Border Emergency Is ‘Care of Children Crisis,’ Progressives Claim

A man carries a child on his shoulders as Honduran migrants, part of the second caravan to
ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Pro-migration advocates are trying to portray the massive Central American migration across the U.S. border as a childcare problem for government rather than a threat to blue-collar wages, civic society, and the rule of law.

“We don’t have a security crisis; we have a care of children crisis,” claimed Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an advocate at the American Immigration Council, which is an education and advocacy group for the immigration lawyers.

“That’s the issue facing Trump & the nation: How to deal with the kids,” said a tweet from Maria Sacchetti, a Washington Post reporter who writes about migrants’ concerns.

“We should have ‘zero tolerance’ for policies that result in this,” said a tweeted response to Sachetti from Douglas Rivlin, a spokesman for the pro-migration progressive group, America’s Voice.

The attempted shift is reflected by Sachetti’s article in the Washington Post, which focused readers on a single migrant child whose job-seeking father brought him into the United States:

Byron Xol was riding in a van, his Pokémon figurines in tow, heading to his fifth home in 10 months. The 9-year-old Guatemalan, separated from his father last year at the border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown, had been stuck in a cycle of moving from place to place in Texas while federal authorities tried to find him a place to live until he could be reunited with his family.

But before the van could reach San Antonio, a federal judge issued an emergency order last week blocking the government from taking him anywhere. U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ordered Byron returned to his previous shelter, citing a child psychiatrist who said moving the boy again could amount to “yet another damaging, frightening and discouraging trauma.”

…

Taken together, 95,000 children and teenagers crossed into the United States between October and February, making up 35 percent of the 268,000 people taken into custody, a higher percentage than in past years, the official said.

Sachetti’s shift towards children was also cheered by Tom Jawetz, who oversees migration policy for the Democrats’ main think tank, the Center for American Progress.

Sachetti’s article minimizes the mention of the many legal loopholes that Congress, progressives, and judges have created to reward job-seeking migrants who bring children to the border, and she plays up the progressives’ unfounded claim to be rescuing migrating children. She writes:

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said this week that children are increasingly “being used as pawns” to help adults gain entry into the United States, and she warned that the immigration system is nearing “meltdown.” Advocates and Democrats contend that child migration has been building for years and that the U.S. government has failed to adapt.

The effort to shift the focus from the adult economic migrants to their children would help Democrats and progressives who gained politically in 2018 when they worked with the media to portray President Donald Trump’s border policies as a deliberate plan to split families. That temporary win has encouraged yet more migration, which may bring in 900,000 people this year.

The focus on children is also a status benefit for progressives, partly because many view themselves as noble champions of distant migrants, in contrast to Trump’s “Hire American” policy, which favors their nearby fellow Americans.

A shift in focus from adults to children would also help business groups, who gain hundreds of thousands of wage-cutting workers as the migration out of Central America brings unskilled adults, mothers, teenagers, and children into blue-collar workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools. The extra labor is especially valuable for investors because labor shortages in Trump’s “Hire American” economy are forcing companies to raise wages for Americans.

The migrants are also valuable to business because they serve as consumers and as a stimulus to government spending. For example, migrants’ children are entitled to use American schools — despite the evidence of harm to American kids — thereby boosting education spending, which quickly reaches companies.

Similarly, migrants help spike demand for apartments, which boosts rent even higher in California and other states.

Any shift in focus towards the children — rather than the job-seeking migrants — would also help the immigration lawyers, who are on track to gain up to 90,000 additional customers in March:

But, like most establishment media sites, the Washington Post does not cover the economics of immigration nor the impact of immigration on Americans. Instead, the newspaper’s college-educated staff view migration sympathetically through the eyes of migrants, despite the deep economic and civic harm to Americans who have not graduated from the journalists’ universities.

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after high school or university. The federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of at least 1.5 million white-collar guest workers and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and it also tolerates about eight million illegal workers.

In 2019, because of catch and release rules mandated by Congress and the courts, the federal government also will likely release at least 350,000 Central American laborers into the U.S. job market, even as at least 500,000 more migrants sneak past U.S. border defenses or overstay their visas.

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

This cheap labor economic policy forces Americans to compete even for low wage jobs, it 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:

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