Progressives Spike Migration Demands Before Joe Biden’s Inauguration

President-elect Joe Biden’s pro-migration allies are pressuring him to maximize migration into the United States, despite the public’s deep opposition to cheap-labor migration.

The federal government should stop detaining migrants as they move into the U.S. workforce, says a spokesman for the American Immigration Council, which is a spinoff of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “End detention now,” spokesman Aaron Reichlin-Melnick declared December 23.

“We need to create … [migration] avenues for [Latin American] people who want a job” in the United States, says Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute.

Biden’s deputies should make it easier for companies to hire foreign graduates for white-collar jobs, says the investor-backed Cato Institute.

The Biden administration should sneak foreign workers into U.S. jobs by relabeling them as students, says Refugees International, a boutique pro-migration group in Washington, DC.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is urging Biden to provide work permits and residency to at least one million migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The CAP’s December 21 request downplayed the reality that the migrants compete with blue-collar Americans for wages as they also drain their home countries of talent and consumers, as it showcased the positive impact of migrants’ remittances “to their family members in these countries.”

Similar maximalist-migration and pro-amnesty policies are being pushed by progressive journalists, Charles Koch, and FWD.us, even though many millions of American professionals and blue-collar Americans have been sidelined by cheap-labor migration and by the coronavirus crash. For example, 83 Democratic legislators sent a December 22 letter to Biden urging him to let migrant youths and children “come out of the shadows … to live in the United States formally.”

The same extremist strategy was adopted during President Barack Obama’s two terms. The pro-migration groups portrayed Obama as the “deporter in chief” even as Obama pushed his 2012 DACA amnesty during the post-2008 recession. Establishment media outlets broadcast the claim even after Obama pushed the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty that would have shifted the American economy further in favor of investors.

“I’m working with [the groups] now,” Biden told reporters on December 22. “We’re dealing with some of those very organizations as we speak. And I will do what I said. It’s going to take not day one, it’s going to take probably the next six months to put [his policies] in place.”

With one eye on the 2022 midterm elections, Biden also warned his progressive allies about the political dangers of their extremism:

The last thing we need is to say we’re going to stop immediately the [curbed] access to asylum the way it’s been run now and end up with 2 million people on our border. It’s a matter of setting up the guardrails so we can move the direction.

The groups’ labor inflation policies are deeply unpopular because they would allow employers to displace Americans’ with cheap, eager, and compliant workers. In 2014, these replacement policies cost the Democrats five Senate seats and 13 House seats — and set the stage for Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

So Biden is also trying to reassure his pro-migration allies — and the swing-voting public — by portraying his cheap-labor policies as pro-family policies. “I will accomplish what I said I would do — a much humane policy based on family unification,” he said.

A similar family-themed pitch is being made by Biden’s nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security. “Creating a new immigration system will help create jobs, raise wages, and grow our economy, not just for immigrant communities, but for all our families across this great, great country,” Alejandro Mayorkas told a pro-migration group, the American Business Immigration Council on December 3.

The political effectiveness of Biden’s family pitch is unclear.

Many polls show that the public welcomes legal migrants — but also much prefers that new jobs go to Americans first. In April 2020, a Washington Post poll showed that 69 percent of Hispanics said yes when they were asked, “Would you support … temporarily blocking nearly all immigration into the United States during the coronavirus outbreak?” Just 30 percent of Hispanics opposed the border shutdown.

Many other polls show that the public also strongly opposes the white-collar visa worker programs that boost Fortune 500 stock prices by suppressing technological competition and job opportunities for American graduates.

The admission of wage cuts come from independent academics, the National Academies of Science, the Congressional Budget Office in 2020 and in 2013, executives, The Economist, more academics, the New York Times, the New York Times again, state officials, unions, more business executives, lobbyists, many academics, the Wall Street Journal, federal economists, Goldman Sachs, oil drillers, the Bank of Ireland, Wall Street analysts, fired professionals, legislators, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2015 Bernie Sanders, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, Eric Weinstein, more Wall Street Journal, construction workers, New York Times subscribers, a former Treasury secretary, academic economists, a New York Times columnist, a Bloomberg columnist, author Barack Obama, President Barack Obama, and the Business Roundtable.

But the nation’s economic elite favors migration because it transfers wealth from wage earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine labor rights, and even get many progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.