President Joe Biden’s border chief Alejandro Mayorkas was asked Wednesday if his huge and growing inflow of economic migrants is good for Americans’ wages and rents, and he replied that this is a “Nation of Immigrants.”
The Cuban-born, pro-migration border chief took a few procedural questions from picked journalists when he presented part of his new plans to import more migrants into Americans’ workplaces and neighborhoods. “Our president has led the largest expansion of legal pathways ever,” Mayorkas said to a mostly empty press room.
But Breitbart News asked about the fairness of Mayorkas’s maximum-migration policies for ordinary Americans at a time of sliding wages, rising rents, and expanding civic chaos:
BBN: How do Americans gain from the immigration paths you are opening, sir? No [journalists] ever asks, “Do Americans gain from all the immigrants who you bring in — [even though] wages get pushed down, rents get pushed up.”
Mayorkas: Sir, we are a nation of immigrants. And we are a nation of laws. Individuals who qualify for relief under our laws have a basis to remain in the United States. The contributions of immigrants to this country is quite clear.
The Biden migration has added at least six million people — including four million workers — to the nation’s population. That inflow is roughly three migrants for every four American births. Millions more are expected after Mayorkas lifts the Title 42 border barrier on May 11.
Mayorkas’ “Nation of Immigrants” claim refers to the Cold War lobbyist narrative that the United States is a homeland for migrants, not for Americans. The narrative was created by Democratic-linked advocacy groups and business interests, despite enduring Americans’ primary concerns for their fellow citizens.
The narrative has no basis in law and had little in 20th-century history. Moreover, many polls show that pluralities and majorities of diverse Americans want to welcome fewer migrants.
The majority preference is increasingly visible in D.C. politics:
Mayorkas’ flood has been urged and welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. Businesses also welcome the migration because it reduces marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, heartland states, and overseas markets. and it reduces economic and political pressure on the federal government to deal with the drug and “Deaths of Despair” crises.
Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot.
“I am, to a great extent, aligned with the expectations” of the immigrant community, Mayorkas told an audience at the Aspen Institute on July 2022.
He has said his border management is “all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country.” Mayorkas’ demands imply equity between U.S. citizens and foreign citizens, and he has opened many loopholes for millions of economic migrants to cross into the United States.
Amid the massive inflow of roughly 2 million global economic migrants in 2022, Mayorkas insists the border is “secure,” and rejects any criticism of his deadly, elite-backed wealth-shifting policies. “We cannot have the rights and the needs of individuals who are seeing humanitarian relief in the United States be exploited for political purposes,” he told ABC News on January 1.
In February 2023, Mayorkas said Congress’ laws are less important than his pro-migration priorities. “Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border … [with] policies that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country,” he said.
Mayorkas claimed on April 27 that his policy offers carrots and sticks to migrants:
We are building lawful pathways for people to come to the United States without resorting to the smugglers. At the same time. We are imposing consequences on those who do not use those pathways and instead irregularly migrate to our southern border.
But that humanitarian pitch is tied to a promise of cheap labor for business investors. On December 13, for example, Mayorkas told ElPasoMatters.org:
Our immigration system as a whole is broken. It hasn’t been updated or reformed in more than 40 years. We look to our partner to the north that has a much more nimble immigration system that can be retooled to the needs at the moment. For example, Canada is in need of 1 million workers and they have agreed that in 2023, they will admit 1.4 million … immigrants to fill that labor need that Canadians themselves cannot. We are stuck in antiquated laws that do not meet our current needs. And they haven’t been working for many, many years.
Extraction Migration
Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.
This policy floods the labor market and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to older investors, coastal billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.
Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.
This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.
Outside government, migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.
This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
But the progressive-backed, colonialism-like migration policy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.
Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigrants. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.