Joe Biden’s Migration Floods Rockland County, NY

President Joe Biden’s flood of poor migrants is overwhelming housing and classrooms in low income Rockland County, NY, and is even adding many migrants’ children to foster homes, say county officials.

Migrants have dropped off 20 children at local foster homes that already held roughly 45 kids, county spokeswoman Beth Celafu told Breitbart News.

Yet the newly elected GOP representative, Rep. Michael Taylor is calling for a “comprehensive” amnesty that would burden ordinary Americans — yet also help businesses — by encouraging many low-wage migrants to stay in the community.

“This is unsustainable and we need to do something about it,” Lawler told a March 2 press conference in the county, which is a short distance north of New York:

You’re not going to get there unless there is truly a comprehensive approach and [unless] both sides are willing to give here. You need to secure the border. We cannot continue to have this massive inflow of illegal immigration … There has to be a pathway to legalization. For some, it will mean citizenship. For others, it won’t, but there has to be a pathway so that they can work and that they’re not reliant necessarily on some of these nonprofits.

Lawlers’ call for a “comprehensive” deal “is outrageous,” said  Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

In D.C.,  “‘comprehensive immigration reform” has become a synonym for amnesty and increased immigration,” he said, adding, “there’s no Republican congressman who should ever utter the word “comprehensive” unironically.”

The comment “suggests a real lack of savvy on immigration,” he further outlined.

Nationwide, the resident population of roughly 15 million illegal migrants imposes a $151 billion cost onto American taxpayers, according to a March 8 report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.  Much of that taxpayer money is eventually paid to local landlords, retailers, and K-12 staff.

County Executive Ed Day described the huge civic and economic burden pushed on the poor county by Biden’s delivery of many very poor migrants into New York state

Lifeboats are a wonderful thing. They’re designed for a capacity that will keep you safe during troubled times. However, if you overload that lifeboat, the lifeboat will capsize and all will be lost. That’s the analogy I’ve been using to deal with some of the things over the past few weeks that’s been going on here in Rockland County.

The influx we have of migrants is doing a number of things. It is straining our schools, straining our food pantries [which] are running out of food. What that means is [Americans] who have been relying on those pantries … are getting shut out. That’s a fact. They’re going hungry because of the additional strain being brought upon a system.

We have a criminalization of young people [because a] very [brief] vetting process is done outside this community before they come here. Our housing stock and social services are being strained to a breaking point … We have a 35 percent increase in children under foster care.

Over 1,000 kids [were] enrolled in just one [school] district in September … and the unscrupulous landlords have taken advantage by allowing these individuals to live in [crowded and] unsafe conditions, making things even more tough for us to make sure that we have proper housing for people.

Washington DC’s immigration policy “is not helping people — it’s hurting people, the people that are coming in, and the people who are here,” said Day. He is a former cop who worked in New York and Baltimore and he has won election three times in the county as a Republican.

The drop-off of migrants children at local foster homes likely is caused by Biden’s border policy. The policy is more likely to admit economic migrants who bring one or more children — yet some welcomed migrants are too poor to support their children in the United States.

“That’s the kind of thing that happens in the third world,” said Krikorian. For centuries, poor parents have used foster homes and orphanages to take care of their children when they have more kids than money, he said. In difficult times, “the fifth and sixth kids get dropped off at orphanages,” he said.

Joan Silvestri is Rockland County’s commissioner of social services. Her job is not about setting national immigration policy but it is about alleviating poverty in the county amid the growing flood of Biden’s migrant population. She said:

What we’re asking for very simply is an alignment between our immigration policy and our policies for a safety net for folks … Our mission is to bring people to self-sufficiency, to provide a safety net temporarily, and bring them to self-sufficiency. Well, if you don’t let [migrants] work, that doesn’t work. So if you let them across the border, you have to align the [work] policies.

You also have to align the funding. We have very limited funding from the federal government for folks that are migrants. We are prohibited from using federal dollars to help support them in so many ways. So we rely on our nonprofits to do that on our behalf. We attempt to fund the [non-profots] for that, but they’re at the point where they’re stretched. They’re trying to make it work. We’re trying to make it work.

However, any flood of working migrants will force down Americans’ wages and drive up rents. That economic shock will push more Americans — especially older, unhealthy, or lazy Americans — into poverty, shared housing, and a greater reliance on welfare.

Lawler and Day did not call for the deportation of Biden’s migrant population.

Instead, Day asked for more federal taxpayer aid that will eventually flow to the migrants, retailers, landlords, and teachers.

“There have also been pantries that have run out of food,” said Day. “The fact that the additional money is running out is only going to make this problem worse because now those [American] families who had access to that extra [Emergency SNAP federal] money don’t and they’re gonna go to the pantries as well … now there are more people [migrants and Americans] and they’re running out of food.”

