Joe Biden Promises Welcome for Venezuelan, Cuban Migrants

Democratic candidate Joe Biden is offering a green light to migrants who want to flee from Cuba and Venezuela.

“The Venezuelan people need our support to recover their democracy and rebuild their country,” Biden told a political event in Florida on October 7.  “That’s why I would immediately grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans” in the United States, he said.

The TPS status allows foreigners to live and work in the United States, and to get welfare and access to K-12 schools. Since 2017, President Donald Trump has blocked TPS for Venezuelans, amid campaigns by Florida business groups and D.C.-based progressives. Trump has also worked to shrink TPS populations created by prior presidents.

Biden continued:

There are almost 10,000 Cubans languishing in tent camps along the Mexican border because of the administration’s anti-immigration agenda. That’s the administration actively separating Cuban families by not processing visas [and] through restrictions on family visits and remittances. I think we have to reverse that.

If implemented, Biden’s welcome policy “will set off a new exodus from those countries as people try to take advantage of the opportunity to stay in the United States,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Biden’s plan would hurt Americans, she said. “What scholars found specifically when they looked at the [1980] impact of Cubans in South Florida is that the wages of American workers who were competing for unskilled or less skilled jobs went down significantly … The usual suspects will benefit — the employers who will have a labor surplus and will get away with paying low wages, [and] the slumlords who can fill up their substandard affordable housing.”

The impact of low wages and surplus labor on Floridians was sketched in a June 2020 article in the Washington Post:

KISSIMMEE, FLA. — The pandemic had forced them from their home. Then they had run out of money for a motel. That left the car, which is where Sergine Lucien, Dave Marecheau and their two children were one recent night, parked in a lot that was tucked behind a row of empty storefronts.

…

Even when the economy was booming, Dave and Sergine had lived in a state of near homelessness, shuttling between seedy motels that had become a shelter of last resort for thousands in the Orlando area. Last year, after six years of the motel life, they had saved enough to finally make it out. They bought an RV and rented a spot in a quiet and clean mobile home community. Sergine promised the kids they would never go back.

Now all that was gone. In theory, they qualified for a $3,400 federal stimulus check, but they had no bank account or address to collect it. In theory, Dave was entitled to unemployment, but as of May only about 43 percent of the state’s 1.1 million claims had been paid.

“We have to be extremely prudent in offering any kind of temporary humanitarian protection,” Vaughan told Breitbart News.

Politicians ignore the emotional incentive for migrants to get into the United States, Vaughan said. “For the privileged, it might be a dollars-and-cents calculation. But for others, it’s more than that — it’s an opportunity to live freely with the opportunity to have a decent quality of life [and] to put their children on a trajectory towards prosperity.”

TPS migrants are rewarded for being in the United States, she said. “They are allowed to immediately access welfare programs, as happened with the Cubans [in 1980 and 1994] and Haitians [in 2010] — unlike other asylum seekers or green card admission –  at an enormous cost.”

Even apparently small changes in border rules can precipitate floods of migrants, she said. The Central American migration began as “a trickle at first [in 2010], and quickly turned into a flood because the smuggler started to take advantage and fed this idea of coming here with kids, or sending your kids.”

The Central American migration was largely stopped in 2020 — but only because President Donald Trump and his deputies fought numerous high-profile battles with the agencies, various pro-migration groups, the establishment media, and many judges to impose a set of migration curbs.

Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular restrictions on immigration and visa workers.

But Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegal aliens, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.

“The number of [foreign] people who could potentially benefit [from Biden’s welcome] is limited only by the tolerance of our government,” Vaughan said. But Biden had his progressive supporters “live insulated from the effects of it, whether it is their schools, their job markets, or their neighborhoods … they live in a bubble.”

Biden’s allies “disregard the effects of their actions on regular Americans, which means it’s selfish elitism.” Like the characters in the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, she said, “they use working people for their own sexual and emotional gratification and cast them aside, caring nothing for the effects on people’s lives.”