Watch DHS Alejandro Mayorkas Stare Down GOP’s Title 42 Criticism

Alejandro Mayorkas
Drew Angerer/PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

The nation’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, faces two House committees this week where he is likely to face down theatrical — but deliberately ineffective and uncoordinated — criticism from GOP legislators.

At 2:00 p.m. Wednesday, Mayorkas will face down GOP legislators on the House Committee on Homeland Security in a hearing about next year’s budget for the Department of Homeland Security.

The hearing can be viewed here.

At 10:00 a.m. Thursday, Mayorkas will testify at the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing titled, “Oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.”

The hearing can be viewed here.

If past hearings are a model for today’s hearings, Republicans will vehemently criticize Mayorkas for the apparent chaos on the border. There will be talk about Title 42, of 18,000 arrivals per day, of drugs begin carried by illegals, and even of possible terrorists sneaking across the border.

Each GOP legislator will use their short time slot to declare his or her disapproval in a TV-ready 30 seconds, then ask some ineffectual questions that Mayorkas will ignore, and then leave the hearing room instead of waiting for a second or third round of questions.

But the GOP legislators will likely stay silent about the huge pocketbook harm to ordinary Americans that is being inflicted on ordinary Americans by Mayorkas and his pro-migration deputies. 

The pocketbook impacts of illegal migrants, legal migrants, and visa workers include stalled wages for ordinary Americans, rising rents, and the shift of wealth from heartland states to the coasts.

GOP legislators will avoid those issues because any spotlight on the damage could cause swing-voting Democrats to vote for GOP immigration reformers in November.

That would be a political problem for the GOP’s leaders.

Many of the GOP’s donors oppose any reforms that would reduce the inflow of immigrant consumers, renters, and workers into the United States. They want more immigration, legal or not, because the extra immigrants boost their sales, raise real estate values, reduce wages, and spike the stock market. 

So the GOP donors pressure GOP legislators to focus only on border chaos and illegal-migrant crime.

That focus helps donors because it boosts the share of GOP base voters who will vote in November — with little chance that any Democrats might join with the GOP base to demand immigration reforms, immigration reductions, or the deportation of the roughly one million migrants Mayorkas has invited across the southern border. 

Mayorkas can be confident the GOP will not ask him difficult questions about the pocketbook issues — such as the visa workers being imported to take jobs from American college graduates or the illegal migrants getting bussed north into Americans’ jobs and apartments.

That confidence means Mayorkas has little to fear from the GOP’s theatrical criticism of his effort to extract more and more poor people from poor countries across the southern border. 

 

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