An Oct. 6 Politifact “fact check ” inadvertently highlighted the fact that all Democratic Senators are backing a bill which would invite more migrants to come across the Mexican border.
The fact check from Politifact Missouri claimed that Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill’s “Keep Families Together Act” is merely intended to keep families together.
But the Politifact claim ignored the reality that the Democrats’ “keep families together” policy preserves a huge catch-and-release loophole which is used by a growing number of migrants, and which is being closed by Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions.
The pro-McCaskill “fact check” was written by an editor at Vox.com, who also works as a business reporter in Missouri. It was posted at a news site run by the Missouri School of Journalism. The article seeks to shield McCaskill from sharp criticism by her rival, the GOP’s Senate candidate, Josh Hawley, who now serves as the Missouri Attorney General.
In September, Hawley slammed McCaskill as one of the nation’s “globalists first and Americans second.” He wrote:
In America, we stick up for one another, believe in one another, fight for one another.
Unfortunately, our ruling elite has given up on all that. They’ve become globalists first and Americans second. If you want to see Exhibit A, look at Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who I am running against in the November election
While illegal immigrants pour across our southern border, bringing drugs and gangs and lower wages with them, McCaskill won’t vote to build the President Trump’s proposed border wall. She won’t vote to secure the border. And she lavishly praises the extremists in her party who want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
That’s bad enough. But now she is sponsoring the most radical open-border bill ever introduced in Congress. Her bill was written by California liberal Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein, and it would give a free pass to any illegal immigrant who brings a child to the border. With McCaskill’s approach, illegal immigrants who use children as human shields would win release into the interior of this country, no questions asked.
That’s wrong. That’s lawless. That’s not Missouri.
Politifact claimed that Hawley’s statement is “False” because:
Hawley said McCaskill backed a bill that “would give a free pass to any illegal immigrant who brings a child to the border.”
The bill in question takes no such measure. Undocumented immigrants are not afforded any new protections from prosecution under the bill; it seeks to stop the separation of immigrant children from their families or guardians. The thinking behind Hawley’s charge against McCaskill has been echoed by Republican officials throughout the country. That doesn’t make it more right.
We rate the statement False.
Politifact’s claim simply ignores the existing patchwork of laws and circumstances along the border.
Hawley’s argument is based on two facts: President Barack Obama’s 2015 “Flores Settlement” bars officials from detaining migrant children for more than 20 days, and the federal government generally cannot process migrants’ asylum claims in less than 40 days.
The cartels and coyotes recognize this legal gap and direct their $10,000 clients to bring children with them.
So if the migrants bring a child, most migrants will get released in 20 days — or three weeks before the border agencies can complete the adjudication of their migration claims.
Once released, the migrants can move anywhere in the United States, get a job in the underground economy, and even get a work permit if their next courtroom date is more than six months away. In 2017, 400,000 migrants got asylum-related work permits because the immigration courts are so backed up that catch-and-release cases take two years to adjudicate.
The children usually stay with relatives and are allowed to attend schools while the fathers and mothers pay off their debts to the cartels and coyotes.
Moreover, the many migrants who expect to lose their asylum case simply cut off their ankle monitors and disappear into the nation’s illegal-migrant population, whose estimated size ranges from 11 million to 22 million.
This reality is common knowledge among the reporters and voters who watch labor-supply and migration issues. It is well known partly because of the May-June “zero tolerance” dispute, in which Democrats and the media loudly pressured Trump to end the policy of detaining all migrants while sheltering their children at facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Flores catch-and-release policy is also known among the people who live in Central American hill towns. For example, the Washington Post reported Sept. 30:
Guatemalan community leaders told McAleenan that smuggling guides who charge $10,000 for a trip to the United States capitalize on the dysfunction of the American immigration system.
“They say that if you bring a child they’ll let you into the United States and give you citizenship,” said Dora Alonzo Quijivix, describing the sales pitch during a meeting McAleenan attended with indigenous leaders in Quetzaltenango, the largest city in the western highlands.
