Democratic Senators OK Removal of Migration Barrier

Migrants part of the Remain in Mexico policy wait at the entrance to the Paso del Norte In
PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

All Democrat Senators voted against an amendment to preserve the Remain in Mexico barrier to migrants — including five Democrat Senators who face tough races in 2022.

The five Senators cast their unpopular votes in a February 4, multi-amendment “vote-a-rama” debate. The rare debate was required by the multi-stage process to create a far-reaching “reconciliation” bill that can be voted through the Senate with a bare majority.

President Joe Biden and his progressive deputies are canceling the Remain in Mexico Program, which is also titled the Migrant Protection Protocols. The program was created by President Trump to exclude economic migrants from the U.S. labor market while they wait for asylum judges to hear their claims. The program was a complete success, and it slashed migrant arrivals from roughly 144,000 in May 2019 to 45,000 in October 2020.

The program works because it breaks the coyotes’ conveyer belt by preventing migrants from repaying their smuggling debts with wages earned at U.S. jobs.

Pro-migration groups hate the program and claim that it exposes migrants to dangers in Mexico while they wait for asylum hearings. But the program also reduces overall harm because it sharply reduces the number of migrants who are enticed to enter the obstacle course migration system for blue-collar migrants — a chaotic Hunger Games trail of loans, coyotes, cartels, rape, deserts, weather, border laws, barriers, rescuers, transport, judges, and cheap-labor employers.

Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) proposed the amendment to the program, saying:

If we end the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, it will lead to a run on our border and complicate efforts to reform the immigration system. Over 50,000 asylum seekers have been waiting in Mexico rather than in the United States, where they often disappear while waiting in the 1 million-person asylum case backlog. This was an important change that the Trump administration put in place, and it is a serious mistake to reverse it.

Graham’s job-protecting measure was rejected by all Democratic Senators, including all of the Democratic Senators who face the voters in November 2022. They included five Senatore who narrowly won their elections:

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), who won his seat in 2020 with just 51.2 percent of the vote.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who won his 2016 rate with just 50 percent of the vote

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who won his January 2021 race with 51 percent of the vote.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who won her race with 47 percent of the vote.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), who won her race with 48 percent of the vote.

The five were joined by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Il), who comfortably won her Illinois race with 54.9 percent of the vote in 2016.

Immigration votes have been a problem for Democratic Senators. For example, the Democrats lost five seats in the Senate in 2014 after they voted for the “Gang of Eight” cheap labor and amnesty bill.

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and immigration in theory.

Decades of data and experiences have persuaded the vast majority of Americans — and many elite economists, lobbyists, and legislators — that migration moves money out of employees’ pockets and into the stock market wealth of investors and their progressive supporters.

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.

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