Border Chief Mayorkas: Laws ‘Regrettably’ Limit Cheap Labor Migration

C-SPAN
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief is complaining Congress’ immigration laws block him from filling even more U.S. jobs with even more foreign workers.

“Regrettably, our legal immigration system is not designed to meet the need of employers here in the United States,” Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkjas told the Senate’s judiciary committee on Tuesday, adding:

Individuals from other countries want to come here to work, even seasonally, even temporarily, earn the money that they can bring back to their home countries and support their families there.

Polls show that Americans strongly favor the existing but unenforced laws that ban CEOs and investors from hiring illegal workers. Those border laws were intended to protect American families from cost-cutting employers, but have been ignored for many years.

Since 2021, Mayorkas has opened and expanded many loopholes and exemptions — and stopped enforcement of some laws — to welcome at least three million southern foreign workers, plus at least two million legal migrants.

Most of Mayorkas’s legal and illegal migrants are eager to work hard at wages far below the levels needed by American workers and to share the housing that is needed by American families.

Mayorkas is already impoverishing ordinary Americans by flooding the labor market with almost one migrant for every American who turns 18. “Sixty-two percent of adult U.S. consumers live paycheck to paycheck as of February 2023,” said a March 27 report by LendingClub Corp. 

Mayorkas, who is a Cuban-born immigrant, delivered his “regrettably” comment as he called for the transfer of even more U.S. jobs to the foreign workers that he prefers to help.

He was speaking to Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), a Japan-born immigrant who also prefers more migration — regardless of the huge pocketbook damage to more than 200 million Americans:

Hirono: We are facing a severe worker shortage in our country … I want to quote the Chamber of Commerce and they said, “The vast shortcomings of our legal immigration system are a key contributing factor as to why companies are struggling to hire or retain the talent they need to succeed in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.” Mr. Secretary, is a worker shortage — especially in cybersecurity, for example — a security threat and whose job is it to fix our legal immigration system?

Mayorkas: So, senator, it is an economic security threat …We have employers who are striving to hire, to find people who could fill jobs to contribute to our country’s economic prosperity. Regrettably, regrettably, our legal immigration system is not designed to meet that need of employers here in the United States, despite the fact that individuals from other countries want to come here to work — even seasonally, even temporarily — earn the money that they can bring back to their home countries and support their families there.

It is precisely why in the H-2B program — the seasonal non-agricultural worker program — we allocated thousands of H-2B visas for the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, so that those individuals in desperate need of a better life do not have to place their lives in the hands of smugglers, take the perilous journey to our southern border, and arrive in-between the ports of entry … To fulfill the need for labor here in the United States, we can screen and vet these individuals in their home countries, and they can travel safely to the United States by air, gain lawful employment, contribute to our economy, return to their home countries with the earnings that they’ve made and address fundamentally the root causes of why people travel irregularly in the first place …

Hirono: Mr. Secretary, you and I, as immigrants, we know why our families brought us to this country —  it is to give us a better life. I came here with nothing and a single parent. And I just wish that my [Senate] colleagues would talk about their own families and their grandparents, their parents, being immigrants. They seem to have forgotten the struggles that they experienced to make a better life for them …

And I’m thinking why does the Chamber of Commerce have to come forward and practically beg us to to pay attention to the massive worker shortage in our country?

Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot. He has repeatedly argued that U.S. immigration policy must help foreigners.

He has repeatedly called for the adoption of the Canadian-style migration system that is designed to provide investors with a massive flood of migrants that cuts wages, boosts retail sales, inflates rents, and spikes stock values. On December 13, for example, Mayorkas told ElPasoMatters.org:

We look to our partner to the north that has a much more nimble immigration system that can be retooled to the needs at the moment. For example, Canada is in need of 1 million workers and they have agreed that in 2023, they will admit 1.4 million … immigrants to fill that labor need that Canadians themselves cannot. We are stuck in antiquated laws that do not meet our current needs. And they haven’t been working for many, many years.

This Mayorkas plan echoes President George W. Bush’s planned “Any Willing Worker” plan of 2004. Bush’s plan would have tilted the labor market against families by allowing U.S. employers to freely hire people from around the world “when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs.”

Mayorkas’ migration policies unite the progressive and investor wings of the new Democratic Party. That coalition seeks to shift wealth and political power from a broad swath of ordinary Americans towards CEOs, wealthy coastal investors, and government elites.

For example, the Brookings Foundation recently was funded by Google Inc. and the progressive Tides foundation to draft a report urging greater replacement of Americans by H-1B white-collar workers and H-2B blue-collar workers. The report claimed:

We show that the H2B visa program should be expanded to accommodate increased hiring of hospitality workers, drivers, construction workers, and care workers. Similarly, the H1B visa program should be expanded to accommodate increased hiring of health care workers, executives, and engineers, among others.

