Biden’s UN Chief Promises to Send More Poor Migrants to the Midwest

President Joe Biden’s “senior advisor on migration” has taken over the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) agency and is promising to help extract more poor migrants from their home countries for transport to cities and towns in the United States.

“Our goal at IOM is to enable the choice to migrate,” IOM chief Amy Pope told radio host Steve Inskeep at National Public Radio. The migrants are needed to replace missing populations in Midwest states where populations are falling, she said:

We know as Americans, that migration has actually led to tremendous benefits in our own country. We know even recent evidence shows that migration has revitalized communities that have been dying. In fact … I was born in Cleveland, grew up part of my life in Akron, then in Pittsburgh. All of those cities have benefited from migration.

“Migration is not the answer to the [economic and civic] problems that are plaguing these cities and the people in these cities,” responded Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The [problems facing these cities and towns] have much more to do with the [development and economic] policies being enacted at the local level .”

The elites’ policy of transplanting poor people from foreign countries harms American families. It harms families by cutting wages, spiking rents, distracting K-12 schools from the needs of American kids, and diverting voters’ attention from the economic policies that favor coastal elites.

The IOM is a Switzerland-based branch of the multinational United Nations organization and uses U.S. taxpayer dollars to extract, feed, and transport many migrants from their poor countries up to the U.S. border. The traffic is overseen by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.

Pope took over after U.S. officials pressured other nations to let her replace the Portuguese chief, Director General António Vitorino.

Pope’s victory was applauded by Inskeep, who visited the migrant population throughout the Midwest cities in 2022, He concluded that the extracted migrants can replace missing Americans:

Her words reminded me of reporting I did in 2022 in Akron, Ohio, which like many industrial cities has lost population. Akron openly welcomes refugees and other immigrants to make up the difference. In one case, a community center built by past Italian immigrants has become a wedding hall for people from South Asia.

That establishment-managed goal of “revitalization” and replacement via extraction migration survives and expands because it delivers many lower-wage workers, government-funded consumers, and renters to local businesses.

Extraction migration also provides many new clients to government-funded VOLAG agencies and elite-backed nonprofits that collect and deliver many migrants to U.S. towns, And it provides jobs to the state and local government welfare agencies who help the migrants pay their rents and buy groceries.

The business-backed International Institute of Akron boasts “Currently resettling in Akron are refugees from countries including Bhutan, Burma, Nepal, Myanmar, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Vietnam, Syria, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and [the] Democratic Republic of Congo.”

But the extraction migration policy really worsens the problems it promises to fix — by impoverishing American towns and starving American families of the income that they need to have more children.

Those costs of extraction immigration are displayed in Akron, where the influx of hardworking but unproductive and poor migrants has helped to keep wage gains below inflation and has pushed up housing costs for American families — forcing the local government to make taxpayers pay the bill. The Akron Beacon Journal newspaper reported in February 2023:

The city of Akron is pursuing $5.3 million in federal money to provide rental assistance and free legal counsel for struggling renters and to increase affordable housing options.

The proposed programs are in response to deepening concerns that too many residents are drowning in Akron’s rising rental market, which has recorded one of the highest eviction rates in the country. One City Council member likened the efforts to “leveling the playing field.” A top city official said right to counsel alone, as it has in other cities, could reduce eviction filing that reached record levels at the end of 2022.

A real-estate firm, Redfin, reported the rising home prices that are a problem for families and young people in the city:

In April 2023, Akron home prices were up 6.4% compared to last year, selling for a median price of $125K. On average, homes in Akron sell after 21 days on the market compared to 13 days last year. There were 262 homes sold in April this year, down from 297 last year.

Migrants “drive up housing prices and fill vacant housing — and it’s paid for by taxpayers” via federal aid programs, said Vaughan.

Pope’s promises of economic benefits for Americans are self-serving cover for pro-migration goals, Vaughan said. She is “using her [IOM] position to champion a particular ideology about migration and globalism, also, apparently to try to shame the United States into accepting more migrants.”

She continued:

The refugee industry is always looking for low cost-of-living areas because they want to dump refugees there …. This is the same story that has been repeated all over the country. What ends up happening is the [government-funded migration] contractors dump the refugees there and expect the local citizens to pick up the pieces. They’re long gone by the time the locals figure out the economic burden of resettling refugees in this way [because] they’re not concerned about downstream costs to the communities.

