The real cruelty of Biden’s open border policy — it hurts low-income Americans By Batya Ungar-Sargon August 10, 2022 8:19pm Updated
When it comes to “open borders,” Joe Biden has gone as far as a president can go without actually abolishing them. This June alone, US Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 200,000 people at the southern border, leading Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to bus migrants to Washington, DC, and New York, liberal “sanctuary cities” whose police departments don’t cooperate with federal immigration officials.
Such progressive posturing may soon run out of steam: Faced with a looming humanitarian crisis, the Democratic mayors of both cities, Eric Adams of New York and Muriel Bowser of DC, are now begging the federal government for assistance.
Yet perhaps the most surprising element of all this chaos is the way the media have blamed the right for this crisis. “Cold-Blooded Texas Guv Vows to Dump Asylum Seekers in the Middle of D.C.,” was how The Daily Beast covered the story. “GOP Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to the East Coast,” explained The New York Times. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called Abbott’s policy “shameful” and a “political ploy.”
The migrants themselves, however, are under no illusions about who deserves credit for their arrival in the US. “Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” one migrant told reporters back in March. “He promised the Haitian community he will help them,” a Haitian migrant told Fox News. “I just need [the US] to tell me when we can cross,” a Honduran woman told Politico.
Where did millions of migrants get the idea that Biden had invited them in? From Biden himself, naturally. During the 2020 primary debates, then-candidate Biden said that migrants illegally crossing the border should not be detained, and like nearly every other candidate on the debate stage, he said he would decriminalize illegal border crossing. Millions of migrants were listening, along with the human traffickers who extort, torture, rape and kill them.
And Biden has more or less followed through as president. From day one, he stopped construction of a border wall with Mexico, ended former President Donald Trump’s travel ban restricting travel from 14 countries, and dramatically reduced deportations — from more than 267,000 in 2019 to just 59,000 in 2021. The Biden administration also vowed to end Title 42, a Trump-era restriction that allowed migrants to be turned away due to the pandemic, though a federal judge in Louisiana has for now blocked Biden’s attempts to end the policy.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that it plans to end another effective Trump-era program, Remain in Mexico, which allowed border agents to turn migrants away and have them wait in Mexico until their removal hearings.
What’s most peculiar about all this is how the administration’s de facto open-border policy represents a remarkable U-turn on the left. Until very recently, free-market Republicans were the ones pushing for things like amnesty and easy access to migrant labor, while the Democrats were on the side of limiting immigration.
Back in the ’90s, Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to Congress and Democratic chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, wrote that the commission found “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.”
“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch Brothers proposal,” socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders scoffed as recently as 2015. “What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.” Fast forward to that 2020 primary debate and Sanders, just like Biden, said he would support decriminalizing illegal border crossing.
This reversal is especially surprising given that the Democrats’ base — or what used to be their base — agrees more with Bernie 2015 than Bernie 2020. In 2019, a large majority of black and Hispanic Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood for strengthening border security to reduce illegal immigration. This shouldn’t be surprising: Illegal immigration has been tied to a 20% to 60% decrease in black working-class wages.
Another recent study suggested that immigration accounts for a third of the decline in the black employment rate over the last 40 years. “Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,” the sociologist Musa al Gharbi reported. “And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or Blacks.”
Why did the Democrats abandon these voters? Many who support mass immigration do so ostensibly because of the overall effect on GDP, which is positive.
But they tend not to ask, positive for whom? As the economist George Borjas has argued, immigration primarily boosts the incomes of the immigrants themselves, while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. In other words, among Americans, it is the elites who benefit from open borders, people whose professional-class jobs would never be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English. For the American working classes, good jobs are sacrificed on the altar of helping those from other countries.
Point this out and you can count on a member of the Squad to call you racist — a ridiculous accusation given who has paid the highest price for mass immigration.
“The history of citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history of racism,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said back in 2019. “It has been used as the legal enforcer of racism for most of US history.” When Vice President Kamala Harris told would-be migrants to stay home, Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted: “We should not abandon our values and rights to far-Right white nationalists.”
But these accusations of bigotry hide a class divide that has seen the Democrats choose educated white elites over the working class again and again. Remember that immigrants make up nearly 50% of America’s household servants, 42% of taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and 35% of grounds maintenance workers. It is these migrants’ employers, not the migrants themselves, who are the target audience for Democrats’ “anti-racist” moralizing.
Of course, many of these progressives also have compassion for migrants crossing the border in search of a better life. I do, too. It’s impossible not to feel for people seeking a better life for their children. But what about America’s own struggling workers? Why no compassion for them?
