Pro-migration advocates are blaming Americans’ opposition to mass migration for the death of 40 migrants in a Mexico jail.
Yet, the disaster was so gruesome and obvious that even establishment voices are blaming President Joe Biden’s border invite to migrants for the deaths. “Something like that, regrettably, is bound to happen,” when many migrants are invited to the border, said Jeh Johnson, the border chief under President Barack Obama who also says Biden’s policies have created a border crisis.
The deaths are really caused by policies that exclude migrants, not by policies that invite more migrants to the border, says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the zealously pro-migration policy director at the business-backed American Immigration Council.
Policies that curb migrants “fuel corruption in Mexico,” he tweeted. “It’s just the latest evidence of the ways in which US deterrence policies, which increasingly rely on Mexico to stop migrants from ever getting to US…are actively fueling corruption and crime,” he said in an April 6 tweet.
“These preventable deaths are, in large part, the result of US immigration and border policies,” said Vicki Gaubeca, an activist at Human Rights Watch, adding:
[T]he government could invest in rights-respecting, welcoming reception centers at US ports of entry. These could be staffed by social workers, asylum and other visa-granting officers, trauma specialists, child welfare specialists, and more.
“How many more migrants have to die for the U.S. to fix its immigration system?” said the headline of an article in AmericaMagazine.org, adding:
[B]ad migration policy and practices in Mexico derive from escalating pressure from U.S. officials desperate to tamp down the numbers seeking to cross the border.
Under Biden’s invite, migrant deaths have spiked along the U.S. border, at sea, in Mexico, and in the jungle of Central America.
On April 6, Vice.com exposed the Mexican corruption that helped to ignite the jail and cause the 40 deaths:
“If you happened to be arrested and held at this jail, there were only two ways out. Either you transferred $200 or you got sent back to your country,” Joan, a Venezuelan migrant who said he paid to get out of the detention center, told VICE World News. He asked to withhold his last name for fear of retaliation.
Joan, 28, was locked up in the center for four hours on the same day of the fire, he said. He escaped death because his family in Venezuela transferred the money before 7 p.m. That’s the deadline he said the guards gave him to deposit the money or be deported the next day.
“I’m only alive because my family paid,” he told Vice.com.
“This has been happening for a long time and not only here, but on our whole journey since we entered Mexico,” Venezuelan migrant Martin Flores told Vice.com. From Mexico’s southern to northern borders, “every immigration center or checkpoint is robbing us, extorting us,” he said.
“The Biden administration is partly responsible for this disaster by continuing to lead more people to the United States with their anti-detention policies and generally loose enforcement, so Mexico ends up with many, many more illegal aliens than would be the case if the United States were working with Mexico to reduce the [migrant] flow,” Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News.
Biden’s policy, he added, is:
[T]he worst of both worlds. Because it’s a pursued the Cato Institute/George W. Bush policy of just opening the borders and letting people come in without any limit or wait, then you’d have less of this [Msqualor in Mexico]… Or if they pursued the Trump policy of actually enforcing the law, you would have less of this because people would understand that coming here wasn’t going to work … This is a cruel policy because it raises people’s expectations but only fulfills them in a fickle and unpredictable way.
“It is like [the movie] Hunger Games — it’s not exactly the same as Social Darwinism, but it’s more like survival of the fittest in immigration,” Krikorian said.
Progressives don’t like the chaos and deaths, said Krikorian, “but they’ll support it because for them the overriding goal is admitting more people into the United States, even if it’s done in this fickle and cruel way.”
Donor-funded GOP politicians have done little to shame Democratic legislators or voters for the huge death toll at U.S. borders.
Some establishment officials and reporters are cautiously admitting that the deaths were caused by a combination of Mexican corruption and Biden’s pro-migration policies.
Congress set legal immigration numbers in 1990 at about 1 million per year, but Biden’s deputies are admitting millions of additional poor southern migrants by claiming that the migrants are allowed to apply for asylum and should also get jobs to support themselves until their asylum claims are heard.
The high-migration policy is unpopular because it shifts wealth from ordinary Americans to investors. Biden’s deputies reduce the political risk by quietly ushering the migrants through various side doors at the border. That side-door process helps to keep the migrant inflow from being publicized in the evening TG news shows but has created a traffic jam of poor migrants on the southern side of the border.
“The conditions on Mexico’s northern border with us [are] terrible, when you have this kind of backlog of people waiting to get into the United States and the facilities there are not ideal,” former border chief Jeh Johnson told a NewsNation interviewer on April 5. “What happened at that migrant center was a real, real tragedy. But something like that, regrettably, is bound to happen,” said Johnson, who was border chief under President Barack Obama.
Many migrants are “exploiting [Biden’s policy] by coming up and making the [asylum] claim, and that gets them at least three, four, five years in the United States,” said John Sandweg, who served as acting top immigration official for Obama. “Obviously, once people realize that, more are going to come and the problem becomes worse,” he said.
“Lots of people have gathered in border towns with the idea that in a month or so, it’ll be much easier to cross the border” when the Title 42 barrier is lifted, said Simon Romero, a reporter for the New York Times.
You see entire families at intersections there. They’re often with infants. They’re often begging for money. You see migrants selling anything they can from sunglasses to flowers. They’re cleaning the windshields of cars that are stuck in traffic. You’re seeing shelters way beyond their capacity, families sleeping in abandoned construction sites, literally sleeping on the streets and the numbers are just growing. They continue to amass in Juarez. And it’s really just increasing pressure on the city in ways that are kind of unprecedented.
“It’s likely you’re only going to see this pressure continuing to build in border cities like what is and what many people fear is that tragedies like this fire are probably not the last that we’re going to see,” Romero said on April 7.
Even Biden’s deputies admit they know their migration policies are deadly.
President Joe Biden’s border chief, for example, argues that he is opening up agency pathways to protect migrants on their migration route to U.S. jobs and homes. In a Senate hearing in late March, he declared:
We need to build … pathways so people do not place their lives in the hands of smugglers. We have to cut the smuggling organizations out and we have to reduce irregular migration and build lawful pathways.
In March, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said:
What we did [in January] was we executed on an effort to build lawful, safe, and orderly pathways for individuals to come to the United States, to incentivize them to use those pathways. Frankly, [to] liberate them from the clutches of the smuggling organizations that wreak so much death and tragedy.
Mayorkas’ pathways — dubbed “parole” and “catch-and-release” — are illegal, according to judges.
The Associated Press tried to blame President Donald Trump, even though his policies sharply reduced the number of migrants in Mexico.
“Deadly fire highlights immigration pressures on Mexico,” said an Associated Press headline on a March 29 article that pointed the finger at the White House:
The Trump and Biden administrations have relied increasingly and heavily on Mexico to curb a flow of migrants that has made the United States the world’s most popular destination for asylum-seekers since 2017, according to U.N. figures.
Guatemalans were the largest group among those killed or injured in Monday’s blaze, according to Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office. Others were from Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador.
“Lumping the two administrations together is tendentious and incorrect,” responded Krikorian. “Under Trump, the United States and Mexico … were pursuing the same kind of objectives at the border, and they succeeded in reducing the flow.”
“The problem today is that the Biden administration is … expecting Mexico to do its border enforcement for it,” he added.
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. “Sixty-two percent of adult U.S. consumers live paycheck to paycheck as of February 2023,” said a March 27 report by LendingClub Corp.
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.
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