President Joe Biden’s border security chief is promising to end the workplace enforcement of migration laws and to help illegal migrants get higher wages from their U.S. employers.
Alejandro Mayorkas, the Cuban-born refugee and pro-migration zealot who now runs the Department of Homeland Security, portrays his “Worksite Enforcement Strategy” as a benefit for both illegals and Americans. He wrote:
We will not tolerate unscrupulous employers who exploit unauthorized workers, conduct illegal activities, or impose unsafe working conditions … By adopting policies that focus on the most unscrupulous employers, we will protect workers as well as legitimate American businesses.
Mayorkas told the Wall Street Journal:
The message is, exploitative employers should beware. Businesses that merely employ [illegal] immigrants not authorized to work but offer them fair wages and safe working conditions wouldn’t be a priority for immigration enforcement, he added.
Federal law bars the employment of illegal migrants but Mayorkas “does not want to enforce that law,” said Rob Law, the director of regulatory policy for the Center for Immigration Studies. Law continued:
Mayorkas actually wants to encourage illegal aliens to get into and remain in the workforce. I think that’s the key thing here: Mayorkas is actually becoming the greatest champion of illegal alien workers. That’s astonishing, that the Secretary of Homeland Security is the greatest advocate for illegal alien workers in this country.
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said:
They are giving employers a green light to hire and employ illegal aliens, ordering a halt to nearly all worksite enforcement. Joe Biden’s policy is precisely the opposite [of the law]: to draw as many illegal aliens as possible to the United States, no matter the cost to national security, public health, burdens to taxpayers, or the jobs and wages of American workers.
Myriad economic studies show that the flood of migrant workers into Americans’ national labor market prevents “tight labor” worker shortages. Those shortages are good for the economy and for Americans because they pressure employers to recruit Americans with offers of higher wages and more technology support.
For example, 2019 workplace raids in Mississippi removed many illegals and forced employers to pay Americans higher wages to take jobs in the chicken-processing sector.
Since the 1990s, the establishment’s policy of extracting workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy has pushed millions of blue-collar and white-collar Americans towards poverty.
That extraction migration policy also transferred trillions of dollars to investors in the U.S. stock market. For example, wages in California rose just 2.9 percent in 21 years — or roughly 0.1 percent per year — according to the establishment-funded Population Reference Bureau. During the same period, the value of the Dow Jones index grew 100 times faster.
The flood of migrants has also spiked housing costs, forcing young American families to transfer trillions of dollars from their reduced wages to older and wealthier real-estate owners. Those young-to-old wealth transfers are set to rise further as Democrats convert suburbs into a patchwork of small apartments and backyard houses.
The average lifespan of American males also has declined as many became unemployed, alienated, and addicted amid the flood of migrant labor. “This is particularly true for American men, for whom drug overdose increased sharply in the past two years,” a medical journal reported in 2018.
On October 12, Mayorkas admitted that his migrant wave into Americans’ workplaces is fueled by economic factors in foreign countries, not by political persecution or famine:
There are many different theories. [for the migration]. I think that pieces of the many different theories, compiled together, form a very compelling answer: The downturn in economies, the attendant rise in violence, the downturn in economies made more acute by reason of the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic, the suppression of any humanitarian relief over the past number of years, and the pent-up thirst for relief among many different populations. I think an accumulation of [those] m factors contributes to the rise in in migration that we’ve seen.
Yet Mayorkas allows the economic migrants to get U.S. jobs while they wait years for overburdened asylum courts to address their economic claims for political asylum.
Federal law requires that asylum seekers be held in detention until their cases are decided. Administration officials stopped enforcing that detention law in about 2009 while Mayorkas was a top DHS official in President Barack Obama’s DHS.
Mayorkas’ “Workplace Enforcement Strategy” follows a September 30 announcement that he would stop deporting illegal workers, providing they did not also commit felonies. Those foreign workers, he wrote, “make our Nation stronger”:
“For the first time, our [enforcement] guidelines will, in the pursuit of public safety, require an assessment of the individual and take into account the totality of the facts and circumstances,” said Secretary Mayorkas. … “As we strive to provide [illegal migrants] with a path to [legal] status, we will not work in conflict by spending resources seeking to remove those who do not pose a threat and, in fact, make our Nation stronger.”
The Worksite Enforcement Strategy says:
We can most effectively protect the American labor market, the conditions of the American worksite, and the dignity of the individual by focusing our worksite enforcement efforts on unscrupulous employers. This is how we will proceed.
Mayorkas’s reference to the “dignity of the individual” refers to migrants, not to Americans sidelined by his cheap labor, pro-migration policies:
Mayorkas’s plan also dangles legal benefits — such as legal status — to illegals who report exploitative employers.
In practice, this could allow foreign individuals who agree to be trafficked into U.S. jobs to get work permits by exposing their traffickers:
These plans should, among other things, provide for the consideration of deferred action, continued presence, parole, and other available relief for noncitizens who are witnesses to, or victims of, abusive and exploitative labor practices. In addition, these plans should provide for the assistance noncitizen victims and witnesses need to participate actively in the investigations and consider ways to ensure that noncitizen victims and witnesses generally are not placed in immigration proceedings during the pendency of an investigation or prosecution. Please present these agency plans to me within 60 days of the date of this memorandum.
Mayorkas’s favoritism for foreign illegal workers over Americans spotlights the progressives’ political war against ordinary Americans, said Law:
They’re subjecting American blue=collar hard working, ordinary Americans to a lower standard of living. … It is consistent with the progressive disdain for middle America.
They’re using immigration policy to further harm and demoralize ordinary Americans, to make their way of life that much harder, much more expensive, and much more miserable, until they see the progressive light, so to speak.
“They put forward token displays of enforcement here or sternly worded statements there, but this is all an orchestrated attempt to further weaken the Americans,” Law said.
Many progressives emotionally prefer to support migrants over Americans, even when migrants cannot or will not support the civic and workplace practices and rules that protect Americans’ workplace rights.
For example, the Washington Post‘s business section posted an article on October 6 that downplayed the housing squalor caused by loose migration rules. For example, one 2017 migrant named Cindia Martinez told the newspaper:
But I found a closet within someone else’s house for me and my two children. It was 72 by 32 inches and rent was $1,100 a month, with bills included. When I thought that I was finally going to be safe with my children, the women I was living with told me I had to go because they couldn’t make rent either.
An article in Mother Jones praised teachers who pour their energy into supporting Mayorkas’s economic migrants, despite the needs of American students:
Xavier—a 17-year-old from Guatemala who lived a few blocks away—was at high risk of disappearing. Short, with a mop of black curls, he had come to the States alone the previous year. His schooling in Guatemala had ended in the fourth grade, and he’d attended classes at Justice for only a few months before it shut down. In spring 2020, Fairfax County offered live virtual classes only two days a week, and teachers had to help their students get familiar with online schooling. Comprehending the instructions required more than basic English, and not all of Xavier’s teachers spoke Spanish. “No entiendo nada,” he lamented—“I don’t understand anything.” He was working at a pizzeria until midnight most days, and got home exhausted. It was hard not to fall asleep during virtual class, and often he did.
“When kids did volunteer an answer [during online classes], teachers became adept at identifying various workplace sounds,” the article said. “Drilling was common on construction sites; cash registers were giveaways of a retail job.”
Nationwide, migration is deeply unpopular because of its economic impact. It damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
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