Krikorian: Pro-Migration Zealots Control Joe Biden’s Border Agencies

President Joe Biden has handed control over the nation’s immigration agencies to pro-migration zealots, and neither he nor his top aides may be able to contain the approaching worldwide wave of migrants, says Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Biden’s picks “see this as a moral issue and [think] that people who present themselves at the border who come from dysfunctional countries have to be led in, regardless of what the effect on the United States,” Krikorian told Breitbart News. He added:

These folks look at the asylum issue without considering any of the other aspects like labor market and the rest of it … What they’re taking into consideration is not what the broad national interest is in this policy. Rather it’s a moral claim that we have no right to not to let them in.

Biden’s choice to run the Department of Homeland Security is Alejandro Mayorkas, who fled from communist Cuba in 1960 to the United States as a child refugee with his Cuban father and his Romanian-born mother.

In a March 6 interview with NBC News, Mayorkas showed his deep sympathy for migrants, saying:

I believe that asylum seekers, individuals who claim credible fear by reason of their membership in a particular social group, should have the opportunity to present those claims to the United States authorities, and they should be able to present those claims in an orderly, efficient, and safe way.

Mayorkas did not suggest any limits to the potential number of asylum seekers, nor any protections for Americans who lose wages and cheap housing when the government inflates the supply of labor.

Immigration is about migrants and the “values of our country,” according to Mayorkas:

To address the needs of the migrants themselves, and the American public, we’re taking a look at the immigration system writ large and seeing what reforms we can achieve to ensure that the manner in which we address the needs of individuals looking for a better life adheres to the principles and values of our country and its proud traditions.

I’m going to take a look at the immigration system writ large and decide what reforms are needed. I’m going to do that in partnership with community stakeholders, of course the agencies that I oversee, [plus] state and local law enforcement. We’re going to be collaborative, we’re going to be a partnership, and I’m going to make the ultimate decisions in executing the President to the Vice President’s vision for a better nation, and to build back better. That’s what I’m going to do.

A flood of cheap migrant labor is actually good for Americans’ pocketbooks, according to Mayorkas. “Creating a new immigration system will help create jobs, raise wages, and grow our economy, not just for immigrant communities, but for all our families across this great, great country,” Alejandro Mayorkas told a pro-amnesty group, the American Business Immigration Council, on December 3.

In reality, Americans’ wages have stagnated since the government began inflating the labor supply in the 1970s, and especially after the bipartisan 1990 immigration expansion. Many business groups openly say that additional migrants reduce wages.

Mayorkas also blamed the rising migrant wave in 2021 on so-called push factors from other countries — not the eagerness of himself and progressives to pull migrants from their home economics and steer them into better lives in America, regardless of the damage done to the migrants’ home countries: “We understand the significance of the number of children: It speaks to the fact that there is, quite frankly, pent-up desperation from three countries that have suffered so much violence, so much poverty, and other adverse conditions.”

But more than 70 percent of the younger migrants are teenagers, many of whom are being sent north by their parents to get jobs amid Joe Biden’s welcome. Yet Mayorkas portrayed the younger migrants as young children during a March 1 event at the White House:

We are not apprehending a 9-year-old child, who has come alone, who has traversed Mexico … whose loving parents sent that child alone. We’re not expelling that 9-year-old child to Mexico when that child’s country of origin was Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.

The Title 42 anti-epidemic barrier against the migration of people should be taken down as soon as possible, Mayorkas told NBC. The healthcare barrier is the most successful — and the most lawsuit-proof — of President Donald Trump’s border measures. But Mayorkas said, “it is our effort to reduce reliance on Title 42 as swiftly as possible to address the public health imperative on the one hand and to be able to process asylum claims of individuals on the other.”

Mayorkas’ views are widely shared by the Democrat Party.

“We’re nothing if we’re not a nation of immigrants,” Democrat leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told a December meeting of pro-migration business leaders. “Immigrants built this country with their hands, enriched our culture with their minds and spirit, and provided the spark that drives our economy.”

The view is reflected in the Democrats’ legislation. For example, the Democrats’ new amnesty for agriculture workers would replace much of the U.S. agriculture workforce with an extracted population of low-wage, indentured, temporary foreign workers. That switch from an American to an H-2A visa workforce would slow technology upgrades, push many Americans out of agricultural jobs and rural districts, and so shrivel the spending and taxes needed by small towns.

Similarly, Biden’s major amnesty legislation allows Fortune 500 companies to sideline American graduates and to fill all their white-collar jobs with low-wage, indentured foreign graduates.

But Mayorkas’s policies are causing distress among some Democrats who fear the public will blame them for the inflow.

“It’s imperative we get this situation under control or we are looking at another crisis on our hands,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) said in a March 8 statement whereby he asked to meet with Biden’s deputies. “I look forward to meeting with President Biden and Secretaries Mayorkas … to discuss the challenges and potential solutions to the influx of people at our border.”

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to legal immigration, illegal migration, and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that 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.

On March 7, amid growing media focus on the border, Mayorkas traveled to the border with a group of administration officials. Several of those officials are like-minded pro-migration activists, including Esther Olavarria, the deputy assistant to the president for immigration; Katie Tobin, senior director for transborder at the National Security Council; and Marsha Espinosa, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS.

Some of the officials, however, are long-time staffers for Joe Biden who may subordinate Mayorkas’ migration priorities to Biden’s broader political agenda.

“The Democratic Party has become radicalized on immigration in a way that it just wasn’t in 1980,” said Krikorian. Back then, President Jimmy Carter eventually blocked the Cuban government’s deportation of many Cubans to America after seven months of rising political pressure.

“Who in the President’s party is going to say, ‘Okay, we need to go back to [President Donald] Trump’s approach, and, you know, shut this down.’ There isn’t anybody,” Krikorian said.

Besides, Mayorkas and his progressives may prefer to ignore the public’s opposition, said Krikorian. “It could well be that they figure they’re going to lose the House anyway [in 2022], so go for broke for a year and a half.”

Also, he added, Biden and his immediate staff may not have the clout to block Mayorkas and his many fellow zealots:

Biden is weak in a whole variety of ways, and if you’ve got competing interests [in an administration such as] the [pro-migration] Human Rights Crusaders tussling with the green-eyeshade election guys, who’s going to put his foot down and make a decision? It’s not Biden, He’s incapable of that. If you don’t have somebody in charge, things like this can get out of control.

In the next several months, Mayorkas is more likely to widen the avenues for migrants to enter the United States by writing regulations to create new “particular social groups” that are eligible for asylum, Krikorian said.

“They’re going to be issuing new asylum rules that will essentially grant asylum to every one of these people if they come from a place where there is violence or domestic violence, or there’s gangs or whatever. They’re going to include all of that under a ‘particular social group’ so that these people will all just get asylum eventually.”

The establishment media may not save Biden from Mayorkas and his pro-migration appointees, Krikorian said. Right now, “they aren’t totally carrying Biden’s water … There is a certain amount of bogus politically slanted ‘fact check’ stuff going on. But the numbers are numbers, and they’re reporting them. So there’s a limit to how much even the semi-official legacy media can do to protect Biden here.”

The radical policy put in place by Mayorkas is likely to discredit the public’s support for the nation’s asylum rules, said Krikorian. “Because of what they’re putting into motion, there’s a really good chance we’re gonna have a Republican President and a Republican Congress in 2024. And if the Democrats have delegitimized the asylum process, we will see a real push to dramatically restrict asylum far more than it was before Biden took over.”