Immigration and the State of the Union

"The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is recommending a new strategy to endangered members and their teams...Democrats should deny support for 'open borders or amnesty,' and talk about their efforts to keep the border safe." - Politico, February 15, 2022.

"If we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure our border and fix the immigration system. We can do both." - President Biden, State of the Union, March 1, 2022.

Meanwhile at the border...

In the worst January since 2000, border apprehensions doubled over the previous year. The booming human smuggling business brazenly uses social media to recruit juvenile drivers.

Border Patrol morale is low.

Deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement dropped 70 percent from 2020 to 2021, down to the lowest level in five years, even as the Biden administration granted work permits to half-a-million illegal aliens through one program alone.

Michael Lind considers the "massive corruption and refusal to enforce numerous laws involved with worker smuggling at every level of American society":

"Having paid thousands in some cases to Mexican cartels, and then having been ferried across the United States at taxpayer expense, many illegal immigrants are then allowed by the Biden administration to simply vanish....

"....the chances that illegal immigrants will ever be apprehended or deported, as the law requires, are virtually nil, especially now that the administration has announced it will limit deportation cases to potential national security threats and those who commit major crimes. (Welcome to America, minor criminals of the world!)

"Illegal immigrants in the United States are often able to obtain individual taxpayer identification numbers (ITINs), or in some cases invented, borrowed, purchased, or stolen Social Security numbers, permitting them to work fraudulently in violation of federal, state, and local labor laws."

No surprise, then, that Biden's line about securing the border in his State of the Union address has been dubbed "a great moment in political dishonesty." Byron York writes:

"Here he is, president of the United States, sending a message to millions of would-be illegal border-crossers that if they cross into the U.S., they will be allowed to stay. And then he stands before Congress and the entire nation and says, with a straight face, 'we need to secure our border.'"

Mark Krikorian says a close read of Biden's speech reveals a plan for an "unprecedented expansion of asylum":

"...when the president said, 'We're putting in place dedicated immigration judges so families fleeing persecution and violence can have their cases heard faster,' he was trying to sneak in an unprecedented expansion of asylum. Fleeing persecution can be grounds for asylum, but fleeing violence is not, especially after crossing through multiple countries that offer asylum. This reflects a regulation the administration has prepared to so dramatically (and unlawfully) expand asylum as to render the border meaningless."

Sign of the times

USCIS, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that oversees visas and permanent work permits, changed its mission statement, raising questions about who the agency works for.

Wage depression is a feature of mass immigration, not a bug...

"If you have more people that are allowed to work in this country, then there's gonna be less of a tight labor market." - Rep. Jimmy Gomez, praising the Build Back Better amnesty, December 3, 2021.

"One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make Americans poorer. I have a better plan to fight inflation. Lower your costs, not your wages." - President Biden, State of the Union, March 1, 2022.

"That's why immigration reform is supported by everyone from labor unions to religious leaders to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce." - also President Biden, State of the Union, March 1, 2022.

"The borscht belt theory of immigration goes like this: 'Immigrants do not suppress wages - and without more immigrants, wages will go up and everything will be more expensive!'" - Michael Lind

Biden didn't mention his "Build Back Better" bill by name during his SOTU address, but he dedicated a significant portion of his speech to rebranding the bill that includes the largest amnesty in history as well as significant increases in new foreign workers.

"My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit," Biden said. "I call it building a better America."

With all due respect to Byron York, that line about fighting inflation without driving down wages was the "great moment of political dishonesty" in my book, particularly with his congressional allies publicly praising how Biden's bill would do precisely that.

Cast down your buckets where you are

"Revise our laws so businesses have the workers they need and families don't wait decades to reunite. It's not only the right thing to do--it's the economically smart thing to do." - President Biden, State of the Union, March 1, 2022

It would be easy to dismiss these lines as cliche political bromides if they weren't so tragically insulting. Consider:

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But Biden believes it is the "right thing" and the "smart thing" to expand the corporate pipeline to foreign workers? Come on, man!

"This idea that somehow or another Black Americans have to sacrifice jobs and wages to help other people of 'color' is just wrong," says Roy Beck. Yet even politicians "who claim they are champions of African Americans" will turn "a blind eye on the effects of mass immigration on Black Americans."

Pamela Denise Long elucidates:

Support for illegal aliens and rampant legal immigration (visa recipients, etc.) undermines the very people for whom the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments and 1960's civil rights legislation were fought, won, and were en route to being fully implemented -- before immigration flooded the nation after 1965. On the cusp of civil rights laws that would have transformed hiring for descendants of slaves and virtually ensured economic stability, American politicians opened the door for non-descendant employees to become an alternate labor source."

