Democrats Vote for Joe Biden's Easy Asylum Plan

Nearly all Democratic Senators voted on Thursday to protect an extraordinary new immigration pipeline now being created by regulatory officials at President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security.

The one exception was Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who voted with all GOP Senators in the chamber for a resolution to kill the so-called asylum rule.

The rule is being created by Alejandro Mayorkas, the pro-migration zealot in charge of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It would allow lower-level officials — some of whom may be political activists — to give the huge gift of amnesty and citizenship to an unlimited number of migrants as they appear at the border.

The rule would bypass the law set by Congress which says asylum seekers must offer evidence to persuade a judge in immigration court. The limits on asylum are designed to protect Americans from a flood of cheap labor that would wreck their ability to bargain for decent wages in a free market for labor.

The Thursday vote shows that nearly all Democrats are eager to attract and welcome illegal migrants, regardless of their TV claims that they oppose illegal migration, said one Hill source.

“They dangle asylum and citizenship” to lure more poor migrants to the U.S. border, despite lethal hazards and the legal bar against giving asylum status to economic migrants, the source said.

For example, the fast-track asylum rules were backed by several Democratic Senators who have recently declared their opposition to ending Title 42, the source noted. These zig-zag Democrats include Senators Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, as well as Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto from Nevada.

The final vote was 48 nos, 46 yays.  But one of the no votes was cast by GOP leader Sen, Mitch McConnell (R-TN) because the no vote allows him to bring the issue up for a revote.

Four GOP Senators were not in the Senate to vote against the rule. They were Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).

Two Democratic Senators also missed the vote: Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).

The four GOP Senators also missed the main vote of the day, for or against the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021. The bill was blocked in a split vote, 47 to 47.

The GOP Senators may win the fight in a future vote because Manchin’s support would give them 51 votes.

But Biden has promised to veto the legislative effort.

GOP officials in multiple states have filed two lawsuits against the asylum rule. The lawsuits ask judges to block the rule because it violates Congress laws.

Since 2011, agency officials have allowed the asylum process to get jammed by applications from more than 1.7 million migrants. The clog ensures that the migrants can stay to work in the U.S. for many years while their claims are slowly processed and appealed.

Democrats defend the new asylum giveaway as a good management policy to improve the efficiency of the asylum process. RollCall.com reported:

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who recently co-sponsored legislation that would require the administration to keep Title 42 in place longer, said he voted against the resolution because he supports efforts to send more officers to the border and speed up processing.

“The idea is that if you want to expedite, you know, removal of asylum-seekers, you have folks there at the border to do that,” Kelly said. “That’s consistent with the ‘no’ vote.”

But the rule would do little to remove the backlog because it allows any migrant who is rejected at the border to get a job after filing an appeal in the clogged asylum courts.

On May 26, DHS described the plan to favored reporters, including CBSNews.com, which reported:

The program will start on a small scale on Tuesday [May 31], with U.S. asylum officers expected to receive a few hundred cases per month during the first implementation phase, Justice Department and Homeland Security officials said during a call with reporters, requesting anonymity to discuss the plan.

Initially, only asylum-seekers who tell U.S. border officials they plan to live near Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Newark or San Francisco will be enrolled in the new program, which aims to condense the asylum adjudication period from the current years-long timeframe to several months.

“DHS officials said they are working to provide migrants access to pro-bono attorneys before the initial screenings,” CBS reported.

The plan “could represent the leading edge of what some experts see as the most sweeping change to the asylum process in a quarter-century,” said the New York Times. It is “President Biden’s first significant policy aimed at improving the asylum system, which he pledged to restore after its four years of decline during the Trump administration,” the report said.

But economic migrants have huge incentives to ask for asylum even if they have no valid reason to fear political persecution in their home country. The incentives include the eagerness of Mayorkas’ deputies to provide the migrants with work permits and transport to the cities where the migrants have friends who can help them find jobs.

If the migrants decline to ask Mayorkas’ agents for asylum, they have to take the dangerous, and expensive trips through the scrub and desert along the border, and then pay high prices to coyote taxis to take them north.

Since he took office in early 2021, Mayorkas has been working to create many pipelines for foreign migrants to move into U.S. society. These pipelines are intended to help worldwide migrants safely and cheaply bypass the cartels’ violent and profitable labor-trafficking networks through Mexico.

The pipelines are hidden behind the federal government’s pretense of guarding the border, such as the Title 42 barrier charade.

The pipelines include fast-track work permits for asylum applicants, so-called Unaccompanied Alien Children, easy parole for many Central Americans, Afghans, and Ukrainians. The pipelines are smoothed by a series of government-funded aid stations then help migrants along the trail, from Panama to Mexico to Texas, and then to Florida and California, Maine, and Oregon.

Mayorkas is also helping migrants within the United States get work permits and legal green cards. For example, he is expanding the U Visa program, which awards work permits and green cards to migrants who say they are a witness to a crime.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

Extraction migration also distorts the economy, damages professionals’ clout, and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines.

Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The economic policy is hidden behind a variety of high-minded narratives. These include the claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees, or that the government needs a different population. But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy reduces overseas investment, kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it extracts human-resources wealth from the poor home countries.

The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of feuding identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.

Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of foreign contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based,  bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.