DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorkas: Immigrants Are the ‘Backbone’ of US Economy

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 1: Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas speaks during
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Immigrants — legal and illegal, but not the 285 native-born million Americans — are “the backbone” of the U.S. economy, says the pro-migration chief of President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security.

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the claim via Twitter April 28, when he tweeted about his purchase of lunch for his deputies at a New York restaurant run by Venezuelan immigrants:

I picked up lunch for our team during my visit to New York City today. It’s just one example of the small immigrant-owned businesses that are the backbone of our communities — and of our country.

“It’s the kind of stuff you expect from these guys — [they believe] immigrants are better than Americans,” responded Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:

That’s the bottom line of the left. It is the radical fringe view that is now taken a central place in the Democratic Party. This is not the way most Democrats used to be — and is arguably not even the way most Democratic voters are today. But this is the worldview of the Democratic leadership, elected officials, and top appointed officials, that foreigners are better than Americans.

Mayorkas’ public declaration of support for migrants comes as he continues to encourage many job-seeking migrants to leave their families, homes and countries, and to walk through the border and into Americans’ national labor market, communities, and schools.

In March, Mayorkas announced he would be providing temporary residency and work permits to roughly 300,000 Venezuelans who are now living in the United States. Subsequently, more Venezuelans have streamed into the United States, so reducing pressure on their autocratic government to give up power. Since April 16, for example, Border Patrol agents have recorded more than 1,100 Venezuelan migrants entering the United States in the Del Rio area of Texas.

Mayorkas is also using the flood of migrant children and partial families to distract the media and the public from the spiking level of job-seeking adults who are sneaking into the United States. Breitbart News reported on May 2 that roughly 185,000 migrants have run through Mayorkas’ border rules since October.

When border guards catch them, they return the migrants to the five-yard line in Mexico instead of flying them back to their homes, thousands of miles away.

Mayorkas arrived in the United States as a child when his family fled Cuba after the Castro takeover. He frequently declares that the United States is somehow a “Nation of Immigrants.” In reality, native-born Americans are roughly 86 percent of the population.

But many other elite political leaders share Mayorkas’s migrant-first views.

George W. Bush, for example, said in an April 22 interview with Hugh Hewitt:

One of the reasons I wrote the book [about immigrants] was to remind our citizens how fortunate we are to have people like Kim Mitchell in our midst, people who really appreciate freedom, people who are patriotic, people who are, whose entrepreneurial spirits get ignited when they come to a place where if you dream big and work hard, you have a chance to make it. And Americans don’t, many Americans don’t really realize the deprivation that can take place in other societies, and how the human soul can be so repressed, and yet when it comes here to the States, it flourishes.

“One of the things that immigration does for our country is it enhances our brainpower,” Bush added.

In February 2020, Joe Biden praised the young migrants who were given the quasi-legal work permits under President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) directive:

DACA students are more American than most Americans are. No, I’m serious. Think about it … They’ve been good, decent citizens and they’re great additions. By the way … you know [why] our Social Security system is still solvent? Because of immigration. They didn’t cost us anything; they’re paying for it.

Migrants “are a blessing to America,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared in February 2018.  “These are the best of the best; they are so fabulous,” she said.

“We’re nothing if we’re not a nation of immigrants,” Democrat leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in December 2020. “Immigrants built this country with their hands, enriched our culture with their minds and spirit, and provided the spark that drives our economy.”

The elites’ praise for migrants is a form of “xeno-mania” — an excessive praise for outsiders — and it signals their opposition to the enforcement of the immigration laws that protect Americans’ wages and civic communities, Krikorian told Breitbart News:

The world view that foreigners are better than Americans is clearly a demotivator for our government [enforcement] … It may well even embolden [migrants] to break the law because the [elite] Americans don’t take it all that seriously either.

The praise for migrants is often insincere, he said, because it is used to mask the elites’ economic warfare against the many millions of working Americans who are trying to preserve their families’ wages and wealth amid the elites’ invited flood of low-wage workers.

The elite’s insincerity is made evident by the elites’ preference for living and socializing with each other, even as they use their praise for poor migrants to distance themselves from the worries and priorities of ordinary Americans, Krikorian said:

They don’t want to be living in a place with some Hondurans in cowboy hats whose aspiration is to buy a pickup truck in the United States. They say they want those people [in the United States], and they’ll buy something from them and have their pictures taken with them, but they don’t want to live in their neighborhoods.

Their support for mass migration “is a way of signaling their loathing for America and Americans, and that’s why so many of those [elite] people are appalled when there’s a big increase in Hispanics who vote for [Donald] Trump,” Krikorian said.

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, intra-Democratic, rational, 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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