Click the image below to listen to a galling example from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The political consultants advised against promoting open borders, but again, President Biden couldn't help himself. Once again, Krikorian parses the speech:

"The president also called on Congress to "revise our laws so businesses have the workers they need" -- this at a time when the share of working-age Americans who are actually working is at a historic low. Often called a market-based approach to legal immigration, this simply means unlimited immigration. That's also what Biden's phrase "and families don't wait decades to reunite" means -- the reason for the waiting lists is that there are numerical limits for certain categories of immigrants. No limits, no waiting!"

Dave Gorak observes that most mainstream media coverage of mass immigration's impact on workers is a performative act of supply-and-demand denialism:

"Nowhere in what today passes for "coverage" of the immigration tsunami scrutinizes how foreign workers willing to work for less harm vulnerable American workers, i.e. those with only basic education and few skills, who are forced to compete harder for depressed wages."

But every so often, the mask slips. Here is NBC being quite open about mass immigration's impact on the labor market:

The corporate lobbies demanding more immigration spikes are not "deeply devoted to humanitarian causes," as Lind put it, but cheer on immigration surges "because lower wages mean more money in their pockets."

The Realignment

Only one out of four Americans think increasing immigration to reduce inflation is a good idea, including only 22% of Americans who make less than $50,000 a year (37% of Americans who make more than $100,000 a year like the idea).

The GOP is picking up Hispanic voters in Texas, especially women, partly due to the chaotic border.

A Wall Street Journal poll found that "Roughly half of Hispanics who voted in the 2020 presidential election said they supported spending more on the border, limiting asylum and reducing immigration, and 42% said they backed more deportations."

The poll also found that "Hispanic voters are showing signs of dividing support between Democrats and Republicans more evenly than in recent elections."

The New York Times is really trying to figure out why Hispanic voters are in play in Texas, and why pro-enforcement Hispanics "do not see their views on immigration as hypocritical or anti-Hispanic."

Mickey Kaus nominates the "Coalition of the Ascendant" as the worst idea of the decade, in part because it encourages bad ideas like open borders that exacerbate inequality and division.

None of the above means Republicans will ride immigration to victory. As Ryan Girdusky reports, 17 Senate Republicans are currently lobbying President Biden to expand guest worker programs even as polls show "more Republicans want to reduce legal immigration than ever."

Girdusky faults the GOP for sleeping on "nationwide e-verify, tripling the number of ICE officers, defunding sanctuary cities, increasing penalties for visa overstays, ending birthright citizenship, cracking down on H1-b visa abuses, and pausing the number of green cards offered to foreigners in industries where a large portion of Americans are out of work."

Ponzi schemes

"Should we magically manage to employ all existing residents and then all those extra babies and extra immigrants many politicians tell us we should have, what happens when they, too, reach retirement age? We then have the same problem we were trying to solve, except now it is even bigger. This is how Ponzi schemes work. And they always crash." - Gaia Baracetti writing about Italy, but also about America

"Some even argue that the United States can take a half billion people inside our borders. But at what costs to the environment. At what risk of disloyalty to American interests, risk of importing the problem of anti-Black racism, and weakening of civic power for multigenerational Americans?" - Pamela Denise Long

We can be grateful that Biden didn't deploy the Ponzi-scheme rhetoric of the Washington Post in his State of the Union address. Gary Wockner writes:

"A February 7, 2022, editorial in the Washington Post titled, "The U.S. Needs More Immigrants And More Babies" lays bare the pro-growth bias of the newspaper while ignoring science and scientists, all negative environmental impacts caused by population growth, or the positive environmental impacts of stabilizing or decreasing the U.S. population."

Unfortunately, the president continued to promote the preferred immigration policies of the Post's editorial board.

Immigration expansionists want us to be terrified of a future without mass immigration. But guess what? The math doesn't add up.

"Although immigration can certainly increase a country's population," Dr. Steven A. Camarota writes, "it is well established that it has only a small impact on the share of the population that is working-age."

Gorak asks: "...immigration now accounts for nearly 90 percent of our population growth that is projected to push our numbers past 400 million by 2060....If today's problems, e.g. traffic congestion, urban sprawl, affordable housing, education and health care seem insurmountable with 332 million people, what will they be like in only 38 years?"

John Kline looks at the Republican Party's past concern about immigration-driven population growth, and maps out a plan for the future:

"Should the House turn red this year, congressmen Gosar and Westerman might also consider re-introducing a bill more clearly outlining DHS's immigration agencies environmental reporting under NEPA. Such a bill was actually introduced by former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) in 2004."

Karen Shragg says when it comes to saving wildlife, we can make the greatest difference within our own national borders.

Gorak gets the final word:

"Another Earth Day is approaching, and the words of its founder, Gaylord Nelson, are more auspicious than ever: 'In this country, it's phony to say, 'I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration.' It's just a fact that we can't take all the people who want to come here.'"

Spread the word,