DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen Predicts 900,000 Border Apprehensions This Year

Neil Munro

Roughly 900,000 migrants will be registered crossing the border this year, Homeland Defense secretary Kirstjen Nielsen predicted in congressional testimony Wednesday.

“We are on track for this year, for 900,000 apprehensions at the border,” she told the House’s Committee on Homeland Security, one day after officials revealed that 76,000 migrants flooded across the border in February 2019. 

The nation’s border defense system “is clearly breaking,” Nielsen told GOP Rep. Michael Guest.

“We need a barrier. We cannot take operational control of the border without it,” she said.

Nielsen’s prediction of 900,000 new migrants does not include migrants who sneak past the border guards, nor migrants who overstay their legal tourist or work visas, nor the resident population of at least 11 million illegal migrants.

In addition, the 900,000 number does not include the expected inflow of one million legal immigrants or the continued residency of at least two million visa workers during 2019, even as four million young Americans leave schools in 2019 to look for well-paying jobs amid the flood of foreign workers. 

Nielsen’s statement came as nearly all Democratic Senators — and some GOP Senators — plan to vote against President Donald Trump’s emergency plan for construction of a border wall.

The news also comes shortly after the Democratic and GOP legislators drafted a 2019 budget that added at least $415 million to provide the migrants with food, transportation, legal advice, and medical care as they cross the border in search of U.S. jobs, residency, schooling, and taxpayer aid. 

The prediction also comes as Democrats, judges, and pro-migration activists fight to preserve the legal loopholes which allow migrants who bring children to walk through the border wall and disappear into communities of illegal migrants.

Migrants frankly state their goals. The Washington Post interview a Guatemalan migrant who brought his son up to the border to help him reach an arranged job at a pizza restaurant in Pennsylvania: 

Across rural Guatemala, [Dionel] Martinez said, word has spread that those who travel with a child can expect to be released from U.S. custody. Smugglers were offering two-for-one pricing, knowing they just needed to deliver clients to the border — not across it — for an easy surrender to U.S. agents.

“If this continues, I don’t think there will be anyone left in Guatemala,” Martinez joked. The men from his village near the town of Chiquimula were all leaving, he said, bringing a child with them.

Martinez said he used the family home as collateral. He had four months to pay off the $2,500. “I need a way to feed my family, and this is it,” he said.

In the United States free-market economy, any inflow of foreign workers — either legal or illegal, either permanent or temporary – cuts Americas’ jobs and wages, and it transfers the lost wages to CEOs and investors.

This federal policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.

That annual inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as the population of two million visa workers and eight million working illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees, especially the wages earned by the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.

The federal government’s cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.

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