Migration Groups Blame Americans’ Border Laws for Migrant Deaths

The bodies of El Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramírez, 25, and his nearly tw
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell

President Joe Biden should remove the Title 42 anti-coronavirus border barrier because it raises the difficulty and risks for migrants trying to reach U.S. jobs, say pro-migration groups.

“Migrants are attempting multiple crossings, seeking out more remote and perilous sections of the border … [so increasing] migrants’ chances of needing to be rescued — or of dying,” claimed a May 26 report by The Marshall Project. The report is titled “Strict Border Enforcement Policies Put Migrants in Harm’s Way. Title 42 Is No Exception.”

On May 31, the Los Angeles Times presented a soft-focus version of the claim with an extensive article about the burial of one Mexican migrant who drowned on the California coast:

The tragic end to the journey of Maria Eugenia Chavez Segovia highlights the vulnerability of migrants desperate to get to the United States. It left her loved ones begging for answers; her dreams were shattered just yards away from safety and a better life for her whole family.

In the months before her death, Chavez Segovia had tried to cross the border at least two other times by land and had been expelled under Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allows the government to deny non-citizens entry into the country in response to the threat of COVID-19.

Migrant advocates have warned the strict border policy is pushing desperate people to take larger risks to try to cross into the United States, increasing the chances they’ll be injured or killed. “There are more people choosing to cross through dangerous routes, including the maritime crossing, because they don’t have the ability to present themselves at the ports because the ports are closed as a result of the Title 42 orders,” explained Pedro Rios, the director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program.

The boat’s sinking was extensively covered in early May. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote Maty 4:

… three passengers — Victor Perez Degollado, 29; Maria Eugenia Chavez Segovia, 41; and Maricela Hernandez Sanchez, 35 — drowned, with blunt force head injuries contributing to their deaths, according to the county Medical Examiner’s Office.

The report noted that the migrants were not forced onto the boat:

The rest of the passengers, in interviews with authorities, said they paid $15,000 to $18,000 to be smuggled into the U.S. on the boat, states the affidavit, written by a Homeland Security Investigations agent.

But those deaths were not caused by Americans’ decision to defend their borders and their workplace from cheap foreign labor, responded Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA.

“It was the cartels who put her on the boat,” she said. “The only people responsible are the migrants themselves who are knowingly trying to get into the United States illegally, and the smugglers who are helping them.”

The best way to reduce the deaths and suffering on the migrants’ treks is to persuade the migrant that the trek will fail, she said:

Send a clear message that the border is closed … Remove people [illegally in the United States]. Deport them back to their countries. Don’t let them come into the United States [to work] for six or seven years while they go through a fake asylum claim. Make them wait in Mexico [until their asylum hearing]

Pro-migration groups argue that migrants will get murdered and mugged while they are waiting in Mexico for their asylum court dates, but Jenks responded that “people get mugged and murdered in the United States — there’s nowhere on the planet where you are save from being mugged and murdered.”

The logic of the pro-migration groups would require government officials to lift all border barriers for migrants so that none die or are injured en route to U.S. jobs.

That would accelerate emigration into the United States, forcing a “race to the bottom for every American,” Jenks said, adding:

We will see wages shrinking, we will see jobs going to cheap foreign labor instead of to Americans, we will see more Americans on welfare, we’ll see fewer tax dollars going to pay for that welfare, and therefore the welfare being reduced in the end. You can’t have open borders and a welfare state.

The resulting economic crash would kill many Americans, she said:

In an America where Americans come last, you will absolutely see an increase in suicides, an increase in desperation, an increase in poverty, an increase in homelessness, an increase in everything bad that we have spent the past decades trying to fix.

The drugs are already being shipped “by the very same cartels that are shipping the people in and killing them in the process,” she added.

Since 2000, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died “deaths of despair” following unemployment, hopelessness, and drug addictions. Most were blue-collar Americans who were cast aside when investors moved their jobs to low-wage workers in China. But a growing share consists of young college graduates who are unable to accomplish their hopes in an economy that is flooded with foreign graduates laboring in exchange for green cards.

Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, says he does not view the Title 42 barrier as a curb on migrants but as a temporary healthcare protection rule. “We will not restrict travel one day more than the public health imperative requires — that is the assurance I can give,” Mayorkas told Senators during a May 26 House hearing.

Mayorkas’s priorities, however, do not include the protection of Americans’ national labor market or their housing market. In a March 26 document, he declared:

Our goal is a safe, legal, and orderly immigration system that is based on our bedrock priorities: to keep our borders secure, address the plight of children as the law requires, and enable families to be together.

The administration, the pro-migration media, and the activists who champion open border do not care about ordinary Americans, Jenks said. “They’re elites who are virtue signaling [to elite peers], and they think it’s better in their political circles and cocktail parties to be all for the downtrodden of the Earth instead of the downtrodden of America,” she added.

The elite’s favoritism towards migrants pressures the people who stay behind to eventually pay the cartels and take the dangerous journey northwards, Jenks noted:

If you send the message that ‘You can get through if you’re lucky, if you pay the cartels enough, if the cartels happen to get you there safely, if you happen to not get turned away,’ then more people will come. It’s always been the case … it is completely perverse.

That message is being sent loudly by Joe Biden’s administration, which has opened many side doors in the border to many — but not all — migrants into the United States to compete for jobs and housing against Americans.

The Los Angeles Times reported from the gravesite of one of the three downed migrants, where the niece of the one drowned migrants decided to follow her trek northwards:

“There are people who leave and do something. I would like to do something for my mother and my daughter,” she said.

…  “I’m going to try my luck.”

The federal government has long allowed migrants to sneak past border guards and into the many jobs and housing once reserved for Americans, while it also reassures the anxious public by promising tighter border security.
This two-track policy strips wealth from working Americans and from heartland regions by quietly inviting low-wage migrants in via a chaotic Hunger Games trail of loans, coyotes, cartels, rape, desertsstormsborder laws, barriers, rescuers, transportjudges, and cheap labor employers.

Some left-wing advocates for greater migration say the deadly trek is intended to deter migrants. But the government-created trek extracts millions of extra young people from other countries to serve as consumers and workers for U.S. companies, investors, and government agencies while also hiding the scale of migration from voters and reporters.

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 multiracialcross-sexnon-racistclass-basedbipartisanrationalpersistent, 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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