President Joe Biden told Mexico’s president that the United States would reduce migration by raising migration, according to a White House statement.
The January 23 White House statement said:
President [Joe Biden] outlined his plan to reduce migration by … increasing [migrant] resettlement capacity and lawful alternative immigration pathways [in the United States], improving processing at the [U.S.] border to adjudicate [migrants’] requests for asylum, and reversing the previous administration’s draconian immigration policies.
Biden told Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he also plans “to reduce migration by addressing its root causes.”
The statement suggests that Biden will try to reduce illegal migration into Americans’ workplaces by raising legalized migration into Americans’ workplaces.
Overall, any increase in the supply of foreign workers reduces Americans’ wages and inflates cheap-labor profits for CEOs and investors. Currently, the United States government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants and roughly 1 million temporary workers each year, just as roughly 4 million Americans begin their work careers.
In 2019, President Donald Trump’s popular curbs on migration and illegal hiring helped raise Americans’ household income by 7 percent.
Biden and his deputies face a difficult task balancing their efforts to carefully extract more workers and consumers from Central America while also trying to prevent a chaotic migration of people seeking U.S. jobs and homes. For the moment, Biden and his progressive allies have given the task of stopping Latino migrants to the governments of Guatemala and Mexico.
The White House statement said, “the two leaders agreed to work closely to stem the flow of irregular migration to Mexico and the United States, as well as to promote development in the Northern Triangle of Central America.”
Mexico’s government provided a short and vague statement.
“We spoke with President Biden, he was kind and respectful,” the statement read. “We deal with issues related to migration, # COVID19 [Chinese coronavirus] and cooperation for development and well-being. Everything indicates that relations will be good for the good of our peoples and nations.”
Biden’s deputies are talking up their plans to provide aid to Central America, even as they draft plans to pull more young workers and consumers northwards to help U.S. employers and investors.
For example, Biden has touted a promise to send $4 billion to reduce the economic incentive for more migrants to join their illegal-migrant relatives in workplaces around the United States.
But the combined population of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala is 32 million. Biden’s spending plan would offer $1,200 per person to the countries to reduce migration.
Currently, the three countries already get roughly $17 billion a year in remittances from the illegal and legal workers they exported to the United States. Those remittances provide the countries’ governments with economic inflows of roughly $4,500 per person in exchange for exporting their young people to jobs in the United States.
The remittance money comes via U.S. employers and the Central American workers who take jobs and wages away from Americans. The exported remittances also reduce U.S. domestic spending at shops, on autos, and in local communities and also reduce tax receipts for local, state, and federal governments.
The threat of illegal migration will continue because Biden’s plan for legal immigration will not include all of the roughly five million Central Americans who want to get to the United States — nor the tens of millions of people from other countries around the world. Biden is also trying to amnesty all illegal migrants in the United States and has directed his immigration officials to release migrants being held for deportation. Biden’s promise of an amnesty will help pull additional migrants to make their way to the United States.
The Los Angeles Times described the motives of the poor and desperate migrants:
Heidi Arely García, 19, has more immediate needs. She fled Honduras with the caravan hoping to make it somewhere to find work to shelter, feed and clothe her toddler.
García used to make four dollars a day helping a neighbor make snacks to sell, but she lost her job when her neighbor fell ill. Then the hurricanes flooded her community in Colinas, 60 miles southwest of San Pedro Sula.
“‘The water wrought havoc there,’ she said in Vado Hondo, before the Guatemalan military and police broke up her caravan,” the article concluded.
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