America is a “Nation of Immigrants,” and Americans should welcome waves of migrants regardless of the impact on their wages and jobs, according to Joe Biden’s nominee for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Nominee Alejandro Mayorkas is scheduled for a Senate confirmation hearing on January 19, where GOP senators are expected to spotlight Mayorkas’s multiple ethical scandals. You can watch below:
Those scandals include the sale of citizenship via the EB-5 “Golden Visa” program, his suppression of DHS anti-fraud rules, his push to win a pardon for a California drug dealer, and his role in the importation of child labor via the 2008 “Unaccompanied Alien Child” rules.
Mayorkas is also compromised by a recent history of working for companies — such as Uber — that stand to benefit from his control of the DHS-managed and very lucrative visa worker programs.
“Mayorkas has a history of corruption that is deeply concerning,” said a Hill source. “Given that no Republican voted to confirm him last time, they should not start now.”
“What Biden wants to do with his immigration policy — with Mayorkas at the head — is to bring enough immigrants into swing states so that they never go Red again,” the Hill staffer said, adding:
Republicans shouldn’t speedily confirm Biden’s handpicked person to remake the electorate. He would allow and encourage more illegal migration to come across the border, creating a mass rush of people that either this administration, or [Biden] in a second term, or the next time they’re in power, will say “We can’t possibly kick all these people out, we have to make them citizens!”
In numerous speeches and statements, Mayorka has repeatedly subordinated Americans’ preferences to his 1950s “Nation of Immigrants” ideological agenda.
“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a noble mission to help keep us safe, and to advance our proud history as a country of welcome,” Mayorkas declared as his nomination was announced on November 24.
Americans’ homeland is “a nation that always has been and forever will remain a Nation of Immigrants,” Mayorkas declared in 2013, echoing a 2018 video by President-elect Biden.
“It is identity that has to serve as the foundation of our approach to the difficult immigration issues we confront,” Mayorkas said in a 2016 speech to the Migration Policy Institute:
We have to give thought to the fundamental and foundational question of who we are as a country, and who we should be, and how we answer that question on the subject of immigration should be our guidepost in traveling through and managing the very, very difficult and sensitive and too often divisive challenges that we face.
But Mayorkas sidelined concerns about Americans’ jobs and careers from his “guidepost” analysis, that he reduced to “Nation of Immigrants” vs. security:
The Syrian refugee crisis. There were and remain at least two different approaches or priorities that are in tension with one another, and people come down on different sides of that tension.
On the one hand, there are many who believe that it is one of our proudest traditions as a country to be a place of refuge for those in greatest need. Certainly, the individuals fleeing the horror that too often occurs in Syria qualify in that category and there is a strong sentiment among many that we need to open our arms more widely and more receptively and embrace more strongly a greater number of refugees than we have historically and historically …
On the other hand, there are individuals who believe that the Syrian refugees, as a population, bring a component of concern for our security.
As Mayorkas ignores the impact of labor inflation on Americans, he is eager to recognize the economic pressures on migrants. He told the 2016 audience:
The issue of migration from the Northern Triangle, from Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many [in the pro-migration community] have taken great issue with the administration … The criticism has been that we should be more expansive in how we welcome individuals who I think without controversy everyone understands are fleeing despair, great violence, great socio-economic challenge, and great challenges in their lives.
DHS officials have the option to either implement Americans’ laws or else to act as the noble leaders of a “Nation of Immigrants,” he told the MPI’s community of pro-migration advocates:
We are a nation of immigrants and we are a nation of laws. Whether we expand the basis on which we seek to welcome these individuals fleeing [for] a better life is a question that is answered by thinking of who we want to be as a country.
Understanding that we have to manage our borders, are we proudest when we manage those most effectively and hew with some orthodoxy to the standards articulated in the law? Or are we [in the community] most noble when we exercise our discretion with greater generosity and welcome these individuals?
…
I, of course, have my views
Mayorkas made his views clear in 2009, by saying he was “privileged” to help push President Barack Obama’s plans for amnesty-and-cheap-labor “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”:
I do want to underscore, as I mentioned earlier, the [DHS] Secretary [Janet Napolitano] of course, in keeping with the President’s directive, is deeply committed to comprehensive immigration reform, and I feel very privileged to be an instrument of that effort.
Many coastal business groups use the “Nation for Immigrants” claim as a political club to sideline Americans’ concerns about declining wages, rising rents, and the flow of jobs and wealth from the heartland to the coasts.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us declared on January 18 that Mayorkas’s family story justifies his appointment to run the nation’s immigration and cybersecurity programs:
Alejandro Mayorkas is more than qualified to oversee the Department of Homeland Security, having spent a distinguished career in public service working on behalf of American families, including leading the development and implementation of DACA and ensuring that people seeking opportunity and refuge in the United States are treated with dignity. His own powerful family story of fleeing Cuba as an infant reminds us that our nation is strongest when we show moral leadership by welcoming immigrants, refugees, and people seeking asylum.
That formula was implemented by a January 18 report in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, which ignored economic issues as it allocated 12 paragraphs describing how Mayorkas’s mother escaped from the Nazis’ relentless anti-Semitism to tropical Cuba, and then from Castro’s 1960’s Cuba to the United States.
Many pollsters show Americans’ deep and broad opposition to cheap-labor migration — and the inflow of temporary contract workers. into the jobs needed by young and old Americans.
The multi-racial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based opposition to cheap-labor migration co-exists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles which still push the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Mayorkas has argued that Americans’ wages will rise once an amnesty means employers’ illegal workers become Americans with full legal rights.
So far, he has not explained why the flood of legalized labor — and the subsequent flood of more illegal and legal labor — will help raise wages for marginalized Americans, including mothers with small children, older people with disabilities, alienated drug addicts, and ex-convicts.
The population of marginalized Americans also includes the tens of millions of Americans stranded in the heartland states that get little funding from coastal investors who prefer to hire legal immigrants as they arrive at LAX or Newark airport.
In 2016, the voters’ understandable solidarity with their fellow Americans carried Donald Trump’s pro-American policies into the White House. Those policies helped shrink American unemployment, raise Americans’ wages, and — if Democratic analysts are to be believed — can bring the GOP back into power in 2024.
Mayorkas’ work scandals “are the kind of thing any swamp figure is going to be involved in,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He added:
Much of the immigration expansionist camp thinks that immigration policy should be designed to promote the interests of immigrants and businesses, rather than the broader national interests … The hearings should be seen as an opportunity to debate the many implications of this broad “Nation of Immigrants” idea.
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