Biden's Border Bait-and-Switch Strands Thousands of Penniless Venezuelan Migrants

Media reports say some Venezuelan migrants are still being let through the U.S. border, and thousands more are pushing against the new exclusionary policy claimed by President Joe Biden’s border chief.

“No one is going to go back,” a Venezuelan migrant told the New York Post. “There’s thousands of Venezuelans on their way right now — they’re not going back.”

Border chief Alejandro Mayorkas announced his new policy on October 12. That about-face took place three weeks before the election — but 20 months after he opened the border for 150,000 poor Venezuelans who try to gain the jobs, housing, and other resources needed by American families.

The new carrot-and-stick promises expulsion back to Mexico for all illegals, and legal status for 24,000 Venezuelans — plus their families — if they apply from their home countries, such as Venezuela, Chile, and Venezuela.

But that sudden policy change has stranded more than 15,000 Venezuelan migrants on their 1,600-mile trek to Biden’s canceled welcome. Many of the stranded migrants are near the border, while others are in Central America after crossing the deadly Darien Gap jungle trail in Panama, south of Mexico.

“They basically got the bait and switch,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:

The administration’s complete unfamiliarity with how migration works has benefited some migrants who wouldn’t have gotten into the United States otherwise.

But it has caused a lot of pain for others who have, in the worst, case been killed in Darien Gap or sexually exploited by cartel smugglers, or spent huge amounts of money on smuggling, whether by mortgaging their little farm or indenturing themselves with the cartels … to be essentially slaves for years.

Many people are being victimized by the Mayorkas and Biden policies, he said.

The legacy media only wants to talk about the winners and not the losers, only the benefits but not the costs. And there are real costs, both to American workers and taxpayers, and [also] to a lot of migrants. Any assessment of a policy has to take into account the costs and benefits. But there’s no such thing as a win-win for everybody. It doesn’t exist — and this administration thought that it did exist for everybody that mattered to them. It didn’t work that way.

Biden’s migration has increased immigration by at least 2.5 million since 2021. That flood of workers, consumers, and renters has cheated Americans’ on wages. It has also boosted rents and housing prices and pushed up inflation for a wide variety of goods, such as used autos and food.

Biden’s migration has also killed thousands of migrants.

Mayorkas, a Cuban-born, pro-migration zealot opened a safe and faster route in mid-2022 for Venezuelans to get into Americans’ workplaces and homes.

Since the October 13 policy reversal, officials have bussed some Venezuelan migrants back to Mexico.

“U.S. officials on Friday sent hundreds of Venezuelan asylum seekers to Juarez, Mexico,” BorderReport.com said on October 14, the day after the claimed policy change:

A KTSM/Border Report ­­photo crew counted about 250 people in the space of an hour, escorted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to the middle of the bridge, then being monitored by Mexican immigration agents as they came down the structure.

However, it is unclear if the Venezuelans are allowed to stay in northern towns, or if they are being sent to places deep in Mexico, as promised by Mayorkas.

If allowed to stay up near the border, most of the migrants will eventually be able to sneak across at night when  Mayorkas sends the border guards elsewhere.

The migrants who have made the very dangerous, expensive, and arduous trek are not giving up.

“David Escoribuela, a Venezuelan migrant preparing to walk across the river from Juarez, said he had not heard that the United States intends to subject people from his country to Title 42 public health expulsions,” BorderReport.com wrote on October 13 as the new policy was announced. Escoribuela “set off for the U.S. from Venezuela on foot about a month ago and said he was not planning to stop.”

The New York Post reported on October 16:

A day after a Venezuelan migrant was expelled from the US to Mexico, The Post witnessed her illegally crossing into America again over the weekend — just one of scores of booted asylum-seekers vowing to sneak back into the country.

…

[Angie] Pina was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso for a day and a half before she learned she and dozens of other Venezuelan women in the same holding cell [were to be] sent back to Mexico. “It was a crisis — we were all yelling and sobbing,” she said.

“I would like to try again because I can’t go back to Venezuela,” she told the Post.

A CNN report on October 15 described one stranded family of Venezuelans, “Morey, her husband Rodolfo and their three children”:

Morey, who is currently in Colombia, says a return to Venezuela is impossible. In 2018 her family sold their home in Santa Teresa del Tuy, an impoverished town some 30 kilometers southeast of Caracas, for US$1500 to pay for the journey to Colombia.

Now, she feels she’s been thrown into limbo. Like so many others, she cannot afford to pay for a transcontinental flight — much less for her entire family. “Under these circumstances I have nowhere to go… I am scared: what can I do?” Morey told CNN.

Pro-migration groups are urging the administration to preserve loopholes for Venezuelans — and to make it even easier for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians to migrate into Americans’ society.

Some migrants are reportedly being allowed in, perhaps under unpublicized “humanitarian” exemptions:

If the administration blocks the migrants, many will just settle in other countries, CNN reported:

“I’m in pain, I don’t know what to do now,” says Ender Dairen, a 28-year-old Venezuelan who was planning to join a group travelling north from Ecuador. But his plans changed after speaking with other migrants online.

“A couple friends are thinking of just settling down wherever they got to, somewhere between Costa Rica and Nicaragua,” he told CNN. “Every person you speak with says the same thing: the whole route collapsed; we can no longer travel.”

But a half-open policy will just ensure more migrants, said Krikorian:

The people who relied on Biden’s lawless [welcome] at the border are out of luck. Letting some of them in because ‘”Well, they already made it through the Darien Gap and to the border” is just going to encourage others. You have to rip off the bandaid … the fault here is Biden’s to begin with.

“The whole Biden administration is responsible for this,” said Kirkorian.

The President is in charge. On the other hand, the Secretary of Homeland Security [Mayorkas] is the person who is in charge of overseeing this. So this is the kind of thing that should be added to the pile of charges when he is impeached in January … They shouldn’t have lured them to the border in the first place. That’s what the whole Administration is responsible for, but Mayorkas is the man on the spot.

The political and economic establishment juices the economy by extracting migrant workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration.

But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs needed by young U.S. graduates.

This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment,  multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan,  rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.