The inflow of migrants also distracts schools from the critical task of teaching local Americans, and nudges down wages, especially for low-income Americans who face more competition for jobs and housing in North Hill, a poor district in Akron. A 2019 story by the Akron Beacon Journal reported:

Akron’s black households earned 59 cents in 2018 for every $1 made by white households, down a dime from last year and a far cry from the 75 cents the city’s black households took home for every $1 earned by a white family in 2006 as the region began shedding jobs.

That economic competition for decent wages also generates diverse civic conflict in Akron that distracts people from the federal economic policies that pump migrants into their neighborhoods.

“I think there’s a big resentment in the black community that has never gone away,” resident James Wright told CleveScene.com in 2019. The article continued:

Liddel Brown, a 1988 graduate of North High School who still lives in the neighborhood, owns a lawn mowing and snow removal business called God’s Lawn and Garden. His business employs local teenagers to help them develop work experience and teach them how to manage money.

Brown feels that there’s a disparity between the resources North Hill’s refugees and immigrants have received and those available to the neighborhood’s longtime black residents.

“I look at it as a disadvantage to give one group of people financial support and kind of, like, leave the other one in the past. It’s almost like you’re trying to create tension without helping both parties,” Brown says. “It’s just like you’re slapping us in the face along with what you’ve already done to us in the past.”

The economic damage of migration also devitalizes many cities and towns by reducing the number and political clout of middle-class American families.

“Researchers found that by the time women born in the late 1980s were in their early 30s, they had given birth, on average, to about one child less than they planned,” the Wall Street Journal reported on May 26, adding:

These findings reflect a growing consensus among demographers that for many Americans, economic and social obstacles have become intractable deterrents to having children. Young adults can’t afford to buy a house as nice as the one their parents raised them in or to pay for childcare while they are still repaying student loans. Many men lack the earning power to be providers, because blue-collar jobs don’t pay as well and fewer men are employed. More women can’t find a suitable partner because, with their own greater education and economic status, it’s harder for them to find a man who measures up.

Leticia Quiles, a 36-year-old unemployed administrative assistant who lives in West Haven, Conn., said that she and her husband, an ATM coordinator, talked about having two children before they got married a decade ago. “We had definitely planned on having children at some point, but because of the economy and the time that you need to put aside for children, it’s not something we can do,” she said. “We can barely take care of ourselves let alone take care of a child.” Instead, Quiles helps to care for her nieces and nephews, babysitting them and taking them for outings like wall climbing. “I get my fill,” she said.

Top Democrats recognize the economic problems facing young families. But their goal of importing more poor migrants has replaced their prior goal of prosperous American families. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to,” Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told a press conference in November 2022, adding:

The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers and all of them — because our ultimate goal [emphasis added] is to help the Dreamers [illegals who were brought in by their parents] get a path to citizenship for all 11 million — or however many undocumented there are here [emphasis added].

This policy of poverty immigration has been adopted in many sidelined towns, such as Buffalo, N.Y., and in prairie towns where migrants are used for cheap labor at investor-owned meatpacking plants. WGRZ.com in upstate New York reported a typical claim on May 22:

The federal migration policy also imports millions of hard-working, compliant, and grateful migrants into the nation’s major cities, including New York and Los Angeles. This imported population tends to drive down wages, push up housing costs, and pressure many local middle-class people to flee those states. This pressured replacement of middle-class Americans leaves local elites with a tight grip on power in those coastal cities and states.

This extraction migration policy is being pushed and funded by national lobbying groups, including groups that hope to resell distressed homes at a profit to new migrants.

But the wage-cutting, rent-spiking policy of poverty migration has been rejected by residents of many towns, such as Johnstown in nearby Pennsylvania — and by many voters in polls.

This public opposition is waved aside by establishment allies as the migration transfers Americans’ wealth and power to older business and political elites in Washington and Wall Street. For example, Inskeep wrote on behalf of his peers:

It’s true enough that immigration brings costs, such as finding shelter for asylum seekers or making space in public schools. Illegal immigration in particular brings disruptions and hardships, including for migrants themselves. It’s also true that migrants bring skill and drive, take jobs that would otherwise be hard to fill, acquire citizenship and become part of the national fabric. As this Senate report finds, immigration expands the labor force and brings economic benefits. The “nation of immigrants” is the richest and most powerful country in history.

Pro-migration elites “can go along with their fantasies that these refugees are helping locally without really the dealing with outcome of their activities,” noted Vaughan, adding:

Traditionally in our history, the migrants have settled where there are jobs. That’s what happened 100 years ago but now the refugee industry is bringing migrants into depressed areas and just expecting that things are going to fix themselves.

“Migration is a sad substitute for good policies,” she 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. 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 the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.

Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. 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.