U.S. Groups Want to Take over Coyotes' Migrant Extraction Business

Pro-migration groups are using the record death rate among illegal migrants to demand they be hired by the government to safely import more of the coyote-delivered migrants.

President Joe Biden’s government uses the coyote networks to extract and deliver extra migrants above the roughly one million legal immigrants per year set by Congress. Once the migrants are delivered through the cartel-controlled border zone, U.S. officials provide them with legal status or exemptions from deportation while they work at low wages for U.S. companies.

The government’s under-the-table welcome for the coyotes’ paying clients is also fuelling a record-breaking death rate on the border. The death toll was spotlighted by the United Nations’ Institute for Migration on July 1:

More than 1,238 lives have been lost during migration in the [north, central and south] Americas in 2021, among them at least 51 children … At least 728 of these deaths occurred on the United States-Mexico border crossing, making this the deadliest land crossing in the world.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service wants to take over some of the coyotes’ business.

“Political leaders can … reduce the overall number of people arriving at our southern border by creating real pathways that do not require risk to vulnerable populations and reward to criminal coyotes,” said a CNN op-ed by O’Mara Vignarajah.

Her group is already paid by the federal government to settle government-approved refugee migrants in Americans’ communities and jobs. She continued:

One such pathway is the US Refugee Admissions Program, which admits and resettles refugees whose applications are processed while the applicant remains abroad, avoiding the need to embark upon the treacherous journey to the US.

The Biden administration should immediately scale up overseas processing and expand to new locations where there are large groups of refugees in protracted situations, like in South and Central America. Doing so would improve upon its woeful underperformance in meeting its refugee commitments.

Other pro-migration groups back her pitch for additional safe, legalized migration.

“Reforms must allow us to bring in legal guest workers and open legal avenues for people to come in to help our economy,” insisted Domingo García, president of an ethnic identity group for Latinos, dubbed LULAC, or the League of United Latin Ameican Citizens. “These steps will prevent these refugees and immigrants from being thrown into the hands of human smugglers and coyotes who are willing to risk the lives of others for a dollar,” he wrote.

O’Mara Vignarajah’s argument that Americans should save migrants’ lives by legalizing illegal migration exposes the radical ambition of the pro-migration groups, noted Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies:

The logical endpoint of that [safety] argument is that everybody should be able to come in …. on the American taxpayers’ dime, so [migrants] wouldn’t have to be in hock to loan sharks or mortgage their uncle’s little farm.

[That] inevitably leads to unlimited immigration. There’s no way you can not [logically] get there. If you say “No, I’m for limits on immigration,” then what are you going to do about the person who’s the next one after the limit? Let’s say you want 5 million legal immigrants a year, which frankly, would not be an implausible position on the part of a lot of the Democrats in Congress. What are you willing to when [migrant] Number 5,000,001 arrives? He is not a rapist, not a drug dealer, just a regular working stiff, and he came in excess of your limit.

Are you willing to take him into custody and throw him out of the country? Yes or no? And if the answer is no, then you’re for unlimited immigration. None of the Democrats in Congress or the administration are really willing to say “Yes [deport him].”

Current law allows the federal government to import one million consumers, workers, and renters each year. The government also imports roughly one million visa workers for jobs that could be done by well-paid Americans and their machines.

Since January 2021, the federal government has also welcomed more than one million coyote-delivered extra migrants across the southern border.

Many of the coyote-delivered migrants die as they try to slip through the border loopholes created by Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. He is dangling work permits and an enforcement amnesty that encourages the migrants to risk their lives to get U.S. jobs.

One survivor described the June 27 death of the 53 migrants who climbed aboard the coyotes’ trailer truck:

As the truck moved on, making additional stops to pick up more migrants, people began to cluster near the door like [migrant] Cardona Tomás. She had no way to track the time.

“The people were yelling, some cried. Mostly women were calling for it to stop and to open the doors because it was hot, that they couldn’t breathe,” she said, still laboring a bit to speak after being intubated at the hospital.

She said the driver or someone else in the cab yelled back that “we were about to arrive, that there were 20 minutes left, six minutes.”

