Texas Governor Greg Abbott Declares Migration Disaster

Travelers, left, waiting in line to cross a customs area into the United States at the McA
AP Photo/Julio Cortez
Neil Munro

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has issued a disaster declaration amid the growing flood of poor economic migrants invited to the United States by President Joe Biden.

“President Biden’s open-border policies have paved the way for dangerous gangs and cartels, human traffickers, and deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour into our communities,” said the June 1 statement from Abbott’s office. The statement continued:

By declaring a state of disaster in these counties, Texas will have more resources and strategies at our disposal to protect landowners and enforce all federal and state laws to combat criminal activities stemming from the border crisis.

Breitbart News has reported on the growing migration — and the resulting rise in crime. “We have had these human smugglers go through our town going 80 miles an hour in a 35-mile speed zone,” Pinky Gonzales, sheriff of Refugio County, Texas, said April 28. “They have no regard for property or human lives … We have just been overwhelmed with these cases,” he said.

The declaration allows Texas officials to impose tougher penalties on law-breaking migrants and ask the federal government for money to cover their economic costs.

 Biden’s deputies responded to Abbott’s declaration by suggesting he will endanger migrant children.

The “top priority is the health and safety of the children in our care,” said the tweeted response by the spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The reaction was made possible because Abbott’s declaration orders officials to shut down licensing approvals for the federal government’s Texas-based welcome centers for child and youth migrants.

The HHS spokeswoman, Sarah Loveheim, continued, “We are assessing the Texas directive concerning licensed facilities providing care to unaccompanied children and do not intend to close any facilities as a result of the order.”

Administration officials routinely spotlight migrant children to shift attention away from the economic damage of migration, said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“It’s another example of [Biden’s agencies] propping up children as the convenient deflection pawn in the longer game, which is unlimited immigration to lower the wages of Americans,” he said.

Numerous polls show that swing voters are deeply concerned about the economic threat posed by the business-backed mass-migration strategy. However, GOP leaders prefer to ignore the economic harm and instead push base-mobilization messages about border chaos and crime.

Abbott faces a 2022 reelection campaign in Texas.

The administration’s migration strategy is being implemented by Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He is admitting many job-seeking migrants via the legal side doors that were created for small numbers of asylum seekers, parole recipients, victimized children, refugees, crime victims, or visa workers.

Mayorkas and his allies are trying to suppress the public’s growing concern by portraying their wage-cutting, rent-raising economic migration as just a heartwarming reunification of divided children and parents.

So Biden’s aides portray Abbot’s disaster declaration as an attack on children, not as a defense of Americans from the migrati0n.

Abbott’s five-page declaration directed state agencies to withdraw operating licenses for the government’s welcome centers. The centers are used to provide legal paperwork to the migrant youths and children before they are handed over to their parents or flown to jobs throughout the United States. Without Texas licenses, the Biden administration would have to send the children and youths to sites in other states.

The administration’s focus on children also encourages allies in the establishment media to ignore the much larger inflow of adults and their children, said Law. Those migrants are being allowed to compete for U.S. jobs and housing, despite the obvious economic harm that competition does to lower-income Americans.

In April, that job-seeking inflow included roughly 40,000 migrants who sneaked across the border, plus many many of the tens of thousands of migrants who are admitted through the border, despite the Title 42 healthcare barrier against the coronavirus.

Moreover, most of the “unaccompanied children” are job-seeking young men.

The youths and children are escorted to the U.S. border by coyotes under contracts with their illegal migrant parents working in U.S. jobs. Once the coyotes pay a “piso” toll to the cartels at the border, they hand the children to Biden’s agents, who then complete the contracts by flying the youths and children to their parents and job markets.

The administration and the media ignore labor migration because they despise blue-collar working Americans, said Law. He continued:

The plight of lower-skilled workers is just irrelevant [to them] — it’s boring, it’s just not worth covering. And so that’s why they go to the shiny object — The children! — and which allows them to be sympathetic, to feel compassion for the [children].

Establishment media outlets hope the economic damage remains hidden, he said.  “By not covering the harm that mass migration has on Americans’ wages and job opportunities, they try to snuff out its existence,  as if immigration cannot harm American workers if they don’t write about it,” he said.

State GOP leaders, including Abbott, should use state laws to protect working Americans from Mayorkas’ flood of cheap migrant labor, he added:

They can’t fix all of the mess caused by the Biden administration policies, but there are certain things that they can do, such as [establish] mandatory E-Verify, enforce the laws against employers for hiring legal areas, and strip business licenses or favorable tax status from the companies that exploit the alien workers to the detriment of fair wages and opportunities for Americans.

…

It is incumbent on state officials to sue the unlawful side doors that the Biden administration is creating [in immigration law]. Failure to do so will give it implicit legitimacy and you’ll never be able to get that genie back into the bottle and it will render the immigration laws meaningless by allowing the permament creation of a side door immigration policy.

Texas officials have filed multiple lawsuits against Biden’s migration policies, including lawsuits against Mayorkas’s policy of not deporting migrants and against Biden’s policy of continuing the 2012 giveaway of work permits to at least 600,000 illegal migrants under the so-called DACA program.

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

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

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