Six Republican Senators attended a press conference on Wednesday to voice concerns about the Biden administration’s push to end Title 42 border protections. While the senators noted the civic damage created by President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, there was little discussion of the massive economic damage to Americans’ wages, jobs, and regional investment.
The senators talked about drugs and cartels, crime and chaos, sexual abuse, welfare, taxes, and even national security — but not the damage caused by the imported flood of wage-cutting, rent-spiking, investment-shifting migrant workers, renters, and consumers.
“We have to stop all of the consequences of illegal immigration, including the fentanyl, including the sexual abuse, including the way [migrants’] children are treated,” retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said at the December 21 event.
But, Portman insisted, “I don’t think anybody behind me disagrees that America is great because of our welcoming of immigrants over the years, and we all support legal and orderly immigration.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) made the same legal = good, illegal = bad, claim:
The [Biden] plan is to let anybody and everybody who wants to, come to our country. Not only does this benefit the human smugglers that are charging thousands of dollars … but this also enriches the drug lords and drug runners that smuggle drugs into the United States that took the lives of 108,000 Americans last year alone.
“We [the GOP senators] all believe legal immigration is a positive good for the country,” Cornyn said, adding, “It makes me angry that the Biden administration has poisoned the well [for more legal immigration] by allowing this [illegal migration] to happen.”
“Well, they’re not wrong about all those [civic] problems that are created by … illegal migration,” Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News.
She continued:
But they are forgetting that the main reason we have immigration controls is [economic] — to protect job opportunities for Americans, to avoid distorting our labor market, and to avoid a race to the bottom in wages that is inevitable with open borders or even very lenient admission rules.
The federal government has operated an economic strategy of “Extraction Migration” since 1990. That strategy pulls human resources from poor countries and uses the imported people to increase investors’ revenues and profits.
The inflow has forced down Americans’ wages and boosted rents and housing prices. The influx has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and has reduced native-born Americans’ clout in local and national elections.
The federal government’s supply of imported wage-cutting workers has also shifted job-creating investment away from heartland states and towards wealthy coastal states, such as Florida, California, New York, and Texas.
The pocketbook damage is also ignored by the GOP’s candidates during elections even though it can pull swing voters to their side.
In the press conference, four other GOP senators also downplayed the economic strategy that drives migration and ignored the pocketbook damage to American families.
“For whatever reason — and I don’t know who will be able to explain it to anybody — the Biden administration believes our borders should be completely open,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said, adding:
We’re going to continue to see terrorists come across our border, criminals come across our border, drugs come across our border, more Americans are going to die. We’re going have more crime, and the Biden administration is not going to change.
However, he added, “I’m from an immigration state — we like legal immigration.”
“None of the President’s positions on this make any sense to me,” said Sen. John Kennedy, (R-LA), adding:
Unless I view it from the perspective of, well, maybe he wants this [illegal migration] to happen. Maybe he’s listening too much to the berserk wing of his own party — the immigration activists who think that vetting people at the border is racist.
But legal immigration is good immigration, Kennedy insisted. “The American people support immigration [and] every year America welcomes about a million of our world’s neighbors to become American citizens.
“Many Republicans are free marketeers in general and don’t naturally gravitate to arguments on behalf of [wage-earning] employees,” responded Vaughan. “It’s just not a habit with a lot of Republicans.”
She continued:
Concerns about the size of government and the cost of government are always at the forefront [for Republicans] as well as national security concerns, and so they naturally gravitate to those [non-economic] arguments.
[And] they are sensitive to the pressure that they get from big donors who may be employers that rely on illegal workers. And so they don’t want to offend them, they don’t want to cross them.
“This is a very real crisis, and for whatever reason, many people are ignoring it,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-OK). “We just want to have a legal immigration system — we just want this to be able to work and for the administration to actually enforce existing law,” he added.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) noted the civic impact of mass migration, but also highlighted the economic impact for Americans.
“Moms and dads and brothers and sisters in our communities have all experienced the impact of fentanyl in our communities, the lives that have been lost, the families that have been wrecked because of the drugs that are coming across that southern border,” said Blackburn.
Blackburn then did describe some economic aspects of migration, with an emphasis on the costs imposed on local governments and taxpayers:
They’ve created this situation at the southern border that they cannot contain and the border communities are saying “You’ve got to do something — you’re overrunning us.” So the Biden administration comes up with a plan: “Let’s make every town a border town, let’s make every state a border state, and let’s take those that are illegally entering, and let’s shift them to other communities.” … That means those states, those cities, their taxpayers are going to have to bear the cost for social services — health services, education, housing, food — for those that are coming in the country illegally.
Both legal and illegal migration drives much of the government spending that Blackburn deplored.
Immigration increases government spending because it imports millions of poor, government-dependent people, pushes working Americans out of jobs and onto welfare, drives up housing costs, reduces workplace productivity, cuts family fertility. and fuels resentful tribalism and chaotic personnel policies.
The reporters at the event did not question the GOP senators’ avoidance of Americans’ pocketbook concerns.
Reporters ignore the pocketbook damage from migration, said Vaughan, because they believe “immigration is a human rights issue.”
She continued:
They’re ideologically oriented to a “Save the World” mentality, a globalist mentality, but also because their news organizations often are owned or run by people who are interested in open borders for a [cheap] labor market. In other words, the employer class.
Also because many of these reporters themselves are part of the elite class in America that favors more immigration because they aren’t affected negatively by it … [and] all kinds of social engineering types of policies can be better provided there’s a huge underclass of new migrants.
“They don’t seem to care as much about Americans who are struggling,” she added.
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