Open-Borders Leftists Worry: GOP May Close Biden’s Parole Loophole

GUILLERMO ARIAS/SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
GUILLERMO ARIAS/SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Business lobbies and their pro-migration progressive allies are worried Republicans may actually use their voting power to curb President Joe Biden’s huge inflow of illegal migrants.

“These border negotiations are politically alarming,” said Andrea Flores, a lobbyist with the FWD.us group for high-tech investors who profit from mass migration. She continued:

Republicans have set the terms of the negotiation, and rather than fighting for Dreamers, visa reforms, or other long-time priorities, Dems have allowed the starting point to be a series of asylum restrictions.

Democrats are “negotiating border and asylum policies with a political party that so openly promulgates white nationalist conspiracy theories,” said a bloc of 11 Democratic Senators.

“Republicans are demanding that presidential parole authority be scaled back … [which is] an absurd demand,” complained Greg Sargent, an establishment columnist at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post who also favors the wage-cutting, rent-spiking policy of annually importing roughly four million legal and illegal migrants.

That vast inflow has pushed millions of Americans on the economic sidelines, but Sargent continued:

Under those parole grants, if migrants gain U.S. sponsors … they can live and work in the country for two years. This provides an orderly alternative to the mode of entry that enrages Republicans, in which migrants breach the border, seek asylum and disappear into the country while awaiting a hearing. Gutting parole could mean more of the latter.

The alarm signals are reasons for hope, said Jon Feere, a former migration official who is now at the Center for Immigration Studies:

The Congress is finally understanding how destructive the Biden administration’s decision to not enforce immigration laws has become, and [how] it is imperative that the Hill forces actual results out of the executive branch [because] it is not sustainable for Congress to write laws and allow the administration to ignore them for years on end.

The GOP Senators and Representatives have leverage in the closed-door negotiations over migration rules.

Many Democrats have recognized that Biden’s very unpopular mass migration is threatening their Senate majority and individual election campaigns, especially in blue cities.

RELATED: NYC Mayor Eric Adams Despairs Migrant Crisis Will Destroy New York City

Democrats are also desperate to win additional funding to minimize the obvious costs of migration and for their controversial policy of funding Ukraine’s maximalist war with Russia. Democrats also are grappling with the growing antisemitism that is fuelled by their support for immigration.

There is also election pressure on Republicans, added Feere. “The Republicans must also understand that they need to give voters a reason to vote for them.”

So far, Republicans are pressing their advantages in the Senate.

“Border security is national security,” GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on November 29 as he rejected the Democrats’ claim that the GOP push for border security endangers global democracy and peace.

McConnell continued:

It’s a fact of human history … the Hamas terrorists who rule Gaza violated sovereign borders on their way to slaughtering 1,200 Israelis and taking hundreds more hostage … China, for its part, is also keenly focused on challenging borders. The PRC has used force in an attempt to gain the upper hand along its border with India.

“What’s dangerous is defending open borders and a broken asylum and parole system even at the risk of urgent assistance to our partners in Ukraine, Israel, and Asia,” said McConnell. “If we fail to uphold this basic, fundamental responsibility, America and our friends around the world will pay dearly.”

The House GOP caucus, and roughly 30 GOP Senators, are supporting a comprehensive migration stabilization bill, dubbed H.R.2.

One sign of GOP seriousness is their demand for curbs on Biden’s use of the parole border loophole, as well as the better-understood asylum loophole and the “Safe Third Country” rule that blocks asylum seekers who migrate through safe countries to the U.S. border.

For example, more than 100,000 Chinese have walked through safe airports in Canada or Mexico since 2020 to claim they need asylum from China’s government in the United States. Similarly, more than 100,000 Ukrainians have flown out of safe airports in Western Europe to demand asylum at the U.S. border.

In 2021, Biden’s pro-migration border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — junked President Donald Trump’s asylum reforms and has widened the asylum and parole loopholes.

The result has been a massive inflow of roughly 6 million migrants seeking U.S. jobs and housing. Mayorkas is even using his loopholes to accelerate the inflow of chain migrants, so sharply raising the incentive for more foreigners to sneak into the United States.

Migrants are rational, determined, and guided by cellphone-shared advice. They are also advised by business-backed pro-migration lawyers towards loopholes, such as the less-well-known Convention Against Torture loophole that allows migrants to work in the United States.

RELATED: Biden’s Border Chief Rejects Economic Concerns on Migration — “This Is a ‘Nation of Immigrants”

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Mayorkas is a lawyer and a pro-migration zealot. He helps the migrants use these loopholes by minimizing penalties for abuse, and by minimizing deportations. He also uses taxpayer funding to guide and transport migrants from South America to many cities, jobs, and apartments throughout the United States.

The result of Mayorkas’ migration is a colossal transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans over to migrants, CEOs, and investors.

