A quiet deal with Guatemala is allowing U.S. border agencies to send Guatemalan migrants home without any delays to get travel documents, Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan told Breitbart News.
“On Friday, we will be repatriating single adults and family units, about 135, that did not have to wait for travel documents from the Guatemalan consul,” he said July 25. “We expect to make this a routine practice that will limit time in custody, accelerate repatriations, and create a deterrent impact. It will save two to four days, on average.”
The quicker return of migrants helps to reduce the numbers in U.S. detention centers, and it reduces the overcrowding pressure which forces officials to release migrants into the United States to take jobs from Americans and to plead for asylum.
The faster deportations to Guatemala is a useful win in broader back-and-forth political struggle with the establishment of pro-migration politicians, judges, investors, and activists throughout the United States. In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has pocketed gains — a shift in public opinion in Mexico and new U.S. repatriation policies, for example — and taken losses, such as a California judge’s decision to block Trump’s reforms of asylum procedures.
The new Guatemalan repatriation process is one of several gains from a round of border meetings held with Guatemalan and Honduran officials in mid-June, McAleenan said.
The round of meetings reportedly triggered a dispute with White House officials who noted the meetings coincided with “World Refugee Day.” The day is an annual agitprop event created by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which pushes for greater migration into the United States:
Around the world, communities, schools, businesses, faith groups and people from all walks of life are taking big and small steps in solidarity with refugees. This World Refugee Day, we challenge everyone to join together and take a step with refugees. Join the movement.
“We had long-standing plans to bring the First Ladies of Guatemala and Honduras, their ministers of security, their ministers of foreign affairs, to the border to see the challenges we’re facing with their nationals in our custody, and the fact that these are the two countries that are sending the most immigrants to our border that our crossing illegally every month of this fiscal year,” McAleenan said. He continued:
We wanted them to understand the conditions that we’re are facing in this crisis and to do more on their end to stop the [migrants] coming in the first place. One we had that trip organized, and commitments from those senior-level people, we were not going to cancel it. None of us were aware that this was World Refugee Day.
“When we heard that World Refugee Day happened to be on the same date, I had our head of public affairs working with the White House to make sure everyone was comfortable, and [to ensure] we could maintain this trip because it was important to address the [migrant] crisis and ideally getting the governments of Guatemala and Honduras more engaged in reducing the flow,” McAleenan said. “We worked it through, and we had the trip, and not a mention was made of World Refugee Day.”
The meetings were successful, he said:
What we have is commitments from Guatemala to take singe adults and family units without travel documents back in an expedited fashion, to get them out of our custody and repatriate them more quickly from the border. We’re going to have our first flight on Friday.
We got a commitment for Guatemala to address adults crossing into their border with children to ensure they are actually traveling with their own kids and that they are properly documented.
We got them to commit to having unaccompanied children, 17 and under, to ensure they have the proper paperwork and permission from their parents to travel instead of letting them transit Guatemala. All of these things were implemented in the weeks after the visit.
However, officials in Guatemala have backed away from a proposed comprehensive immigration reform deal that would require migrants passing through Guatemala to ask for asylum before traveling onto the United States.
Various pro-migration groups have lobbied Guatemala’s elite to reject the proposed “Safe Third Country” deal with the United States. Trump is threatening to impose penalties on Guatemala for not finishing the deal:
“We continue to work with Guatemala to follow through on our shared commitment to limiting human trafficking and smuggling through Guatemala,” McAleenan told Breitbart News. “We need them to do more.”
Immigration Numbers
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes roughly 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or healthcare, engineering or science, software or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses —plus roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
“If there is a growing flood of foreign labor, the American middle class is no longer going to exist, and Republicans will not have a constituency,” said Hillarie Gamm, a co-cofounder of the American Workers Coalition.
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