President Donald Trump is using the rising flood of job-seeking migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border to show how Democrats in Congress have refused to reform migration laws or even fund enough detention beds.
The rising inflow is forcing officials to release the overflow population of Central Americans into the U.S. job market, even though federal data shows that only about 1 in 50 migrants are eventually approved for asylum.
On Thursday, Trump spotlighted the so-called “caravan” of migrants and blamed pro-migration Democrats, such as Sens. Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown and Claire McCaskill.
The latest caravan of migrants moving through Mexico underscores the dramatic migration from Central America into the United States.
“It kinda of helps Republicans to have several thousand people coming across the border right before the election,” said Mark Krikorian, director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “It concentrates the mind, and it shows in a big way what the consequences are of Democratic obstruction and Republican leadership ambivalence about fixing the loopholes and funding detention,” he said, adding:
It makes sense. Some might see that as cynical, but it is not — they are saying this is the consequence of what Congress has failed to do. They are basically rubbing [Democrats’] noses in it, and showing that Congress has to act or that our border will be basically meaningless. Anyone who comes to the border who has been coached with a plausible story is now going to be let into the United States.
The inflow is rising because Central Americans in the United States are showing their relatives via cellphones how easy it is to get through the border loopholes and then find jobs. The loopholes are being kept open by Democrats and by business-first Republicans in Congress, despite the 2016 election results and Trump’s agency reforms.
From October 2017 to the end of August 2018, 136,000 migrants walked across the border, joining hundreds of thousands who have arrived since roughly 2010. That illegal-immigrant movement is also being amplified by the caravan of several thousand Central American migrants who now heading for California.
Border officials “are overwhelmed,” said Sheriff Leon Wilmot, who head of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association. Border officials “are releasing them out of the front door of their facilities,” he told Fox News.
For example, an Oct. 16 news alert from DHS spotlighted an Arizona KTAR News’ interview with Henry Lucero, Phoenix field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. KTAR reported:
On the news in Guatemala they are saying that you can get a work permit if you’re in a family, if you’re coming with your child, and that you’re going to be released,” Lucero said.
He added that human smugglers are taking note. Immigrants are paying smugglers to get them to the border. Instead of attempting to cross into Arizona illegally, the smugglers are instructing the immigrants to find a border patrol agent and turn themselves in.
…
“They were told by smuggling organizations and the smugglers that all they have to do is jump over the wall or however they may cross, seek out an agent, and then they will be able to claim asylum that way,” explained Jose Garibay, a border patrol agent in Yuma recently told KTAR News.
DHS officials are raising the alarm via Twitter:
The ACLU, immigration lawyers and other pro-migration groups say the migrant wave is driven by fear of crime more than by hope for jobs.
But the migration is mostly organized by labor-trafficking cartels, supported by U.S. and foreign pro-migration groups, and funded by U.S. employers who hire low-wage illegals instead of working-class Americans.
The cartels’ labor-trafficking business is providing them with billions of dollars in revenue, partly because the catch-and-release process allows migrants to get work in the United States and pay off their debts. But that huge movement of cheap labor — at least 400,000 work-permits in 2017 — is clipping wages for blue-collar Americans, including many Democratic voters.
Amid Congress’ passivity, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has led Trump’s pushback. He has narrowed asylum rules, speeded courtroom proceedings, halved asylum approvals, and has won legal cases protecting the President’s right to detain and deport migrants.
But Congress has refused to help curb the economic migration. For example, in February, a tacit alliance of pro-migration Democrats and business-first Republicans in the Senate blocked Trump’s “Four Pillars” reforms. In August, business-first Republicans in the House — led by Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Yoder — pushed a bill that would dramatically expand the legal inflow of wage-cutting foreign workers.
Also, Senate Democrats — led by Sen. Tester — have rejected Trump’s request for funds to operate 52,000 detention beds and instead agreed to fund for only 40,520 detention beds. The House appropriations committee only approved funding for 44,000 beds, regardless of any intervention by Trump’s Hill liaison aides.
Tester’s Democrats and the GOP members on the Senate panel also blocked the hiring of additional agents to repatriate migrants who lose their asylum claims.
Senate Democrats, including Tester, McCaskill, Brown and Indian Sen. Joe Donnelly, are also pushing legislation that would tie the hand of border enforcement officers by barring the arrest and detention of migrants who bring children. Other Democrats want to give a free pass to migrants who say they are pregnant.
The clogged legal process means that few migrants are deported out of the U.S. job market, even though very few are approved for asylum. Breitbart News reported:
The data shows that 94,285 “family unit” migrants were registered as they crossed the border between October 1, 2016, and September 30, 2017. The data does not say how many of the migrants were adults, youths or children. Most family units are fragments. For example, they consist of a mother with younger children. The father often travels separately, sometimes with older children.
But only 252 migrants of the 94,285 migrants were quickly returned to their home country, and just 1,095 were formally “removed” after legal adjudication and deported home by the end of June 2018.
The meant 92,938 of the 2017 family migrants — or 98.6 percent — were still in the United States as of June 30, 2018, up to 21 months after they arrived.
Business groups are eager to downplay the rising migration levels. Any public dispute over illegal immigration damages their routine claim that the much-larger annual inflow of 1.1 million legal migrants helps investors and employers without imposing economic and civic harm on working Americans.
Establishment-media journalists cover the migration very sympathetically and rarely mention the damage done to Americans’ income, schools, rental costs, social solidarity, and neighborhoods.
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 coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations living in the coastal states.