Some unlucky migrants with children do not get through this Flores catch-and-release loophole but are instead sent to one of the relatively few family detention centers before being sent home. The number is small, largely because Congress refuses to fund larger shelters for migrant parents with children.
Sessions is now closing the Flores loophole by writing a regulation which superseded Obama’s Flores deal with the judge.
In turn, the Democrats are trying to preserve the Flores loophole with Feinstein’s bill, which says:
General.—An agent or officer of a designated agency shall be prohibited from removing a child from his or her parent or legal guardian, at or near the port of entry or within 100 miles of the border of the United States, unless one of the following has occurred:
If passed, the Feinstein bill would protect nearly all migrants-with-kids from prosecution and deportation because it prevents officials from sending the children to shelters while judges process the parents’ legal claims. Migrants are rational and would use this Feinstein/McCaskill legal protection to migrate in even larger numbers to get better-paid jobs in Americans’ cities.
This larger migration would help employers by forcing down blue-collar wages. It would disadvantage American kids by crowding Americans’ blue-collar public schools with Central American students who do not speak English.
It would also provide upper-income Americans — including some journalists — with a larger supply of restaurant workers, maids, and gardeners amid the turmoil of Donald Trump’s presidency.
The migration would also help the cartels who earn billions of dollars by delivering cheap, exploited labor to the businesses which are patronized by progressives who write and edit “fact-checks.”
Democratic legislators are also pushing other cartel-boosting loophole-legislation that would bar the detention of pregnant migrants, and bar officials from releasing migrant children to their illegal–immigrant parents who are living in the United States.
To give Hawley’s statement a “False” label, Politifact Missouri ignored this legal background, ignored the migrants’ ability to recognize their economic incentives, ignored the cost to blue-collar Americans, and ignored the incentives for employers and upper-income progressives to welcome cheap-labor migrants.
In contrast, Hawley highlighted the larger forces behind McCaskills’ easy-migration bill. His American-solidarity statement said:
We need an immigration policy that works for the citizens of this country, not the global elite. That begins with securing the southern border. Enough apologies and temporizing. Build the wall. Fund the border patrol. Back ICE. You can count on me to fight for all of the above.
Next, we need to reform our legal immigration system to make it work for Missouri workers. For decades now, we’ve admitted millions of immigrants with few or no skills – the percentage of foreign-born is at its highest levels in nearly a century.
These low-skill immigrants are competing for jobs with folks in our own country struggling to find work, while driving down wages for those who are working hardest.
It’s time to do right by American workers. Limit the number of low-skilled immigrants who come to this country. End the visa lottery system. End chain migration. Replace that with a skills-based immigration system that prioritizes the training and know-how we need to create new jobs in this country for our own people.
Hawley also included a jibe at McCaskill and other progressives:
McCaskill and her globalist allies live in a fantasy world where citizenship doesn’t matter and national borders are embarrassments. Their most important priorities are getting cheap labor at home and cheap products from aboard.
Some of McCaskill’s cheap-labor business allies in D.C. openly oppose Hawley:
In mid-August, Hawley moved ahead of McCaskill in the RealClearPolitics polling averages.
Alongside McCaskill, all of the other Senate Democrats are sponsoring Feinstein’s open-borders bill.
Many of the co-sponsors are up for election this year, including Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, Maine’s Sen. Angus King, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, and Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
The Democrats’ cheap-labor policies are deeply unpopular — but they are often protected from election-campaign criticism because the GOP’s business-donors fully share the Democrats’ pro-migration policies.
In debates over migration, business groups and Democrats tout polls which prod Americans to declare support for migrants and the claim that the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants.”
But the alternative “priority or fairness” polls — plus the shocking result in the 2016 election — show that voters in the polling booth put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy. Polls also show that voters blame business — not migrants — for the problem.
Four million young Americans will join the workforce this year, but the federal government will also import 1.1 million legal immigrants, and allow an army of at least 2 million visa-workers to work U.S. jobs, alongside asylum-claiming migrants and illegal aliens.
Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions. Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because investment flows towards the large immigrant populations living in the coastal states.
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