Secretary of State Antony Blinken: Americans Must Accept Migrants

President Joe Biden’s foreign policy chief, Antony Blinken, says Americans must give foreigners the opportunity to migrate into their U.S. homeland.

“You have to give them an opportunity to do that,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at an event at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas.

Blinken did not urge his government peers to enforce the immigration laws that protect Americans from employers who hire illegal immigrants that undercut Americans’ bargaining power in the labor market. He also did not mention the many polls showing the growing public opposition to Biden’s mass illegal migration.

Instead, he described migration as a natural and inevitable process — an opportunity for government officials and experts to better manage, exploit, channel, and redirect. “We are going to make migration safe, humane, and orderly, which we have to do,” said the veteran Democrat appointee.

“What the executive branch has to do is enforce the laws on the books as written,” responded Jon Feere, who held a senior job in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for President Donald Trump. Feere added:

That’s what the executive branch has to do. That’s why the executive branch exists in our Constitution — and if they’re not going to do that, they do delegitimize their own existence. [Blinken’s attitude] is a post-American mindset. It’s a post-democracy mindset in many ways. Why are we putting laws on the books if the people running the executive branch can just ignore them?

That’s so destructive to our society. It’s so destructive to our way of life and our constitutional order, and maybe that’s their goal.

But Blinken’s views are also important because he spoke at the Texas event on October 3, four days before Hamas murdered more than 1,200 Israels in their homes. Since then, and amid the Israel counterattack, some U.S. progressives are urging officials to shift a large share of Gaza’s population into the United States.

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So far, Biden’s deputies have not suggested they want to move Gaza’s population into American society. But they also claim they have unlimited power to invite populations through the so-called “humanitarian parole” clause in the nation’s immigration laws.

Blinken’s ideological support for migration suggests he may support the transfer of Gaza’s population away from Israel’s border. In prior speeches, he has repeatedly described Americans’ home as a “Nation of Immigrants.”

Blinken’s migration comments were made in a conversation with David Satterfield, a U.S. ambassador in Africa. Eight days after the Gaza attack, Blinken appointed Satterfield to the job of special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues.

At the Texas event, Blinken eagerly talked up the White House’s ambitious plans to unilaterally rewrite the nation’s immigration rules, regardless of existing laws or congressional votes.

He began by talking about his upcoming diplomatic visit to Mexico, which did not yield any notable gains for Americans.

“The movement back and forth between our countries [Mexico and the United States] to do good things is a daily reality for so many of us, and our lives are intertwined,” Blinken told the Texas meeting, adding:

It used to be that when there was a migration crisis, it tended to be one – maybe one source country at a time. Maybe it was Haiti. Maybe it was Cuba. Maybe it was Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador, the so-called Northern Triangle countries. Now it’s all of the above, plus Venezuela, plus Nicaragua, plus Ecuador. And on top of that, we’re seeing an upsurge in migrants who are coming from entirely other parts of the world through our own – countries of our own hemisphere toward Mexico and toward the United States.

Blinken’s passive-voice description hides the reality that Biden’s deputies — principally, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas — have successfully coaxed, supported, and funded the growing global migration into the United States.

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But Mayorkas’s migration wave has created new opportunities for U.S. diplomats, Blinken noted:

So the dimensions of this are unlike anything we’ve ever seen.  And here again the response has to be one of shared responsibility among many countries.  It can’t simply be the United States and/or even the United States and Mexico alone.

So one of the things that we’ve done is we had a Summit of the Americas; we brought together all the countries in the hemisphere in Los Angeles a year and a half ago. And out of that came something called the Los Angeles Declaration, which for the first time is an expression of shared responsibility for migration in our hemisphere. And what do we mean by that? We mean that each country – and that’s pretty much everyone in the hemisphere that’s either a country of origin, a country of transit, or a country of destination – has things it has to do if we are going to make migration safe, humane, and orderly, which we have to do.

The U.S. government is helping other countries set up a regional immigration network to manage and distribute the migrants, Blinken noted:

What we’ve been doing since is working individually with country after country to translate that sense of responsibility into very practical things. So for example, some countries are building up their own amnesty programs so that the only place that people go is not to the United States to seek amnesty. We’re helping them do that. But as they are able to take in more people through amnesty, that’s fewer people who are going to come to our border seeking it. We have countries that we’re working with to better enforce their own laws and not simply allow a fluid transit north. We have countries that we’re seeking to make sure are willing to repatriate people who have tried to come north and have been stopped, in other words to take them back. We’re working with countries to expand their own legal pathways to migration, as we’re rightly doing here [in the United States], so that people have outlets in those countries.

To help move the migrants, Blinken and Majorkas are setting up new centers where migrants in foreign countries can simply ask for permission to fly into the United States, regardless of Congress’s legislated annual limits on migration numbers.

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Blinken said:

Now, one of the things that we’ve done as well is to set up something that we found a great government term for – Safe Mobility Offices. These are places in partner countries in the hemisphere where someone can go to determine whether they have the ability to come to the United States legally. They can find out if they qualify for one of the legal pathways – for example, a worker or a labor visa, family reunification, one of our parole programs. And they can do that right there in their own countries, so instead of making the incredibly hazardous journey to our border, putting themselves in the hands of the trafficker, leaving everything behind and not knowing what’s going to happen, they can make a determination about whether they actually can be entitled to come into the United States legally.

And nine out ten people – maybe ten out of ten people – given the choice between being here legally and trying to come by some other method will choose the first option. But you have to give them an opportunity to do that.

“That also has the potential to take pressure off of the border,” he added.

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On November 3, Blinken will work with Biden to host a summit of Western Hemisphere countries to talk about migration. CBS reported:

The Americas Summit is set to be held Nov. 3 in Washington and hosted by the president, who has invited leaders of Barbados, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Uruguay to attend, the White House tells CBS News.

The countries are members of the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP), launched last year at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles to address concerns about economic development, inequality, and the fate of hemisphere’s democracies.

A senior administration official said in a statement that the summit would provide an opportunity to deepen economic integration among western hemisphere countries. The official said the aim of the summit is to “drive more inclusive and sustainable economic growth, and tackle the underlying economic drivers of irregular migration in our hemisphere.”

Blinken’s refusal to enforce legitimate and popular laws spotlights “a very dismissive mindset,” said Feere, adding:

These open-border elites view the laws of the land as something to be ignored, something from the past, something that is no longer legitimate, and under this administration is no longer enforced.

To them all the efforts that the American people have made over the years to put laws in the books are meaningless. They’re always looking for some new policy, some new system that eliminates the way most Americans think of the United States as a sovereign nation.

“He’s dismissed the clear preferences of the American people and abandoned his responsibilities to represent the interests of American families,” Feere added.

Extraction Migration

In 1990, Congress set immigration caps at roughly one million per year and also barred employers from hiring illegal migrants. The inflow was roughly one migrant for every four American births. Since January 2021, Biden and Mayorkas have imported roughly seven million people via various legal, illegal, and quasi-legal doors at the border.

Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot who has said his border management is “all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country.” Mayorkas’s 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 seven 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.

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.

In February 2023, Mayorkas said Congress’s 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.

Editor’s Note:  This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel.  The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.