Amnesty advocates are working overtime to portray illegal migrants as heroic essential workers in the national campaign to contain China’s coronavirus.
“We have started talking about essential workers as a category of superheroes,” according to Andrew Selee, the president of the pro-migration Migration Policy Institute. The illegal aliens who work as “essential workers” deserve an amnesty if the epidemic continues, he suggested in a New York Times op-ed. “[We should think] in a bold way about how do we deal with essential workers who have put their life on the line for all of us but who don’t have legal documents,” he said.
Illegal aliens in the healthcare sector, “regardless of their place of birth, these individuals undoubtedly represent the best of America,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said April 28.
“They’re the Face of COVID-19 Response,” claims a May 7 post by Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
The Zuckerberg post showcases the stories of four attractive college-educated illegal migrants who were brought as children to the United States and were then educated by American taxpayers. The initiative’s globalist theme is “A Future For Everyone,” even though recruiters at Zuckerberg’s Facebook company bypass U.S. graduates to instead hire foreign H-1B and OPT workers.
Zuckerberg’s pitch was amplified by Todd Schulte, director of FWD.us, which is a pro-migration advocacy group founded by Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other wealthy investors.
Many illegal aliens hold jobs that require hard work, diligence, and skill. A very small percentage of illegal aliens are trained medical experts, but most are unskilled laborers working for low wages in the food and hospitality industries. The illegal aliens are vastly outnumbered by roughly 280 million Americans and roughly 34 million legal immigrants — but these illegal aliens drive down the wages and salaries paid by companies to hardworking Americans.
Yet the Democrats’ praise for illegal migrants exposes their dislike of the ordinary Americans, said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. For many progressives, he said, “immigrants are better than we are … immigrants are supermen of a sort, and we are whimpering people who need to curl up in our apartment and never leave again.”
This biased view matches their political ambitions, he said. Progressives want to “use the virus to bootstrap an amnesty … [because] they are creeped out by ordinary Americans,” he said.
“Where would we be if 41,000 DACA protectees and 11,000 TPS holders [in the healthcare sector] picked up and left us?” Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) asked in a May 5 comment. “We’d be in much worse shape, and we know it …We need them today,” he said.
Durbin used the #ImmigrantHealthHeroes hashtag to push for the legalization of illegal aliens who are now temporarily legal under the Deferred Arrival for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] and the Temporary Protect Status [TPS] programs. “Let’s recognize that America is ‘a nation of immigrants,'” he added, referring to the 1960s claim that the United States is a place for migrants, not a nation for Americans.
“We need Congress to pass a comprehensive bipartisan immigration reform bill,” he said, promising to use the next coronavirus emergency bill to extend the temporary legal status for the DACA and TPS illegal migrants.
More than 200,000 DACA and 130,000 TPS migrants have jobs defined as “essential workers,” Durbin said.
The “essential worker” term includes healthcare jobs as well as jobs on farms, in restaurants, food processing, transportation, and the security of critical facilities, such as waters, as well as banking, childcare workers, retail workers in hardware stories, janitors, and trash workers.
The vast majority of workers in these sectors are native-born Americans, not migrants, and the essential jobs held by illegal aliens can be performed by millions of the suddenly unemployed American blue-collar and white-collar workers.
The Center for Immigration Studies reported in August 2018:
Among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, we find only a handful of majority-immigrant occupations, and none completely dominated by immigrants (legal or illegal). Furthermore, in none of the 474 occupations do illegal immigrants constitute a majority of workers.
For example, companies provide the reward of green cards to roughly 50,000 foreign visa workers each year after those foreign workers have taken technology jobs from Americans via the H-1B and other visa programs.
DACA migrants provide a tiny share of U.S. medical workers, Camarota told Breitbart News. The claimed number of 29,000 DACA healthcare workers “translates to just 0.2% of the nation’s 14.5 million health care workers,” as CAP defines it.
Moreover, many additional healthcare experts have volunteered to work on the disease in New York and California but have not been mobilized by the state government, according to press reports. The New York Times reported April 18:
As of Wednesday, more than 90,000 retired and active health care workers had signed up online to volunteer at the epicenter of the pandemic, including 25,000 from outside New York, the governor’s office said.
Putting them to work, however, has been a different story.
New York City hospitals have only deployed 908 volunteers as of Wednesday, according to city health officials.
But the data does not make any difference to the pro-migration advocates.
“Honor immigrants on COVID-19 front lines by helping their families stay here,” said a May 4 op-ed by two lawyers in the Des Moines Register. “Honor is rightly due to these new American heroes … many of them do not have a path to permanent residency and citizenship.”
“It’s very hypocritical to say that we think these [illegal migrant] workers are essential and at the same time talking about deporting people from this country,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) an India-born advocate for migrants. House Democrats are “pushing very, very hard” to get an amnesty for younger illegal aliens, dubbed DACA migrants, she said, according to RollCall.com.
Legal and illegal immigrants are “disproportionately represented in the very workers most essential in the U.S. right now,” said Laura Collins, the director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. “We need immigrants to help start new businesses, jump-starting entrepreneurship when many others will be too scared to risk opening a business again,” she said in a May 5 op-ed for the San Antonio Express-News.
But “immigrants and the native-born will not compete with each other for opportunities in the post-pandemic economic recovery,” she insisted.
“It’s time to offer all essential workers a path to legalization,” said a New York Times op-ed, which focused on the stoop-labor illegal migrants who harvest single asparagus sticks with a long knife, while ignoring the machines which rapidly harvest asparagus fields.
“Immigrants were keeping America’s health care system afloat before the coronavirus,” an immigrant investor claimed in an Axios.com op-ed. “When we do get through this, we’ll be able to retell the story of America as a country built by fearless, men and women seeking a new beginning for themselves and their families. We’ll remind the world that, especially in a time of crisis, America remains a ‘nation of immigrants.'”
“#ImmigrantHealthHeroes Is Highlighting The Immigrant Health Care Workers Keeping Us All Safe,” says a headline posted by a pro-migration website, WeAreMitu.com.
New York Attorney General Letitia James also pushed the migrants-save-Americans claim:
“The reality is that immigrants are the backbone of the U.S. economy, are already on the front lines of pandemic response, and will also be key to the economic recovery,” claimed the progressive Justice Action Center.