Mayorkas ignored the impact of his cheap-labor policy on Americans, especially on the Americans who are too sick, old, alienated, addicted, or homeless to compete with the healthy, hardworking, grateful, and subordinate supply of migrants.

Instead, he promised to help migrants — legal, illegal, or quasi-legal — win higher wages and better conditions in the jobs that would otherwise go to better-paid Americans in a tight national labor market:

Our enforcement resources in the worksite environment are focused on investigating and prosecuting employers who exploit the vulnerability of the migrant workforce by paying them substandard wages, by keeping them in substandard working conditions. [This] not only [is] exploiting the vulnerable workers themselves, but also creating an unfair advantage in the marketplace because … through the imposition of those [poor] conditions, they charge lower prices and create an unfair competitive advantage.

As usual, donor-backed GOP politicians ignored Mayorkas’s push for more migration into American jobs and mostly vented their complaints about non-economic aspects of Mayorkas’s easy-migration policies. For example, no GOP senator in the hearing asked Mayorkas how many migrants he planned to admit in 2023 above the 1990 levels or to assess the impact of the inflow on Americans’ wages and housing.

None of the Republican legislators asked about Mayorkas’s creation of a growing population of indentured teenage migrant workers or the administration’s preference for more migration instead of more American births, or to explain how many migrants have died on their deadly trek to Mayorkas’s border.

This refusal to recognize the pocketbook impact of migration keeps donors happy — but it weakens the GOP’s support among swing voters.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pushed Mayorkas to defend his use of asylum law to open a huge doorway in the border: “If the asylum process were followed — by the law — you would turn people away [and] you would send them back once you ran out of detention [space],” he said.

U.S. President Joe Biden (L) greets Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas as he arrives to speak at the DHS 20th Anniversary Ceremony at DHS headquarters in Washington, DC, March 1, 2023 (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

Lee also criticized Mayorkas for his creation of a “parole pathway” to admit 600,000 economic migrants per year, above the limits set by Congress in 1990:

At the end of the day, it appears to me that you are not enforcing the law. You are redefining key statutory terms in order to obfuscate the fact that you’re not enforcing the law.  This is a fireable offense.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) pressured Mayorkas on his loose asylum rules and the parole pathway. The questions prompted Mayorkas to suggest that Kennedy would “shut down” the asylum policy.

Mayorkas defended the parole pathway for conjuring a flow of illegal workers into a claimed flow of legal workers:

Let me give you an example of what we have delivered ….  [The parole pathway] has led to an approximately 95 percent drop in the number of encounters in-between the ports of entry at our southern border, of Cubans, Haitians. Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Why would that be opposed when it is delivering precisely the result that you seek?

Mayorkas’s response simply ignored Americans’ civil right to the enforcement of the popular laws that protect American wage earners from investors’ use of cheaper foreign labor.

Kennedy responded:

Did you just parachute in from another planet, Mr. Secretary? Because you’re the only person in the Milky Way who believes that we’re not having massive, massive illegal immigration into America.

A federal judge has declared Mayorkas’s parole pathway to be illegal.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) berated Mayorkas without getting any useful data or admissions. “Your refusal to do your job is revolting,” he told Mayorkas.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.SC) prodded Mayorkas to tighten the asylum rules that Mayorkas is now using to let the migrants get entry and take U.S. jobs.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) slammed Mayorkas for operating a “concierge service for illegal immigrants.” but did not talk about the pocketbook damage done to his home-state voters.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) asked about the agency’s inadequate exclusion of “slave-produced textiles” manufactured in China.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) asked Mayorkas about the rapidly rising inflow of Chinese migrants.

The resident population of Chinese illegal migrants is rising rapidly because President Joe Biden’s deputies are not pressuring China to accept the return of deported migrants — or even of the Chinese criminals who have finished their U.S. jail sentence for crimes committed in the United States.

Amid the GOP distraction, Mayorkas repeatedly insisted that the immigration laws are “broken” — rather than unenforced — and repeatedly urged the inflow of more workers. “Unfortunately, our immigration system is not well designed to address the [investors’] need for labor [and] it is our hope that reform actually is legislated to address that issue,” Mayorkas said during the hearing.

The replace-Americans policy was repeatedly endorsed by Democrats.

“We have a labor problem,” claimed Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), adding: “We need more H-1, H-2A, and H-2B visas … to meet the needs that many of our employers have.”

Mayorkas agreed, saying:

We need to build safe, lawful, and orderly pathways so people do not place their lives in the hands of smugglers. We have to cut the smuggling organizations out and we have to reduce irregular migration and build lawful pathways.

Extraction Migration

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, 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 inflow 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 lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

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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