President Joe Biden is offering a huge giveaway of citizenship to at least 24,000 Venezuelans in the hope of deterring the rising flood of illegal migrants.
The plan offers the huge prize of legal status, work permits, and eventually, citizenship, to 24,000 Venezuelans who apply at U.S. embassies instead of migrating up to the U.S. border.
The colossal giveaway is paired with a threat of Title 42 expulsion back to Mexico for the Venezuelan migrants who walk across the mostly open U.S. border in search of jobs and a U.S. residency.
The policy was announced Wednesday afternoon.
The announcement comes three weeks before the mid-term election and 21 months after Biden triggered — and welcomed — a cross-border flood of roughly 200,000 Venezuelan illegal migrants into Americans’ workplaces, homes, and society.
“Those who follow the lawful process will have the opportunity to travel safely to the United States and become eligible to work here,” said a statement by Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s pro-migration, Cuban-born head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The statement said:
Venezuelans approved via this process will be authorized on a case-by-case basis to travel to the United States by air directly to an interior port of entry, thus relieving pressure at the border. Once in the United States, they will be eligible to apply for work authorization.
Venezuelans who travel by land, however, supposedly will be blocked by the Title 42 border protections that Biden’s deputies sought to cancel earlier this year. The DHS statement continued:
Effective immediately, Venezuelans who enter the United States between ports of entry, without authorization, will be returned to Mexico.
The two-sided plan will only be implemented if Mexico helps to block Venezuelan migrants, the statement said:
The United States will not implement this process without Mexico keeping in place its independent but parallel effort to accept the return of Venezuelan nationals who bypass this process and attempt to enter irregularly.
The statement did not reveal the quid-pro-quo deal for Mexico’s agreement to take over the task of protecting U.S. workers from cheap, imported, illegal labor.
A group of Venezuelan migrants called “walkers” walk through the streets of the Venezuelan border city of San Antonio del Tachira to cross to Colombia and continue their journey to the United States, on September 25, 2022. (YURI CORTEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
In September, 30,000 more Venezuelans were welcomed across the U.S. border by Biden’s deputies. That number is rising rapidly because the arrivals are using cell phones to boast of their new lives and wages to their penniless, at-home peers.
The new Venezuelan giveaway will be worth perhaps $24 billion to the 24,000 winning Venezuelans and their families. The estimate is based on the EB-5 program which effectively sells family packs of green cards to wealthy foreigners who lend $1 million to U.S. investors, such as current investors in New York real estate.
The plan is also a giveaway to U.S. businesses because it requires Venezuelans to get sponsored by U.S. residents, such as companies. This means that employers will be allowed to reject Americans — such as homeless dropouts or ex-convicts — and instead hire embassy-approved, skilled Venezuelans at very low wages. The Venezuelans will know they must remain docile and diligent to earn the dangled, government-funded citizenship bonanza for themselves and their families.
But there are many gaps in the Mayorkas plan.
The statement does not say whether officials will cap the giveaway at 24,000 Venezuelans. Prior drafts of the plan reportedly offered similar giveaways to many Cubans and Haitians.
Biden’s officials told media outlets that he can award legal “parole” status and work permits to the 24,000 Venezuelan migrants. If valid, the claim would allow the White House to shatter Congress’ annual limits on legal migration. But the claim is legally suspect.
Biden’s threats and promises may do nothing to stop the Venezuelan migrants now in transit from multiple countries in South America. That migrant population could well exceed 50,000 migrants. They likely are determined to push past Mexico’s corrupt police forces and then overwhelm Biden’s weak border defenses.
The chance of overwhelming the U.S. border force is significant. Breitbart News reported on October 12 that only 1,000 Venezuelans will be returned each day:
The [return] plan will unfold with 200 Venezuelan adult migrants returned daily at each of five crossing points. Migrants will be returned through the Rio Grande Valley, Del Rio, El Paso, Tucson, and San Diego Sectors of the Border Patrol. The source says the agency plans to add adult migrants from Cuba and Nicaragua to the plan as soon as possible.