The county is also facing more crime.

Day continued:

Our current system forces these [migrant] people to live in the shadows and not with the American dream. And that is plain wrong. The needs we have are extensive — clothes, medical care, education, food — and this list goes on and on and on. We need help and we need it now. I can’t make that any more clear.

It is a federal government responsibility to help us and help these [migrant] families and individuals [who are] resettling in our community.

Without it, we are going to capsize. We’re going to have more hunger, more children who cannot learn, more families who are being [housed] in subpar housing and at risk. That’s what’s going to happen, that’s where we’re going. And it’s not a matter if. Let me make it very clear — this is a matter of when.

On March 6, four days after Day spoke, five Latinos — including two children — died in a house fire in Rockland Country.

Lawler pushed the same amnesty and aid themes:

This is about raising awareness to the challenges that municipalities are facing to deal with the massive influx of migrants coming into our communities … This is not about attacking immigrants. This is not about attacking migrants. This is about understanding the very real challenges that municipalities across the state of New York and across the country are facing because of the dereliction of duty of this [Biden] administration.

The issue is politically difficult for Lawler. He won the election in 2022 by less than one percent with the aid of donations from local pro-migration employers and real estate groups. He was also backed by a huge ad blitz funded by the pro-migration Congressional Leadership Fund. His district also includes a variety of communities that favor more migration.

His district is also close to New York City, whose economy relies on exploiting low wage migrants. Many of the city’s migrant workers may place their families in Rockland apartments and schools while they work low-wage jobs in the city. The same work-home split occurs in other high-migration regions, such as Houston, Texas.

The low-wage migration also imposes huge costs on the already poor Rockland County

For example, Biden’s migration is fuelling Democratic efforts to roll back suburban zoning so that more poor people can be packed into smaller housing.

Amnesty and migration also are very unpopular among his GOP voters — and among many independent swing voters. So he promised on the campaign:

Mike will fight tooth-and-nail to get our borders under control in order to halt the flow of illegal immigration. The current situation is a mockery to the rule of law and a genuine threat to national sovereignty and the health and well-being of our citizens.

One obvious option for Lawler is to zig-zag between those rival groups. For example, he might call for “comprehensive” reform but not actually vote for an amnesty, while also not voting for the reform by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) that pressures border officials to follow the law’s requirement to exclude migrants and detain asylum-seekers.

That political zig-zag is good for business groups because it lets Biden import more migrants for low-wage jobs and high-profit apartments.  But the zig-zag would do no good to Rockland County officials or Rockland country residents faced with fewer resources, lower wages, and higher rents.

“The [economic] benefits [of migration] are narrow and therefore those who benefit are very agitated and active and keeping the way it is,” said Krikorian. “The costs are spread out over a large share of the population [who] don’t have a lobby for middle-class Americans or a lobby for property taxpayers. Those are groups that are too big and diffuse to actually mobilize and influence policy,” he said.

The issue is also tough for County Executive Day.

He is not a federal legislator, so he cannot be blamed for immigration levels. Even if he calls for greater enforcement of immigration law, Washington will ignore him but local CEOs and landlords will push back against him.

So he too zig-zagged between decent sympathy for migrants and solidarity with his neighbors who are losing out, saying:

First of all, this is about people. I don’t care where these people are coming from [or] if they’re people here or people coming over the border. That is a distant issue. The issue right now here … [is] we have [government] people who have been trying to make the system work. Doing nothing is not an option.

…

Just picture one simple example. East Rampapo school district has so many [migrant] children, they can’t teach them. They don’t have the language teachers to teach them. Not only do those children suffer … they’re being welcomed into our country [and] are being sold a bill of goods because they’re not finding the American dream.

And they’re compromising the hard work that Americans  [do as they] pursue the American dream … and that’s desperately wrong.

“The point here today is to make sure people understand this is not something that’s only happening on the southern border — it’s something that’s happening here and it’s hurting people in our backyard,” Day said.

The underlying economic problem for Rockland County is Biden’s immigration policy, said Krikorian.

Real [per-person] economic advancement is going to come through technological development. But importing lots of poor people in a variety of ways is a disincentive toward technological innovation because it makes the sectors the [migrants] are working for more profitable than others.

[Biden’s migrants] are benefiting industries that aren’t knowledge-intensive or capital-intensive — they’re working at McDonalds. At the same time, the industries they’re in don’t have the incentive to become more capital-intensive and technology-intensive because they’ve got this huge cheap input of labor. So they’re better able to keep doing things the way they’ve always been doing instead of modernizing.

“A more moderate flow of people who have higher levels of education is more likely to promote the kind of [productivity-raising] economic development that our society needs for us to do better, not just get bigger,” he said.

Extraction Migration

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.