Mayorkas: ‘Nation of Immigrants’ Narrative Is More Important than Congress’s Law

WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 13: U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas answers a
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images

The 1950s “Nation of Immigrants” narrative is more important than Congress’s laws, according to Alexandro Mayorkas, who is President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief.

“Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border, to do everything that we can to support our personnel with the resources, the technology, the policies that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country,” Mayorkas said in an interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace, on the cable TV show, Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace.”

“The law needs to be changed if it does not either meet our highest ideals or actually proves to be functional in the service of those ideals,” said Mayorkas, a lawyer who has opened many loopholes to smuggle more economic migrants into Americans’ economy and society.

“I’m not going to resign,” Mayorkas said in response to a question about congressional GOP calls for his impeachment. “There’s a tremendous amount of work to do, and we are doing it and I’m incredibly proud to do it,” he said.

Mayorkas made his “Nation of Immigrants” claims when Wallace pressed him to justify his repeated claim that “the border is secure” amid the movement of roughly 3.5 million migrants — including at least 1.2 million unidentified “gotaways” — through the southern border.

“What does ‘secure’ mean to you?” Wallace asked.

Mayorkas responded:

There is not a common definition of that. If one looks at [Congress’s 2006] statutory definition, the literal interpretation of the statutory language, if one person successfully evades law enforcement at the border, then we have breached the security of the border … Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border, to do everything that we can to support our personnel with the resources, the technology, the policies, that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country. I say that because in the prior [Donald Trump] administration, policies were promulgated or passed that did not hew to the values that we hold dear.

The federal government defined border security in a 2006 law, as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”

Mayorkas then explained “the values we hold dear” which he says trump the 2006 law:

We, in the United States, have tremendous pride in our country as a country, a place of refuge. We are a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Those laws provide for humanitarian relief for those who qualify. They also provide that individuals who do not qualify will be removed. That’s how we do our work at the Department of Homeland Security.

But polls show Americans oppose Mayorkas’s “Nation of Immigrants” justification for ignoring the nation’s border laws.

That opposition is rising as Americans learn how Mayorkas’s vague “values of our country” claim actually transfers the economic value of their work over to wealthy coastal investors and Wall Street.

“In 1985, it took 39.7 weeks of work each year to pay for these [middle-class basics], giving families plenty of room to enjoy other consumer goods and luxuries,” said a Washington Post op-ed by Henry Olsen:

But today, it takes 62.1 weeks of work to cover the same expenses. In other words, about 40 years ago, the median American family could enjoy a middle-class life on one earner’s paycheck. Today, it takes two.

Nearly all older Americans grew up in a coherent society with a shared culture and a prosperous economy alongside a black-white gap. But many elites are now using immigration to impose a skewed economy and fractured culture on their 300 million fellow Americans.

For example, Mayorkas has released millions of migrants into the U.S. economy to compete for the jobs and housing needed by Americans, despite federal laws that require the detention of asylum seekers and the exclusion of economic migrants. He has used his bureaucratic authority to expand the inflow of foreign graduates into the investors’ Fortune 500 jobs that are needed by U.S. graduates, despite the glaring damage done to U.S. innovation, salaries, and housing.

Wallace probed Mayorkas to explain his motivation for imposing pro-migration policies that disadvantage Americans and their children:

Mayorkas cited his Romanian-born mother who fled from the Nazis’ Jewish genocide to Cuba during World War II. In 1960, she and her Cuban-born husband and children were welcomed by optimistic Americans when the couple fled Cuban communism to the United States. He told Wallace:

My parents instilled in me the profound meaning of displacement, the yearning to give one’s children a better life than what the life one has had, [and] the fragility of life. And so I understand deeply the plight of individuals who will leave their homes, whether they flee persecution or aspire to a better life. We, in the United States, have tremendous pride in our country as a place of refuge. We are a nation of immigrants.

My mother, given the tragedy that she lived through — her father lost everybody except the sister in the Holocaust — she understood that every day is a new life. The world did not have the privilege of recognizing the beauty of my parents. And through the work I do, I hope I can communicate that in some way.

Other media accounts back up the empathy-with-migrants theme. “Mayorkas, 61, is a former federal prosecutor, not a liberal activist, but he brings a deep sympathy for immigrants rooted in his own family’s extraordinary journey to the United States, his backers say,” the Washington Post reported in 2021, adding:

Through his Romanian-born mother, whose relatives were murdered by the Nazis, Mayorkas discovered the horrors that can unfold when refugees cannot flee to safety, friends and former colleagues say. Through his Cuban-born father, he learned someone can love a country and still feel compelled to leave it forever.

Mayorkas has repeatedly declared his support for migrants over the children and grandchildren of the Americans who welcomed him in 1960.

“It is all about achieving equity [between Americans and foreigners], which is really the core founding principle of our country,” Mayorkas declared at a 2022 meeting hosted by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

“We are building an immigration system that is designed to ensure due process, respect human dignity, and promote equity,” Mayorkas tweeted in August 2021, as he sketched out his plans for easy-asylum rules that would encourage a mass migration of poor job-seekers into Americans’ homeland.

“Justice is our priority,” Mayorkas declared at a November 2021 Senate hearing, adding, “That includes securing our border and providing relief to those [migrants] who qualify for it under our laws.”

“I am, to a great extent, aligned with the expectations” of the immigrant community, Mayorkas told an audience at the Aspen Institute on July 2022.

Mayorkas’s decisions rarely show any desire to help ordinary Americans prosper as his migration drives down wages, pushes up housing prices, provides camouflage for Mexican criminals and cartels, and shifts vast wealth from heartland states to coastal investors.

Mayorkas’s desire for cooperation with Mexico on migration also shields Mexico from U.S. diplomatic pressure that could curb the cartels’ drug distribution business. The business is killing 100,000 Americans each year — including many sons and daughters 0f the Americans who welcomed Mayorkas in 1960.

Wallace is a former host of Fox News who quit because of the network’s conditional pro-Trump coverage.

His Mayorkas interview provided a much better portrayal of Mayorkas than the credulous coverage provided by pro-migration establishment media outlets, such as the New York TimesBut Wallace’s interview ignored the huge death toll of Mayorkas’s migrants, and the economic and pocketbook damage caused by Mayorkas’s motives and pro-establishment policies.

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from impoverished countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The influx has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.

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