Republican Senators: Biden and Mayorkas Create ‘Open Borders’

“It’s obvious we have an open border,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the senior Republican on the homeland defense appropriations committee, said.

“I’ve talked to [Alejandro] Mayorkas … [and the] the administration, they didn’t have a plan,” she said during a press event in the Senate on Thursday. “They keep throwing their hands up saying, “This is somebody else’s fault.” … [but] there is no plan,” Capito said.

Capito’s “open borders” warnings were echoed by several other Senators at the press conference.

“It’s very clear – the message down there is ‘This is an open border,'” said Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND).

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have handed control of the agenda and immigration over to the radical open-borders, extreme left,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). “Their radical open-border policies trumps any desire to combat COVID and it is dangerous.”

“While they say we do not have an open border, the entire country is watching what’s happening on our southern border,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).

The “open borders” talking point is an easy way for the GOP Senators to appeal to their base voters, noted Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. But, he said, “they’re not confronting the [pocketbook] tension between their voters and the donors on immigration … They’re simply responding to the easiest, most obvious outrages that the administration is perpetrating, It’s the path of least resistance.”

For example, migration steers job investment away from heartland states by delivering many foreign workers to the coasts where coastal investors prefer to create jobs. The impact of cheap-labor migration on investors’ job-creation plans is highlighted by a report at an economic research site, SSTI.org.

The report shows late-stage venture capital investments are concentrated in the states where investors and their new workers — legal and illegal migrants — prefer to live. For example, in the last three months of 2020, investors made investment deals worth roughly $2,028 per person in California, $936 per person in New York, $167 per person in Pennsylvania, $128 per person in Ohio, $52 per person in Kentucky — and 55 cents per person in West Virginia, which is ranked among the poorest states in the union.

This regional skew will be turbocharged by two hidden elements in the Democrats’ reconciliation bill that GOP Senators have ignored.

One section would inflate housing prices and real estate wealth by accelerating chain migration to the coastal states.

The second section would allow Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors to hire endless foreign college graduates instead of hiring young Americans in the heartland states. The corporate hiring would be skewed because the bill would allow the companies to pay an uncapped number of foreign graduates with green cards, so avoiding profit-sapping salary payments to Americans.

Yet Capito was correct to say Biden’s deputies had no plan to exclude the Haitian migrants, said Krikorian:

They had no plan to limit patient illegal immigration [at Del Rio] because they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to limit the number of people and the only reason they ending up acting was because Fox News had drone pictures [on September 15] and it became politically impossible not to respond.

Krikorian continued:

The open borders people [in the White House had] learned that the administration will let them get away with anything. And the Biden people were happy to do that until the issue politically became unsustainable. Some of these hard open-borders people see themselves as having been betrayed by Biden [saying]  “Why did we vote for him when we got Trump’s policies?” Well, the fact is Biden was happy to let them do anything they wanted until it exploded politically in his face and he had to respond. So it’s not that he’s not with them. It’s that the consequences of the anti-borders policies are politically toxic and the White House has to respond to that.

The Senate press conference was complemented by an October 7 letter to Mayorkas asking for more information about his department’s response to the Del Rio landing. Thirty-seven GOP Senators signed the letter, which said:

While we applaud the administration’s original stated intent to expel the majority of migrants under the CDC’s Title 42 order or to expeditiously remove them, we are concerned that DHS did not actually carry out this plan, deployed resources in a manner that weakened border security, and undermined the deterrent effect of any future statements that the Biden administration will enforce our immigration laws at the border … The Administration’s response to the ongoing border crisis only makes it more likely that we will continue to experience surges like the one in Del Rio.

The letter was signed by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), as well as:

Senators James Lankford (R-Okla.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), John Thune (R-S.D.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Todd Young (R-Ind.), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), John Kennedy (R-La.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), and Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

This year’s push for amnesty and more migration is being led by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors. They stand to gain financially from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters. Their network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.

Nationwide, migration is deeply unpopular because of its economic impact It damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture.

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 pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan,  rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.