President Joe Biden’s border agencies are preparing reception centers to help a huge inflow of perhaps 800,000 family migrants this year, along with a record inflow of unaccompanied children and a growing wave of single men, according to media reports.
The Washington Post reported March 28 that officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expect:
… roughly 500,000 to 800,000 migrants to arrive as part of a family group during the 2021 fiscal year that ends in September, a quantity that would equal or exceed the record numbers who entered in 2019, according to government data reviewed by The Washington Post. Officials are now racing to find facilities to house these families ahead of their release, along with additional staff to process an increase in humanitarian and asylum claims.
The extra facilities are being used to provide legal advice and paperwork to help the migrants move permanently into Americans’ labor markets and housing markets.
The reports do not describe any steps the federal government is taking to deter, stop, or reduce the inflow. The inflow will generate billions of dollars in smuggling revenue for coyotes and for the drug-smuggling cartels that control access to the U.S. border — and plus many billions in extra revenue and profits for U.S. companies.
In fact, Biden’s deputies, including border chief Alejandro Mayorkas, have already dropped nearly all of President Donald Trump’s anti-migration policies. Those policies allowed officials to quickly fly nearly all migrants back to their home countries, often 2,000 miles distant.
Under Mayorkas, officials have quickly reduced the share of family migrants who are rejected under the Title 42 anti-coronavirus measure to under one-in-six per day. Trump’s appointees used the Title 42 rule to block nearly all migrants.
The Wall Street Journal reported March 26 that the number of children and teens delivered to the border for entry under the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) doorway “will rise substantially for at least the next two months, according to internal projections.” According to the report:
The government estimates that about between 18,600 and 22,000 children could cross the border in April. For May, officials are estimating the figure could rise to roughly between 21,800 and 25,000.
Border Patrol officials have said they expect taking more than 16,000 children into custody this month, a record for any month at the border since at least 2010, according to government data. In February, the figure was about 9,300, up from 5,700 in January.
If just 20,000 young migrants per month use this UAC route, that would add 240,000 migrants to the year’s inflow.
On March 24, Breitbart News reported 130,000 additional migrants had sneaked across the border since October 1. That number is almost four times as many migrants as in 2020, when an estimated 69,000 migrants crossed illegally.
But these record numbers may wildly underestimate the number of foreigners who push their way through Biden’s and Mayorkas’ half-open doors.
Roughly 42 million people south of Texas want to migrate into the United States, said a March 24 warning from Jim Clifton, the chairman and CEO of the Gallup polling company.
The share of families, UACs, and adults change in each year’s inflow.
This year, there is evidence more families are sending older children through the UAC door while the fathers and young men sneak over the wall until they can get transport to go north. Most media coverage treats the different streams as unconnected, but the migrants share a cellphone communications network that keeps them in close contact with each other, the coyotes, and their illegal-migrants families already living in the United States.
Mayorkas is a zealous proponent of the Cold War claim that the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants” and is encouraging the migrants by rewriting regulations and policies to widen small side doors in U.S immigration law.,
The law allows roughly 1 million legal immigrants per year, just as 4 million Americans turn 18. But Mayorkas is following the law as he welcomes a theoretically unlimited inflow of migrants via the side doors for asylum, UACs, parolees, and refugees.
Amid the inflow, Mayorkas has also disengaged the regulatory brakes on the inflow of young migrants. For example, he has told illegal migrants they need not fear arrest if they pay coyotes and cartels to deliver their children to government agencies for subsequent pickup. He has also rejected proposals to exclude older, job-seeking teenagers from the separate UAC migration process.
The pro-migration policies set by Mayorkas are reviving the “extraction migration” economic policy that was largely blocked in 2019 by President Trump.
The Mayorkas policy is pulling many migrants — old and young, work-ready or sick — out of Central American and into the U.S. economy, where they spur economic activity by serving as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters.
Each additional poor migrant is an economic boon for U.S. employers and investors — but an economic loss for employers and taxpayers. For example, older migrants boost government healthcare spending, much to the advantage of healthcare companies. Child migrants increase K-12 education spending, much to the advantage of teachers and companies that sell school supplies. Adult migrants work, eat, buy things, and sleep, so creating additional revenue for employers, groceries, retailers, and renters.
The costs, however, are borne by working Americans and their children. Americans’ wages are pressured down, their workplace training and investment are diverted, their housing prices are pushed upwards, and their schools have to deal with many migrants who do not speak English or who prefer to get jobs.
These southern migrants tend to impact blue-collar Americans of all colors. However, U.S. graduates are damaged by the inflow of foreign white-collar workers via different side doors in the nation’s immigration laws.
The costs of migration are also imposed on people in migrant-sending countries. Many migrants are shamed and pressured into taking the dangerous trek northwards. The resulting loss of young people also minimizes pressure for political reform of the corrupt, authoritarian countries.
But the process is also used by progressives to let them pose as champions of the migrants who have been forced from their countries by the progressives’ support for extraction migration.