White House Whips Media with ‘Cruel GOP’ Narrative on Migrants

Gouging - President Joe Biden speaks at a Democratic National Committee event at the Gaylo
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Neil Munro

The Republican party’s televised policy of sending economic migrants into Democrat neighborhoods has forced the White House to double down on its bald-faced narrative that “cruel” Republican governors are interfering with the “safe, orderly, and humane” processing of several million invited migrants.

But the narrative is risky because it fuels angry, much-publicized reactions from Democratic activists even while Democratic campaign advisers are  trying to keep the issue out of the headlines during the midterm campaign, according to Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“They’re just going berserk,” Krikorian told Breitbart News:

They’re behaving like children. It’s ridiculous. Martha’s Vineyard has something like four times the median income as South Texas. So they can’t deal with any illegal aliens? Even though Martha’s Vineyard’s media and businesses have been complaining last year and this year about the need for more foreign workers to work in their restaurants! … All they’re doing is reinforcing the populist-versus-out-of-touch-elites narrative that the Republicans are running on.

…

This is drawing attention — unwanted attention — to their destruction of the border. Even the lapdog media has to write about this when a busload of illegal aliens is dropped off at the Naval Observatory right in front of Harris’ house. In a sense, their concern is that anytime the news is about the border and illegal immigration, it’s bad for them. That may be what’s going on.

But White House officials are whipping White House reporters with the Democrats’ narrative.

“It is a cruel way for elected officials — the power who have power … to behave in this way and we should call it out,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, a Haitian immigrant who is now the White House’s spokeswoman.

She continued:

It is a political stunt. That’s what we’re seeing from Republican governors in particular, and it is a cruel, inhumane way of treating people who are fleeing communism — people who are poor. And we’re not just talking about people. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families who were promised a home, promised a job, put on a bus, and you know, driven to a place that they do not know. And it is a cruel thing to do. … It’s cruel. It is a cruel way for elected officials — the people who have power, the people who are elected by their constituencies — to behave in this way, and we should call it out. Republicans should call out Republicans.

She used the word “cruel” at least eight times during the briefing. She used “stunt” 10 times, and “communism” five times — and the subsequent media reports echoed with “stunt” and “cruel” references.

The pitch was ridiculed by DeSantis and pro-American groups.

“Their virtue signaling is a fraud, ok?” DeSantis said Thursday. “It is not defensible for a superpower to not have any control over the territory of its country, over the borders of its country.”

“The Republicans [are] cruel and horrible and mean for sending people to Martha’s Vineyard!” scoffed Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations for NumbersUSA. She continued:

Most people who see this, I would guess, just think it’s hysterical because it is completely, hysterically funny. You have Kamala Harris saying on national television the border is secure [but] every sentient being on the planet knows our border is not secure. And how many days later, a busload of illegal aliens arrives at her doorstep? I mean, that’s just funny.

The in-house journalists quietly accepted the narrative, and a few even asked Jean-Pierre if the governors’ busing of migrants is illegal.

Jean-Pierre continued the invective on Friday, saying the GOP governors are using “the kinds of tactics we see from smugglers in places like Mexico and Guatemala,” and are treating the migrants “like chattel,” which is a synonym for slaves.

On Thursday. Jean-Pierre repeatedly insisted the Biden administration is repairing an immigration system that was “broken” by President Donald Trump, who worked to enforce barriers against economic migration:

We are fixing a broken system. It is not like turning the light switch on. It is going to take some time. But I will say this: More individuals encountered at the border will be removed or expelled this year than in any previous year.

…

We have repeatedly said a long-term solution can only come from comprehensive legislation that brings lasting reform to a fundamentally broken system. We understand that and that’s why we continue to call on Congress to also act so we get it done. It’s a fundamental long-term issue. It is a broken system.

Overall, few White House reporters understand immigration politics — especially the economics of migration. After all, they face massive social and workplace pressure from other journalists, and editors, and vice-presidents — to endorse migration.

When the establishment media subordinates itself to the White House narrative and then refuses to connect the dots, many Americans have to do it themselves, Jenks said. “They have to connect all those dots and with the media screaming at them “Republican Bad! Republican Bad!,” they may not go any deeper than that.

“The Democratic narrative very well could work if Republicans aren’t pushing back on it,” she continued. “… Even when inflation and the economy has overtaken all other issues, immigration is still in the top five of every poll I’ve seen, right? So … Republicans should be talking about immigration.”

To be persuasive in politics, “you have to personalize it for people,” Jenks added. “Why is an open border bad for me? Republicans could be so easily showing that.

“They could say that these are economic migrants. They’re coming here for your jobs. They’re going to lower your wages. They’re going to compete with you for housing. They’re going to be competing for resources in your kids’ school. … [And] it is perfectly reasonable for Americans to be concerned first and foremost with their families, then second with their communities. That’s how communities function.”

Republicans should also show how Biden’s effort to extract migrants is bad for the sending countries, she added. “The people who are coming to the border are the people with the most resources from those countries. You have to pay a smuggling fee. You have to pay for your transportation, however you got here. You have to pay for food and water and shelter along the way. So these are the people with resources. They’re also the people with the most get up and go the most ambition. … We’re also giving basically a pass to bad governments in these four countries because the people who would rebel against the government are coming to the United States.”

But the leaders of the Democratic Party understand how to whip their upper-class progressive base back into line, even though the vast immigration hurts their voters’ wages, salaries, housing costs, and communities.

In September 2021, when progressives watched the Del Rio migration rush, Democratic leaders shouted “Racism!” and the major TV networks turned their cameras and questions away from the crush of migrants while progressives were invited to display their moral superiority over the supposedly racist supporters of U.S. borders.

In September 2022, the White House leaders are encouraging their base to view their own faction as noble and to view pro-border Americans as cruel, exploitative, and racist outsiders.

On Thursday, Biden used a speech to a pro-migration, ethnic advocacy group to lash the GOP governors:  “Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props. What they’re doing is simply wrong. It’s un-American. It’s reckless.”

The party’s tactic of promising moral superiority to liberal college graduates in exchange for allowing a huge transfer of their wealth to Wall Street is often successful. For example, the Martha’s Vineyard narrative was quickly echoed by progressives tweeters:

 

Extraction Migration

It is easier for government officials to grow the economy by immigration than by growing exports, productivity, or the birth rate.

So the federal government officially — and unofficially — extracts millions of migrants from poor countries and uses them as extra workers, consumers, and renters. This extraction migration policy both grows and skews the national economy.

The policy prevents tight labor markets, and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that would allow Americans and their communities to earn more money.

This migration policy also reduces exports by minimizing shareholder pressure on U.S. companies to build up beneficial and complementary trade with people in poor countries.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland and southern states.

An economy fueled by extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives an excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.

This economic strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement. … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.

But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.

Progressives hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding narratives and theatrical border security programs. For example, they claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration helps migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

Similarly, establishment Republicans, media businesses, and major GOP donors hide the skew caused by migration. They suppress any recognition of the pocketbook impact and instead tout border chaos, welfare spending, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs U.S. graduates need.

This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.

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