Democrats Hide as Bodies Pile Up at Joe Biden’s Border

Migrants, mostly from Nicaragua, cross the Rio Grande River into the U.S., in Eagle Pass,
AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills
Neil Munro

Democrat politicians have gone silent since 13 more illegal migrants drowned in the Rio Grande as they tried to reach President Joe Biden’s welcome at the border.

But some Republicans are stepping up to blame and shame Democrats for the record and growing death toll of men, women, and children.

“Nine dead trying to illegally cross the border,” tweeted former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, shortly before the discovery of four additional bodies. “This is a direct result of Biden’s border policies,” said Pompeo, who used his legal authority in 2020 to help curb migration under President Donald Trump.

However, even before the bodies are buried, business-backed migration advocates and some Democrats used the September 1 drowning deaths of 13 adults and children to demand yet more legal immigration — regardless of the pocketbook damage to American families.

“This heartbreaking tragedy highlights once again the need for Congress to act and pass immigration reforms,” said a tweet from the business-funded National Immigration Forum. “Congress must act quickly to pass solutions that bring compassion and security to our border, in the names of human lives and human dignity,” said the group, which helps deliver cheap migrant labor to Fortune 500 corporations. 

“Another horrible tragedy at the border,” tweeted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an advocate with the American Immigration Council, which is a spin-off of the immigration lawyers’ trade association. “With the ports of entry shut … desperate people feel like they have no other options,’ he tweeted. “The blame is bipartisan and decades-old,” he said.

National borders are killing migrants, says Austin Kocher, a migration advocate at Syracuse University who regards the public support for clear borders as illegitimate: “The fact that migrants have been found in [sic] dead in large numbers at the borders of the US and Europe this week should be understood as … the routine functioning of borders and the perceived expendability of migrants’ lives.”

The different reactions of Democrats, Republicans, and migration zealots are rational in the final few weeks before the critical November election.

The pro-migration progressives simply deny Americans’ right to clear borders and stable labor markets. They insist that Americans’ nation actually belongs to foreigners because it somehow became a “Nation of Immigrants” in the 1950s.

Whatever the body count, the progressive zealots — including Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, can lobby in Congress, the media, universities, and the public because they are lavishly backed by Wall Street investors. The investors support the advocacy campaigns because they gain extra workers, consumers, and renters whenever migrants cross the border, legally or illegally.

But Democrat politicians keep quiet because they know that Biden’s mostly-open border is deeply unpopular, even among their own base.

They also know that the media coverage of Biden’s massive death toll could shame millions of swing-voting Americans to vote against Biden in November.

Biden’s recognized 2022 death toll is roughly three times the 247 migrants who died in 2019 under Trump’s oversight.

So Democrat consultants are urging Democrats to stay quiet on migration.

“Major parts of the Democratic base accept Trump’s dire warning that America has never been more at risk from crime, open borders, disrespect for police, and a lack of pride in America,” famed pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in an August 30 article. He continued:

I asked voters to choose between a Democratic message, with its hugely popular policies, and a Republican message, embodying Trump’s words on making America great again, that led with crime and borders and ended with the police. A stunning 28 percent of Blacks chose the America First message. But more alarming, 45 percent of AAPI voters and 47 percent of Hispanics did too.

The Democrats’ media allies also muffle the ghastly, government-created drama under other news, as they did with the June death of 53 migrants in a San Antonio truck.

For example, the New York Times tried to excuse Biden, instead blaming imaginary “tightened border restrictions … [that] have encouraged more desperate people to take risks.”

The buried drama also includes the uncounted yet huge death toll on the long trek from South America to Biden’s border welcome. CNN buried that bad news at the tail-end of the September 2 article about migrants getting an official welcome in New York:

“We embarked across the Darién [trail from Colombia] with a total 339 people,” [Wilbur] Salvatierra said. “About 230 reached Panama. Many died. We saw bodies … on the side of rivers. A friend traveling with his young son said he could not stop thinking of a dead child he saw.”

The Democrats’ silence in 2022 is a huge contrast to their loud laments whenever migrants died at Trump’s border.

In 2019, the Democrats’ second-ranking leader in the Senate rushed to drape two corpses around Trump’s neck:

The father accidentally drowned himself and his young daughter while he was trying to get into the United States, via President Barack Obama’s court-imposed Flores catch-and-release policy for adults who bring children.

But this weekend, as Biden’s record body count rose by another 13, Durbin’s Twitter account was concerned about other matters:

In 2019, the Democrats’ leader in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, offered an emotional reaction to the drowned father’s mistake:

But in 2022, amid a far higher death toll at Biden’s border, Pelosi’s emotional energy targeted ordinary Republicans:

Mayorkas did not comment on Twitter about the 13 deaths. His most recent tweet applauded city officials for helping to move newly arrived migrants at the border deeper into the United States:

Mayorkas’s border deputy suggested that Republicans are to blame for the deaths.

Republicans have mostly opposed the Democrats’ plans to rewrite what they claim is “a broken immigration system” to better deliver more migrants into Americans’ jobs, homes, schools, and politics:

Republicans, however, are slowly learning how to make the Democrats accept responsibility for their deadly policies.

Pompeo’s tweet was clear and direct:

Other GOP candidates, however, are less clear.

On August 30, for example, Tiffany Smiley, the GOP’s Senate candidate in Washington State, talked about sex trafficking into the United States:

Morgan Ortagus, the Republican candidate for a Tennesee House seat, also spotlighted the trauma to migrants:

The candidates, however, are under severe pressure from their donors.

The investors and CEOs fiercely oppose any reduction in the inflow of legal and illegal migrants who will serve them as workers, consumers, and renters.

The GOP’s reliance on the donors for advisers and cash ensures that most GOP candidates ignore the vast pocketbook damage done to millions of American families by the inrush of Wall Street’s wage-cutting, rent-boosting migrants.

Some Republicans are pushing past their donors.

“These guys say that we’ve got to show compassion for illegal migrants — and of course, we do — but let’s show some compassion for our own citizens,” Ohio Sen. candidate J.D. Vance said on August 31. “Let’s actually secure the border so that we don’t have 100,000 Americans dying of fentanyl overdoses. … We can’t run away from the border issue because it’s making our country poor.”

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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