Economic migrants are sending more teenagers and children into the United States via a much-traveled loophole in President Joe Biden’s much-touted border curbs.
The Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) loophole has long been used by foreign teenagers who hope to work in the nation’s fast-growing child workforce, jobs, despite the danger and abuse described in a recent New York Times article.
The UAC doorway was created in 2008 to provide some legal status for a small number of children — such as teenage prostitutes — who were trafficked into the United States.
The Los Angeles Times offered a sympathetic portrayal of migrant parents who are now using the loophole to dodge Biden’s new policies.
The migrants first try to register for Biden’s new “parole pathway” on the border agency’s “CBP One” cell phone app. But not all migrants get in via the legally dubious pathway, which is used as a quasi-legal carrot to deter migrants from illegally walking across the border.
So the families use the CBP One app to get the parents into the United States — and then send their kids in via the UAC pathway. The families are later reunited — at taxpayer expense — in a city chosen by the parents.
The Los Angeles Times wrote:
Advocates said some parents are making the decision to leave their children in [Mexico in] the care of extended family or friends and keep their appointments with CBP. Jeyson [a Venezuelan migrant] said another couple from the tent encampment did just that, leaving their five children at the border bridge and entering the U.S. after managing to get only two appointments.
“Jeyson [a Venezuelan migrant]] said he watched as the [separated] children walked up to a border agent and were taken into custody [in the United States],” the newspaper reported.
On February 21, MyRGV.com published an interview with Priscilla Orta, an attorney working with an elite-backed advocacy group, Lawyers for Good Government:
On Monday, Orta said about a dozen people crossed, but all of them had already sent their kids as unaccompanied minors without them by that point.
“Dozens of migrant families are splitting up at Mexico’s northern border,” Reuters reported on February 27., adding “The 15-year-old decided to turn himself in at the border [as a UAC] after his pregnant mother could only secure a solo appointment.”
“That makes sense — that’s the incentive Biden created, so, of course, people are going to do that,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Mayorkas allowed 21,600 UACs into the United States in December and January, alongside other illegal, legal, and quasi-legal inflows. Roughly 75 percent of the UACs are work-ready teenage youths.
Mexico’s government claims to intercept and deport other UACs before they get to the U.S. border.
The migrants’ increasing use of the obvious UAC loophole comes as many media outlets spotlight claims by business-backed advocacy groups that Biden’s new border policy is cruel and exclusionary.
But the new rules include many loopholes, according to a February 22 analysis by Kiroprkian’s CIS. For example, the CBP One app
… obscures the severity of the crisis because it allows CBP to report an inadmissible alien’s arrival to the United States as a lawful entry rather than a border encounter. This will enable the government to claim that the border is under control, while still releasing hundreds of thousands of aliens into the United States illegally per month. This time, however, it is our government that is acting illegally.
Biden’s supposedly restrictive policies are pre-election theater, said Krikorian.
This is just political damage control. Maybe some of the people in the administration proposing these changes think that they’ll make a difference, but they won’t.
They’re deluded if that’s what they think, because the pull factor of being released into the United States and having essentially zero chance of being removed later, is so overwhelming that people are going to try [to get in] whatever the administration does. .. So until that changes, the gravity will keep pulling people into the country, especially since the administration is pulling its punches, even when Biden does things that are described as “hardline.”
All of the changes announced by the administration are at best half measures, and, in fact, are not intended to change the basic policy, which is that anyone who wants to come into the United States is led in, even though they have no legal right to enter.
“The answer is to change the overall immigration policy, not to try to tweak it here and there and hope it makes a difference,” Krikorian added.
The monthly inflow of roughly 10,000 UAC migrants and 20,000 parole-pathway migrants are just part of the semi-legal inflow arranged by Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
He is also inviting 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti to move into Americans’ society, and is doing little to stop roughly 80,000 migrants from sneaking across the southern border each month.
The White House’s southern inflow of roughly 1 million people per year is on top of the massive inflow of visa workers and the 1 million legal immigrants allowed by Congress.
Mayorkas’ economic policy of importing many low-productivity workers, rent-sharing boarders, and government-aided consumers helps to push down Americans’ wages, raise their rents and spur inflation:
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.