The migrants’ hopes will be boosted by a Washington Post article on the new policy, which noted that “Venezuelans who aren’t ‘expelled’ to Mexico under Title 42 would continue to be allowed to enter the United States.”
Migrants also know that once they sneak across the U.S. border, they will not be sent home. Biden’s progressive officials believe their “equity” agenda overrides their legal obligation to deport migrants who seek the jobs and housing held by better-off Americans for jobs and housing.
Once the U.S. election is over, Biden and Mayorkas may drop their unwanted deportation plan. “The ability to send them [the migrants] back to those states is not rational,” Biden said in September.
Venezuelan migrants called “walkers” on the highway between San Cristobal and the border city of San Antonio del Tachira in order to cross the border into Colombia and continue their journey to the U.S., in San Antonio del Tachira, Venezuela, on September 24, 2022. (YURI CORTEZ/AFP via Getty)
So far, Biden’s pro-migration allies have raised little complaint about the pre-election plan.
The DHS statement does not explain why the election-eve plan to import more Venezualan economic migrants would be popular among voters.
Mayorkas’s Venezuelan migrants are a direct pocketbook threat to U.S.-born working-class whites, blacks, and Latinos, most of whom are already seeing their wages drop because of Biden’s mass migration and inflation.
Polls show there is a near-consensus among native-born Americans against the government-aided corporate extraction of cheap labor for use in Americans’ jobs and workplaces. That consensus has crashed Biden’s poll ratings on migration, so boosting the turnout of GOP base voters.
Yet Democratic and GOP donors favor the long-standing, semi-secret government economic policy of Extraction Migration. The policy extracts millions of extra workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries for use by CEOs, investors, and government agencies.
This wealth-shifting policy ensures that few Republican candidates — and fewer Democratic candidates — will object to Biden’s giveaway during the midterm election.
The two-sided deal also cements the administration’s long-term plan to import more illegal migrants into Americans’ society. For example, Mayorkas’ DHS statement said:
Today’s actions are part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing efforts to reduce irregular migration throughout the Western Hemisphere … [and] is premised on pairing increased enforcement in response to irregular immigration with the development of lawful and safe pathways for qualifying [foreign] individuals.
“We are building an immigration system that is designed to ensure due process, respect human dignity, and promote equity,” Mayorkas tweeted in August 2021, as he sketched out his plans for easy-asylum rules that would encourage a mass migration of poor job-seekers into Americans’ homeland.
The new plan is also intended to reduce the huge death toll of migrants who walk across the Darien Gap jungle trail between South America and Central America. The Mayorkas statement said:
The United States is also planning to offer additional security assistance to support regional partners to address the migration challenges in the Darién Gap.
Panama is currently seeing more than 3,000 people, mostly Venezuelan nationals, crossing into its territory from Colombia via the Darién jungle each day.
The huge daily inflow — perhaps 90,000 each month — is expected to soon hit the U.S. border.
Many of the Venezuelans are poor economic migrants from safe countries, such as Chile and Colombia. Their economic goals legally disqualify them from getting political asylum in the United States. For example, Venezuelan migrant Lever Alejos spoke to Miriam Jordan, a reporter at the New York Times:
Solidly middle class in Venezuela, he was struggling to keep his machine-repair shop afloat amid the country’s economic collapse. In Venezuela these days, many people make just a few dollars a day.
…
Within days [of arriving in D.C.], Mr. Alejos found work in construction. By the second week, he was sending money home to support his 7-year-old son, Christopher, and saving to buy a cellphone. By late fall, he plans to move out of the shelter to his own place.
Biden’s migrants will push many marginal American workers out of jobs.
“The job losses forecasted by the Fed [in September] would by the end of 2023 raise the unemployment rate from its current level of 3.7% to 4.4%,” ABC News reported in September. “That outcome would add an estimated 1.2 million unemployed people, according to Omair Sharif, the founder of research firm Inflation Insights.”
“We’ve already seen construction work is slowing,” one economist told ABC News.
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