The wealth is transferred because migration suppresses Americans’ wages and salaries, pushes up their rental prices, minimizes workplace investment in labor-saving machinery, and grows the corporate profits that multiply into a 20-fold gain in stock prices for the wealthiest Americans.

Some Democratic legislators are bending, according to Politico.

“In terms of the politics of these three issues, the Democrats involved in the talks seem resigned to accepting a revised asylum threshold, deeply hostile to meddling with parole authority and somewhere in the middle on safe third countries,” Politico reported on November 29.

Understandably, lobbyists for investors — and their non-profit subsidiaries who claim to represent migrants — are urgently trying to block GOP curbs on asylum and parole loopholes.

“Advocates and lawmakers are sounding alarms,” Politico reported on November 29. “For immigration reform advocates, it means their longtime [pro-migration] priorities have been traded away and replaced with Biden’s foreign aid priorities.”

The urgency is demonstrated by Todd Schulte, the president of Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group. Late November 30, he tweeted a warning to Democrats:

THREAD – to explain how current demands from some Senators are WAY out of bounds from anything in past bipartisan–particularly demands for massive restriction on immigration parole & massive asylum restrictions AND a unilateral transit ban

Legislating restrictions to the government’s #immigration parole authority, imposing unilateral transit bans, or eroding our asylum system would be a policy disaster today, spur chaos at the border in 2024 & have decades-long ramifications—rolling back post WW2 protections. 

…

A falsely named so-called “Safe Third Country” UNILATERAL TRANSIT BAN would give any future President the ability to single-handedly, 100% disqualify any & all people who cross through Mexico, Canada, or any country (but this is really about Mex), from even applying for asylum

The breadth of investors who founded and funded Schulte’s employer — FWD.us — was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website in early 2021. But copies exist at the other sites.

FWD.us supported Mayorkas’ nomination and confirmation for the border job.

Schulte also posted an apocalyptic memo arguing that the GOP-backed reforms are bad for Democrats and migrants:

some [Senators] are trying to inject two massive policy changes into the debate that would be the largest restrictions to legal immigration pathways and protections for refugees and those seeking asylum in decades.

This memo outlines why legislating restrictions to immigration parole authority as well as expanding or strengthening so-called “Safe Third Country” unilateral transit bans would be a policy disaster today, with decades-long ramifications, spurring chaos at the border in 2024 and spelling political disaster for Democrats.

…

Legislating new parole restrictions will immediately eliminate legal pathways and critical border management tools, and be incorporated into ongoing lawsuits by Texas AG Ken Paxton and others aimed at fully eliminating any uses of parole not explicitly written into new legislation. The consequences of this action are a lose-lose-lose-lose situation for Democrats …

“Legislating new parole restrictions is a giant trap,” for Democrats, he insisted.

But doing nothing will also allow Mayorkas to flood Democrats’ cities and districts with millions more migrants, likely spiking public hostility towards Democrats just before the election. For example, an October poll in New York showed that Mayorkas’ migrants are now viewed as a burden rather than a benefit by 54 percent to 32 percent.

Even among New York’s Jews, a 52 percent majority view Mayorkas’ migration as a burden, while only 28 percent view migration as a benefit.

“This is a sort of this is a real-life example of how things have to get worse before they get better,” said Feere. “The Republican Party should never have allowed it to get to this point … But the Biden administration’s outright lawlessness has, in a way, forced the Republican Party to embrace the [immigration] enforcement perspective once again.”

RELATED: Mayor Eric Adams Heads to Mexico — NYC Migrant Crisis at “Breaking Point”

The GOP is also facing populist pressure from some D.C.-based advocacy groups, such as Heritage Action, a political spin-off of the Heritage Foundation:

NumbersUSA is also pushing for results:

But investors and their allies are ramping up the rhetoric:

“Senate Republicans have been demanding a series of cruel, draconian and permanent changes to the U.S. asylum system in exchange for funding to support our allies in Ukraine,” complained Gabe Ortiz, an advocate with the business-backed, pro-migration America’s Voice group. He continued:

[Democratic] Senators Chris Murphy, Michael Bennet, and any other Senate Democrats at the [negotiation] table need to be made aware [they are] … negotiating border and asylum policies with a political party that so openly promulgates white nationalist conspiracy theories.

“Efforts by Republicans to curtail new avenues for migration are counterproductive,” the Washington Post claimed on November 27. The fix to illegal migration, it added, is even more legal migration, regardless of the economic damage to Americans:

If the objective is to transform migration into the United States from a crush at the border into an orderly process, the country should move beyond the efforts to harden the border — sensible though some might be — to create new doors [for more migrants].

“What the House Republicans are doing, I think, is really just punishment,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) told Politico. “They’re anti-immigrant, and they want to show their stripes.”

 

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