Biden’s Migrants Are Displacing Americans from Homeless Shelters

Tens of thousands of economic migrants invited by President Joe Biden are displacing Americans from homeless shelters just before Christmas, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper reported on December 15 from El Paso, Texas, where the many job-seeking migrants are being released by Alejandro Mayorkas’s easy migration policies. The numbers are so high that many migrants cannot find seats in departing buses and aircraft:

John Martin, deputy director at El Paso’s Opportunity Center for the Homeless … said the Opportunity Center’s five shelters traditionally focus on the city’s local homeless population but since August have routinely housed migrants released in the city. On Wednesday, the group’s Welcome Center housed about 129 people, nearly all of whom were migrants.

“Our ideal capacity is 85,” Mr. Martin said of the Welcome Center. The nearby men’s shelter housed nearly 200 men Wednesday, about 60% of whom are migrants, in a space meant to comfortably house 100 to 120 people, he said.

…

Meanwhile, with shelters full, some migrants have spent the night sleeping outside as overnight temperatures have been at or below freezing this week. Migrants crowded outside bus stations Wednesday wrapped themselves in blankets provided by the Red Cross and other charities. Hundreds of others have taken to spending the night at the airport while waiting for morning flights.

Most of the migrants are single men, who are eager to take low-wage jobs, share crowded apartments, and compliantly accept abuse from employers. They migrate because U.S. jobs — many of which are paid in tax-free cash — pay far more money than they could earn at home and allow them to quickly pay smuggling debts and send money back to their families.

The El Paso migrants are being sent to other cities by the government-backed network of migration-support groups. The TexasStandard.org reported on December 17:

Ruben Garcia, the executive director of Annunciation House, a network of temporary shelters in El Paso for migrants and refugees, told the Texas Standard that his group sent a bus of refugees to a faith community in Kansas City, Mo., on Monday and that he had spoken with some of the people who had crossed.

“I asked them, what were the numbers like? And, you know, I heard words like ‘indescribable,’ the lines longer than you could even see,” Garcia said. “So we’re just seeing many, many refugees that are crossing the border at this particular time. And of course, it’s creating a tremendous challenge.”

The Associated Press reported on December 15:

Mario D’Agostino, a deputy city manager [in El Paso] …. outlined a new strategy that might ferry migrants to large, nearby transportation hubs, such as Dallas, Denver and Phoenix. He said federal immigration authorities are preparing to possibly process and directly release migrants at a bridge that connects Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso.

“Two days after the city of Denver opened an emergency shelter to accommodate more than 100 migrants who arrived in the city from the country’s southern border, another 20 arrived on Thursday, city officials said,” according to a December 8 report in Denver Post.

Landlords have responded to the Biden inflow by evicting many single-income American families to make room for larger groups of bunk-sharing migrants that can pay higher rents from multiple jobs. This resulting rise in rents provides an easy guide to the growing cost of migration that is being imposed on Americans, just as rising gas prices tend to display the impact of inflation on Americans.

NBC reported on November 5:

Despite a relatively strong job market and historically low unemployment, nearly 7.8 million Americans said they were behind on their rent in October and 3 million felt they were likely to be evicted in the next two months, according to a census survey the same month. That survey found that 2.5 million people had experienced a rent increase of more than $500 over the past year.

“With inflation and the massive increases in rental prices that we’ve seen over the last few years, it’s much worse for low-income renters than it was before the pandemic when we were already in an affordable housing crisis,” said Daniel Grubbs-Donovan, a researcher at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.

NBC described the impact on one single-income, fatherless family:

Zenovia Johnson is one of those Phoenix renters who’s been struggling to stay in her home because of rising rents. She said she missed her rent payment at the start of October and received an eviction notice from her landlord just days later. She borrowed money to cover her payment, but now is unsure how she will make November’s rent with the income from her telemarketing job unable to cover her bills. Last month, her car was repossessed because she had been prioritizing her rent over her car payment.

“Everything has gone up, I just can’t keep up,” the single mother of two young children said. She added that she was not sure what she was going to do. 

Americans are also facing even more competition for housing in New York, which has long used immigrants to create a low-wage economy dominated by landlords and elites:

Other cities are losing shelter space to Biden’s migrants. In Chicago, The Book Club of Chicago reported on December 7:

By early October, [Noiram] Cardozo had landed short-term work at a car wash and in construction, he said. His top priority was to send money back to his relatives in Venezuela who were struggling to pay for food, water and gas, he said.

…

Without steady income, Cardozo can’t save up enough money to get out of the shelter, he said.

The Book Club also described the story of Maikel Jose Tineo, a migrant from Colombia, which recently elected a left-wing president:

the 21-year-old was sitting outside the Salvation Army Freedom Center in Humboldt Park, where he lives with hundreds of other young immigrants. He’d been to a doctor, received clothes and a city ID and was able to borrow a bike to visit the neighborhood’s sprawling namesake park.

…

After days of walking and biking around the city to find work, he landed a part-time job at a Wicker Park restaurant. He washes dishes for minimum wage, he said.

With the money Tineo earned, he bought a bike and started paying off debt he owes from his journey to the United States.

Many of the migrants’ shelters are funded by the federal government with taxpayer dollars.

The shelters are also backed up by corporate donors, eager for bodies and the diversity that fractures the public to the growing concentration of wealth. Together, federal officials and corporate donors have built a massive network of shelters and transport routes to quickly deliver new economic migrants to the jobs and housing needed by Americans.

Ideological progressives also welcome the inflow of poor economic migrants.

Since the 1990s, many progressives have shifted their emotional sympathy for underdogs away from a focus on blacks and blue-collar Americans. The shift comes as those groups blame their loss of jobs, income, and status on progressive policies, and so reject progressives’ preferences and increasingly vote for populist Republicans.

In turn, progressives find emotional satisfaction in helping their new wave of poor and subservient migrants who are grateful for the progressives’ support:

The same establishment-backed process is playing out in European countries, such as England, Ireland, and Wales, where pro-migration leaders welcome more foreign renters, buyers,and wage-cutting workers: