Republican Senators were stunned on Thursday when homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas insisted the surge of juvenile migrants began under President Donald Trump.
“The surge of unaccompanied children… had begun in April 2020, many months before we took office,” said Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Mayorkas repeated the claim at least three times and was echoed by Democrats, including committee chairman Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI).
“I’ve had respect for you, as you know, Secretary,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) responded to Mayorkas. “But I’m not able to sit here and not comment on this idea that somehow this is Donald Trump’s fault,” he told Mayorkas, whose credibility has already been damaged by a series of misstatements, including his May 11 claim that “The border is closed.”
“I’ve got a chart … [with] got total apprehensions at the border, and shows clearly — it’s galling quite honestly to hear that this is a crisis inherited by this administration,” responded Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). He continued:
The [Democrat committee] chairman is saying that the numbers are decreasing, the situation’s improving, the surge started in April of 2020. To the extent we had any suerge in 2020, it’s because Democratic presidential candidates were saying, “We’re not going to deport anybody, we’re going to give everybody free health care.” That was the incentive, that was the pull factor.
“I must admit that I have found this hearing to be stunning,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) responded. He continued:
It seems, Mr. Secretary, that you’re proud of the progress being made by the administration that things are going well at the border, and I look at this chart that was prepared by Sen. Johnson, and I see an extraordinary crisis. I mean, do you recognize this as an alarming crisis?
Mayorkas’s claim “is just so outrageous you don’t even know how to respond,” said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
But the Democrats’ claim is designed to shift the conversation towards children at the border, instead of Mayorkas’s unpopular efforts to push more migrants into Americans’ workplaces and housing, he said.
In April, Mayokas used optional Title 8 rules to allow roughly 60,000 people across the border, while roughly 45,000 sneaked across the border. Roughly 178,000 migrants were recorded arriving at the border, marking a 20-year record.
But administration officials divert the media from the labor migration by touting the issue of child migrants and their lawfully deported mothers, helping to bolster their polling support among women and progressives.
The Democrats’ eagerness to exploit migrants’ children for their own political benefit is “very cruel,” Law said, adding:
Shame on them for perpetuating policies that subject these vulnerable [foreign] children to horrific conditions. Democrats don’t deny these children will be subjected to horrific conditions — that becomes part of the price of entry, to be completely subjected to abuse and other horrific experiences as a trade-off for coming in, in their goal for unlimited immigration. It is immoral, and it’s repulsive.
Obviously, the trek north is what subjects these migrants to horrific conditions. All that’s preventable. If they don’t come, then it’s status quo whatever their life is at home. There are ways that you can improve your life, but it is [the Democrats] enticing them to take the journey that injects pain and suffering that wasn’t already there.
[The Democrats’ migration] harms the home countries because you’re extracting an entire country’s population. You may get some remittances for a period of time, but that’s just long enough until the cartels and smugglers are paid to export the next batch of people. It is extraction immigration … At the end of the day, calling everybody north to the United States leaves these other countries with a desolated population and completely destroyed economy. It is cruelty on steroids. What they’re doing is callous. It is cruel, and it’s immoral.
The Democrats’ planned strategy of highlighting the migrant children caused the inflow and has also diverted border guards from enforcing the law, he added:
Other than just the moral depravity, they’re exhausting taxpayer resources … [and moving] resources away from actually enforcing our border. [Reports say] more than half of the time spent by border patrol agents is not actually securing the border — they’re caring for children. They’re turning our border patrol agents into babysitters — that’s been a consequence of abusing children as a [political] prop like this.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
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