GOP Rep. McCaul: Biden Lets Cuba, Venezuela ‘Weaponize’ Migration

A group of mostly Venezuelan migrants is detained by Texas National Guard members until Bo
Randy Clark/Breitbart Texas, File
Neil Munro

Dictatorships are “weaponizing” migration to the United States, and President Joe Biden is “falling in their trap,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House foreign affairs committee.

“President Biden can and should do more to stop these three socialist regimes [of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuala] from weaponizing migration to the U.S.,” McCaul (R-TX) said in a statement to Breitbart News. He continued:

All three have historically used migrants to pressure the U.S. and Biden is falling in their trap.

To start getting this situation under control, the White House needs to fully enforce the embargo on Cuba, implement new sanctions on Venezuela, and review whether Nicaragua deserves to remain part of the CAFTA-DR trade agreement.

Biden and his deputies are now blaming the huge inflow since January 2021 of almost three million southern migrants on the autocratic governments — not on his disguised welcome for more economic migrants.

“Fewer immigrants [are] coming from Central America and from Mexico,” Biden told reporters on September 16 when he was asked about the huge migration. He added:

This is a totally different circumstance [from prior years]. What’s on my watch now is Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.  And the ability to send them [the migrants] back to those states is not rational.

McCaul’s criticism of Biden’s passivity was echoed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was asked on September 22 about Biden’s welcome for Venezuelan migrants:

We believe the regime in Venezuela is illegitimate. We believe that [Venezuelan dictator Nicolas] Maduro is a dictator along the lines of a Raul Castro and I think he’s done immeasurable damage. [I spoke to] Brazil’s Ambassador us today [who told me] they have absorbed over a million people from Venezuela, because of what’s going on.

But here’s the thing, Biden was asked, “Hey, how come you can’t keep control the border?” He’s like, “Well, I’m having to deal with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.” Are those new dictatorships? Have those not been dictatorships for a long time? And not only that, he’s soft on all those dictatorships. It would be one thing if he was actually willing to apply pressure and then say it’s causing people to need asylum, but he’s coddling them. He’s willing to go and play footsie with Maduro. He didn’t lift a finger last summer when the Cuban people were rising up to take on the Raul Castro regime. And of course, he’s going to be buddy-buddy with Nicaragua and then the new Colombian president who’s very leftist.

So that’s just the nature of what we’re seeing here. [Unlike Biden] I’ve been opposed to them — [or] playing footsie with Maduro — the whole time. But nevertheless here we are.

The Cuban government has recognized that there’s building internal [political] pressure, so their perspective is alright, “We’re just going to release migrants to go to the United State,” a Hill source told Breitbart News.

But the migrants are also an economic windfall to Cuba’s dictatorship because Biden has lifted limits on remittances from Cuban migrants in the United States back to their relatives in Cuba. “When people leave [Cuba], it is with the tacit endorsement of the regime, the source added.

Charles Lane, a columnist at the Washington Post, echoed that point on September 21: “It is in these governments’ interest to export dissent and stir political trouble for President Biden — as the boatlifts did for his Democratic predecessors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.”

Biden’s deputies also refuse to use other diplomatic pressure tools against the autocratic governments, the source said. For example, Biden’s deputies do not threaten to suspend the free trade deal with Nicaragua, and do little to enforce international sanctions against Venezuela’s oil exports, the Hill source said.

Biden’s people are also refusing to pressure Mexico to accept the return of migrants.

“They’ve lost all ability to have any sort of kind of like leverage to negotiate with the Mexican government, in terms of who would be allowed to be sent [backl] into Mexico .. to address this new wave,” the source said.

“This administration has this ideological kind of view that these socialists and authoritarians are not to be confronted head-on, but rather that we can find some means of peaceful coexistence,” the source said. So the dictatorships are now confident that “they have a bunch of [Biden] suckers that they’re dealing with, and they can just get away with it.”

Unsurprisingly, U.S. immigration lawyers are defending Biden’s policy of extracting migrants from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy. “I have a Venezuelan client who is a dentist here,” tweeted immigration lawyer Paul Herzog.

If we deported her back to Venezuela … she wouldn’t be fixing people’s teeth – she’d be standing in lines, trying to scrounge food and medicine for her kids. We’re all better off because she is here, instead of there

But even Bret Stephens, a pro-migration columnist at the New York Times, slammed Biden’s excuse for the migration:

The administration likes to blame turmoil in Central and South America, particularly Venezuela, for the recent surge. But the Venezuelan refugee crisis has been years in the making … A better explanation is that the Biden administration came to office loudly advertising the fact that it was not Donald Trump, which is why the surge began almost to the day Biden took office.

Biden’s mass inflow is supported by the economic beneficiaries — the nation’s political and business elites.

Those elites can hire desperate migrants who will compliantly work to earn the money needed to pay their smuggling debts. They can also rent housing and sell food and consumer goods to the roughly 4.5 million extra immigrants imported by Biden.

Predictably, Biden’s migration is driving down Americans’ wages. It is also boosting rents and housing prices, and pushing up inflation for a wide variety of goods, such as used autos and food.

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