Like so much of what passes for political debate in America in 2022, the fight between Gov. Abbott and Mayors Adams and Bowser is less about values and more about interests. Big-city Democrats want to flatter the moral vanity of their elite base by rhetorically supporting illegal immigration, but only so long as border states such as Texas and Arizona are the ones who foot the bill.
Moreover, the “compassionate” approach is incentivizing truly dangerous behaviors, leading to parents drowning in the Rio Grande with their infants and to children riding La Bestia migrant train and watching as others fall off to their deaths. A third of women who make the trip across the border admit to being sexually abused, and nearly everyone is preyed upon in some way by the powerful cartels that now effectively control the border.
Trump may have gone too far with his family separation policy, but his relentless approach to the border ended up preventing a lot of suffering, both to would-be migrants and to American workers. Since the start of 2022, authorities have found 609 bodies on the border, a record high that doesn’t even include those discovered further north in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
Some of these deaths made headlines, such as the 50 migrants who perished in the back of an abandoned truck in south Texas earlier this year, or the migrant from Nicaragua who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in May, or the 22-year-old who drowned in April. But most of these tragic and totally preventable deaths go unnoticed.
This is leftist compassion curdled into cruelty. And it’s not Gov. Abbott’s fault — it’s President Biden’s.
Gov. Abbott rips Biden in op-ed on sending migrants to NYC, DC By Callie Patteson August 11, 2022 10:20am Updated
Mayor Eric Adams and his DC counterpart Muriel Bowser should wake the Biden administration up from its “willful ignorance” regarding the border crisis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday — as he continues to send busloads of illegal migrants to progressive East Coast cities.
In a new op-ed published by Fox News, the Republican governor insisted his bold plan highlights the strain President Biden’s open border policy has on border towns — and the naivety of Democrat-run liberal cities to this reality.
“If the mayors of America’s most populous city and the nation’s capital are complaining about a few thousand migrants, imagine what these small border communities with more limited resources face on the frontlines,” Abbott wrote.
“The New York City and D.C. mayors’ recent interest in this relentless crisis is a welcome departure from willful ignorance the Biden administration continues to demonstrate.”
The Texas lawmaker called on the Democrat mayors to use their newfound experience to implore President Biden to “stop dismissing this crisis.”
“As Mayors Adams and Bowser recently acknowledged, the border crisis demands immediate and decisive federal action. I ask that they call on President Biden to stop dismissing this crisis and to honor his duty of preserving America’s national security,” he wrote.
In recent weeks, both Adams and Bowser have asked the federal government for help to manage the influx of migrants into their cities.
In mid-July, the New York City mayor urged Biden to send “additional federal resources immediately” as the swarm of asylum seekers overcrowded the city’s homeless shelters.
Around the same time, Bowser issued a request to the Department of Defense for 150 DC National Guard personnel each day to ensure a “24/7 operation” in receiving the migrants.
She also requested the use of the DC Armory, or “another suitable federal location in the National Capital Region” for a temporary processing center.
The Pentagon later denied her request.
Abbott’s op-ed came just days after the Biden administration moved to phase out the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy that forced tens of thousands of people to return across the southern border to wait for their immigration proceedings.
While the administration insists the order did not deter migration, Republicans have warned that lifting the policy could lead to increased border crossings at a time when crossing are already at historic highs.
Meanwhile, Gov. Abbott launched “Operation Lone Star” to protect border communities in early 2022, as his first busload of migrants arrived in the Big Apple and DC.
Abbott revealed that the mission has led to over 290,000 migrant apprehensions and the seizure of nearly 326 million lethal doses of fentanyl as of late July.
“Regardless of the federal government’s indifference, a dangerous situation continues to intensify. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45, but President Biden allows it to continue pouring across the border from Mexico,” Abbott wrote.
“Too frequently, we’ve witnessed the horrifying consequences of human smuggling and trafficking, yet Mexican cartels and other transnational criminals are emboldened to carry on with their deadly enterprises,” he continued.
Abbott also blasted the administration’s apparent lack of assistance Thursday, criticizing Biden’s failure to travel to the border during his time in office so far.
“President Biden has never visited the border to understand the magnitude of the crisis he created. His ‘Border Czar’ Vice President Kamala Harris has similarly taken no meaningful actions to address the gravity of the situation, except one visit to the El Paso sector over a year ago,” Abbott wrote.
“U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently testified that the southern border is ‘safe and secure.’ As thousands of illegal immigrants cross the border each day, that statement is either shockingly uninformed or intentionally deceptive.”
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
