Biden Offers PR Fig Leaf to Democrats for Migration Crisis

new york migrants
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s deputies are offering a PR bandaid and diversion to the New York Democrats who face growing voter opposition to their cheap labor migration policies.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will send staffers up to New York City to help some of the migrants apply for work permits, Gov. Kathy Hochul said on August 30, according to NYStateofPolitics.com:

According to Hochul, the White House said they will “surge resources,” meaning that in the next couple of weeks, DHS staffers will arrive in Manhattan and “make themselves available to allow us to start processing thousands of people so they can apply to asylum legally.”

Agency officials say they will extend the sign-up campaign across the nation and to other cities facing waves of migrants, such as Chicago.

The meeting helps Hochul and other politicians claim to voters and donors that migrants are being excluded from welfare and must work:

Among those who attended the Wednesday meeting [in D.C.] were [Hochul,] White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and a number of senior team members “hired to respond to our letter,” Hochul said.

“I reinforce my message, which I said back with labor leaders, government leaders, business leaders, the mayor, back in May: Let them work,” Hochul added.

The work permits may help politicians — but they will also help migrants compete for jobs and housing sought by working-class Americans.

Moreover, the arrival of the more-than-100,000 migrants will force down wages and raise rents nationwide, so creating more problems for middle-class Americans.

But the PR move may help Democratic politicians in New York, Chicago, and other cities who are facing rising protests over the civic and economic damage caused by Biden’s huge migration:

A majority of political independents in New York say international migration has been a burden to the state over the last 20 years, according to an August poll by the New York Times and Siena College. Fifty-one percent of independent voters and 67 percent of Republican voters said immigration was a burden when they were asked, “Looking back over the past 20 years or so, do you think that migrants resettling in New York has been more of a benefit or more of a burden to the state?”

Unfortunately for Hochul, many of the economic migrants in New York sneaked over the border to dodge the agency’s register and release process.  Even if they go through the government’s register and release process and then file for asylum, they have to wait at least six months to get a work permit.

The six-month delay was put into law to protect Americans, the New York Times reported on September 1:

In 1996, Congress stipulated that asylum seekers had to wait nearly six months after they filed their asylum application before they could apply for permission to work in the United States. At the time, it was taking the government months to consider individual asylum applications, and there was a concern that tens of thousands of foreigners were using the system as a backdoor to work in the United States because they could work while they waited for a decision.

Congress is unlikely to change the law, the New York Times notes:

There are proposals in both the House and Senate to reduce the wait time to apply for work authorization for certain asylum seekers from six months to 30 days. But there is scant support for either bill. Lawmakers in both political parties worry that shrinking the wait time for work permits will encourage more migrants to cross the border illegally.

The White House could try to offer “Temporary Protected Status” to migrants whose home countries are disaster zones, or grant “Humanitarian Parole” at the border to more job-seeking migrants, the paper said.

However, many migrants are trying to avoid government checks, and prefer to work in the black market, according to a report in RestaurantBusinessOnline.com;

About 20% of new arrivals who used the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s CBP One smartphone app to facilitate [parole] entry into the country are adults eligible to work right away. Yet only 16% of the “non-citizens” relocating to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Hochul’s state have filed for clearance to accept a job, the department said.

Hochul, the White House, and business donors all want the illegal migrants to get jobs and housing, regardless of the impact on Americans. She said in a statement:

It is the only way to help asylum seekers become self-sustaining, so they can move into permanent housing. I am especially pleased that the federal government has agreed to provide personnel, data, and resources to identify the thousands of individuals in New York who are already eligible, but have not yet applied, for work authorization.

The Biden migration added at least four million workers to the nation’s workforce. That flood was urged and welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. It also reduces marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, heartland states, and overseas markets. and it reduces economic pressure on the federal government to deal with the drug and “Deaths of Despair” crises.

Biden’s easy-migration policies are deliberately adding the foreigners’ problems to the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.

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