Guatemalan teenager Juan Wilmer Tulul Tepaz died in the truck, according to PlazaPublica, a website in Guatemala:

“Yes, yes, he is dead”, were the words that [his father] Manuel Tulul was able to outline after looking at photographs of his deceased son to confirm … [His mother] Magdalena, on the other hand, could not say anything. She just clutched her chest and cried.

The 53 dead found in the truck a just a small share of people who are dying while trying to get to the border welcome dangled by progressives and their allies in federal agencies, including border chief Alejandro Mayorkas.

The U.N. report described the known migrant death toll in 2021:

The largest demographic in the available data on migrant deaths in the Americas is unidentified people – nearly 500 individuals died on migratory routes in 2021and remain unidentified. Of those who have been identified, Mexicans make up the largest proportion (154 individuals), followed by Guatemalans (129 individuals) and Venezuelans (94 individuals).

In the Darien Gap [in Panama], 51 migrant lives lost were recorded in 2021. However, anecdotal reports indicate that many migrants die in the Darien Gap and their remains are neither recovered nor reported, so this figure presents only a small fraction of the true number of lives lost.

“Given the challenges to collect data on migrant deaths in the region and the lack of official sources of information, all … figures should be considered an undercount,” the report added.

The sending countries are deeply damaged by the U.S. government’s colonialism-like policy of extracting poor workers, consumers, and renters to juice the U.S. economy. For example, PlazaPublica reported from the rural village of Tzucubal, five hours distant from the capital city:

The children, says teacher Antonia Ixtoz, no longer come to school because they say that it is of no use to them, that their families have no money and that they have to help their parents. Their perception is that studying is a waste of time because they see that people who have graduated end up going to the United States.

Antonia has been a primary school teacher for 11 years in Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán and one of her main battles is trying to convince her 11 or 12 year old students not to emigrate. “I have a job and I barely have enough money but I’m not leaving because maybe I can convince a few kids to stay here,” she says.

But pro-migration groups keep calling for the extraction of more migrants from poor countries.

“The best way to limit spaces for the illegality that led to the death of at least 53 people southeast of San Antonio this week is to expand and strengthen legal options for migrants,” said a July 1 op-ed in the Washington Post by Enrique Acevedo, a Mexican-born journalist at CBS News.

“What we have at the southwest border is a lot of people putting their lives in the hands of smugglers who are taking them through very dangerous routes to get into the United States,” Andrew Selee, the president of the Migration Policy Institute, told C-SPAN on July 1:

You have to deal with it at least with three or four strategies. And one is you got to create more opportunity for people to come legally … If we don’t do that, anything else we do is going to fail. It’s a law of supply and demand and people will find their way around sooner or later of whatever enforcement measure we do.

The legalization of more migrants would be good for business and for the U.S. competition against China, says O’Mara Vignarajah, who claims she is a left-winger:

Policy makers must also recognize the economic contributions migrants are poised to make amid a nationwide labor shortage, by increasing access to work visas, such as H-2A and H-2B visas. That people from around the world envy the opportunity to build their livelihoods in the US is a strategic competitive advantage we should leverage, especially in the face of an ascendant China with a far greater overall population.

The same self-centered demand for endless cheap labor — regardless of citizens’ right to a fair labor market — is pushed by business leaders within GOP-led states.

“When the Idaho agricultural industry wants to hire workers to pick produce, the residency of those workers shouldn’t matter,” claimed Peter Crabb, an economics professor at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho. “Anytime we prevent mutually beneficial transactions, we reduce competition and all its benefits to society,” said claimed in a July 5 op-ed for an Idaho newspaper.

But the claimed “labor shortage” is good for Americans and America: It is forcing CEOs to recruit Americans with higher wages and also to invest more money into the high-tech, productivity-boosting automation that allows Americans to get more work done each day.

The migration advocates want to import the people rather than trade with their home countries, said Krikorian. Trade has allowed many countries — such as Chile and Brazil — to flourish by selling goods to Americans.

But migration advocates “want to import the people rather than [trade for] the product of those people’s work,” Krikorian said.