NBC Report: Biden’s Team Hesitates on Border Migration Policies

Migrants and human rights activists protest against US and Mexican migration policies at t
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Joe Biden’s deputies are hedging his bets on the high-stakes “separated families” drama being pushed hard by open borders progressives, according to a paragraph posted by NBC news.

The hesitation was hidden in a dramatic click-bait article headlined, “Lawyers can’t find the parents of 666 migrant kids, a higher number than previously reported.” The article first spotlighted the lawyer-created claim that:

Lawyers working to reunite migrant families separated by the Trump administration before and during its “zero tolerance” policy at the border now believe the number of separated children for whom they have not been able to find parents is 666, higher than they told a federal judge last month, according to an email obtained by NBC News.

But the lawyer’s unverifiable claim that lawyers cannot contact the foreign parents of 121 extra children in the United States is less newsworthy than the news about Biden’s hesitation buried at the end of the article:

President-elect Joe Biden has committed to establishing a government task force that would work to reunite all migrant families separated by Trump administration policies. But, according to two sources familiar with the incoming administration’s planning on immigration, Biden has so far not decided whether separated parents will be given the opportunity to come to the U.S. to reunite with their children.

The posting of the NBC report suggests the ACLU lawyers are using the NBC reporters to pressure Biden’s deputies to let the foreign parents join their children in the United States — and so create a new child-first legal route for migrants to get through the U.S. border and into U.S. society.

But Biden must be cautious about his border policies because he may trigger an avalanche of hopeful migrants in time for the 2022 elections, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. For example, if Biden “undoes [the Remain in Mexico policy]. 60,000 people are going to come across the border” in a very short time, he said, adding:

Are they going to let them all in at once? Do they have any conception of the political disaster their immigration policies will visit on them?  … In six months, they could face a [migration] disaster. The contrast is; ‘Trump had immigration under control and now we have this disaster!”

“This is a political time-bomb for them — they can’t be stupid about it,” he told Breitbart News.

The issue will be painful for Biden — if he is inaugurated — because he used the media-magnified claims of “kids in cages” and “separated families” as an emotional prod in the 2020 election campaign. The prod was used to motivate Democrat-leaning women — and Latino women — to gamble on Joe Biden’s mixture of radical social policies and Barack Obama’s economic status quo.

The “separated families” claim was hyped at the end of the campaign amid the ACLU’s suggestions that it could not get in contact with the parents of 545 migrant children following their mothers’ or fathers’ repatriation.

The story was “wholly inaccurate,” said a tweet from Chase Jennings, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. “Out of the parents of 485 children whom Plaintiffs’ counsel has been able to contact, they’ve yet to identify a single family that wants their child reunited with them in their country of origin.”

Since 2011, many Latin American migrants have exploited a 2008 law to transport their children into the United States.

Under the law, children found at the border are placed with close relatives or friends — including illegals — in the United States, so ensuring the foreign children can grow up in safe neighborhoods and also go to American K-12 schools.

Many Latin American parents have hired coyotes to escort their children and teens to the United States’ border in the justified expectation that the agencies will reunite them with their illegal-immigrant parents in U.S. cities or let the children live with other relatives.in the United States.

From 2014 to April 2020, federal agencies relayed  245,245 foreign children — including many teenagers and young men who claimed to be younger than 19 — to friendly homes in the United States. Those homes were often set up the migrant parents who used asylum claims to stream past border agents and then into U.S. blue-collar workplaces and neighborhoods from 2012 to 2020.

This out-of-control chain migration played a huge role in getting Donald Trump into the 2016 race and into the White House. It also helped to wreck Obama’s ratings and kill the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill.

The chain-migration strategy was spotlighted by a November 2 article in the Washington Post, which interviewed a Honduran woman who regretfully is leaving her child in the United States with relatives in Houston:

In November 2018, after seven months in [U.S.] detention, Noyemi was deported back to her native Honduras. By then, [her child] Jarvin had been sent to live with his great-aunt in Houston.

[…]

So now she’s here, in a quiet subdivision at the edge of this [Mexican] industrial city, cleaning houses and babysitting other people’s children during the day, waiting for her 7 o’clock phone call.

“Mommy, I hear you,” Jarvin squealed Saturday night.

“Look how handsome you are,” Noyemi said.

“How was school today?” she asked. “Did you behave yourself?”

“Look at these words I learned,” he said, and flashed the phone’s camera to hand-scrawled letters: The Spanish for “computer” and butterfly.”

The Washington Post noted the woman has tried to sneak into the United States, and also suggested she does not want the child to be sent back to her in Mexico:

No one told her she could choose for her son to be deported back to Honduras, she said (though that option was hardly ideal).

[…]

Some deported parents were given the option of having their children returned to their countries of origin, but many declined … Others, such as Noyemi, were not told of that option. The ACLU said it was heartened by Biden’s pledge to reunify families in the United States.

In 2020, Trump’s deputies finally blocked most of this semi-legal chain migration and returned roughly 9,000 younger migrants to guardians in their home countries.

Biden’s 2020 plan would reverse many of trump’s pro-American migration policies. He promised to “reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees,” to wipe out Trump’s asylum reforms, bar any deportations for 100 days, and end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony.

Biden also promised to let companies import more visa workers, let mayors import temporary workers, and allow an unlimited flow of foreign graduates through U.S. universities into white-collar jobs. He would “exempt from any cap [the] recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields.”

Biden also wants to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants and dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.

Overall, open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrivals help transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and get many progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.