into the United States via a parole loophole. They have pulled 150,000 Ukrainians from safe European countries, partly via a new sponsorship program. The “Unaccompanied Alien Children” loophole has allowed entry by more than 200,000 young workers and children of illegal migrants.

Mayorkas and his aides have also extracted at least 175,000 Cubans and at least one million people from Central and South America. Many are deemed legal when they are invited through the parole and asylum loopholes. This quasi-legalization allows migrants to walk away from cartel-affiliated labor traffickers and then find their own legal jobs. Only a small share of the migrants are being flown home from the U.S. border.

Under Mayorkas, many more migrants from distant countries — such as India — are simply being waved through the border. Leaked reports say almost one million young migrants have slipped past the wall where Mayorkas ended construction, and past the border guards who are distracted by their new duty of welcoming Mayorkas’ semi-legal migrants.

Biden’s deputies also just leaked that they plan to pull 125,000 more people in via the refugee backdoor during 2023.

Since January 2021, Biden and Mayorkas have allowed roughly 2.5 million economic migrants across the southern border via a series of legal rationalizations.

The Mayorkas-invited illegal inflow is in addition to the Congress-approved inflow of 1 million legal immigrants and roughly 1 million visa workers. This combined inflow of perhaps several million migrants since Biden’s inauguration has imposed an economic shock that has slowed Americans’ wage growth and pushed up inflation, especially for housing.

Biden’s many alternative pathways for the illegal migrants override international policies against letting economic migrants pass through multiple safe countries to a preferred destination.

They also ignore federal laws that require them to detain economic migrants who are seeking U.S jobs and homes. For example, the Vinyard Gazette reported the frank admissions by an economic migrant on September 14 who is — theoretically — ineligible for asylum protections:

A plane carrying approximately 48 migrants from Venezuela and Colombia landed unexpectedly at Martha’s Vineyard Airport Wednesday afternoon. Island officials and emergency management representatives were gathering to deal with the situation.

“We’re immigrants,” said Eliase, who said he was from Venezuela. “We came here because of the situation in our country, for the economy, for work, for lots of things. I came here walking. We went through 10 different countries until we got to Texas. There a refugee association put us in a plane and told us there would be work and housing here. I feel good, despite everything. We spent four days in Texas so it’s good to be here.”

Mayorkas is also accelerating the inflow of foreign white-collar workers into Americans’ careers. The workers arrive carrying H-1B, J-1, L-1, TN, B-1/>B-2, F-1, and other visas that help them get the jobs needed by U.S. graduates.

Mayorkas and his deputies are also bulldozing prior practices to help smuggle the migrants into American society. They are providing them with quick aid and transport services, fast-track work permits, legal aid and courtroom favors, exemptions from deportation laws, and easy access to federal welfare programs.

As Mayorkas and the agencies build their alternative pathways for migrants to take Americans’ jobs, they are hiring a corps of government appointees to operate the pathways, Krikorian notes:

If was a Democratic administration, obviously, people on the hard left [would manage the migration pathways], but in a Republican administration that was disposed to that sort of thing, you’d have pro-business folks — agricultural, landscaping groups, whether it’s the companies themselves or not — but people with that [business] orientation would be the ones running the program.

“In either case, there wouldn’t be a great incentive to make sure the [border and employment-protection] rules were being followed because the point was to import the workers, not necessarily to vigorously enforce the various requirements,” he added.

Unfortunately for Mayorkas and Biden, the Supreme Court is expected to hear a case in December that may shut down their unofficial pathways. The judges will hear claims by state officials that Biden and his deputies are breaking the law by refusing to detain illegal migrants.

Their refusal to detain the migrants inflicts economic damage on ordinary Americans because the migrants force down wages level by accepting jobs at wage levels below what is needed by American families, say Krikorian and other critics.

The government-backed, international rush for slices of America also pushes aside many of the 4 million young Americans who begin working each year.

Within the United States, the administration’s policy —  jobs for migrants and jail for smugglers — also lets most U.S. employers off the hook.

They are let off the hook because progressives want migrants to get jobs in the United States, regardless of the impact on Americans.

In late August, for example, BBC World Service reported that the Department of Labor imposed minor penalties on a Hyundai auto factory amid evidence that it was using migrant children on its production lines:

A lawyer for the company signed the consent decree in which the company agreed to not hire underage workers, verify the ages of workers hired through a staffing agency, and to fire or discipline any managers aware of the use of underage workers.

The same pro-migrant policy is also visible in the Department of Labor. For example, department officials have forced many companies to pay required wages to underpaid H-2A and H-2B  visa workers — but debarred very few of the companies for manipulating the labor market.

But officials are still eager to showcase the punishment of cartels and coyotes within the United States, including the four coyotes who let 53 migrants die in an overheated truck outside San Antonio.

In February, the Department of Justice announced long jail sentences for a foreign family that smuggled girls into the U.S.:

Between 2006 and July 2017, the defendants transported young and vulnerable Mexican women and girls, some of whom were minors, to the United States and forced them to work in prostitution.  The defendants used false promises of love, marriage, and a better life to lure the women and girls into romantic and sexual relationships and isolated their victims from their families by bringing them to live with them at the defendants’ homes in Tenancingo, Mexico.  The defendants then used physical and sexual violence, threats, and fraud to coerce their victims to work in prostitution in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware.  The defendants took the proceeds generated from the victims’ prostitution and laundered them to conceal their source.

The department’s statement coyly declined to say if the young girls were smuggled to their future workplaces via the much-used “Unaccompanied Alien Children” loophole. That pathway was narrowed by President Donald Trump but quickly reopened in 2021 by Biden and Mayorkas.

Similarly, in August, a Ukrainian was sentenced to 24 years in jail for helping to sneak foreign workers into many resort jobs throughout Key West. The Ukrainians stole wages from Americans for 14 years and exported at least $11 million. But there is no public evidence that the administration will penalize the many U.S. employers who worked with the Ukrainian gang for many years.

The progressives’ two-sided policy — jobs for migrants, jail for smugglers — is politically viable only because it is backed by investors and businesses, large and small, from the East Coast to the West Coast.