Washington Post: Border Rush May Hit 100,000 Migrants in March

Honduran migrants heading to the United States with a second caravan wait in Agua Caliente
JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/Getty
Neil Munro

The cross-border migrant inflow may reach 100,000 people in March, according to the Washington Post.

“The number of migrants taken into custody last year jumped 39 percent from February to March, and a similar increase this month would push levels to 100,000 detentions or more,” the Washington Post reported March 4. The paper continued:

U.S. court restrictions on the government’s ability to keep children in immigration jails — and the sheer volume of people arriving — have left Homeland Security agencies [on the border] defaulting increasingly to the overflow model Trump deplores as “catch-and-release.”

An inflow of 100,000 per month brings migration up towards the levels encouraged by former President George W. Bush before his economic bubble and 2008 crash.

The establishment’s open borders welcome is extracting wealth and political stability from Central American countries. Poor farmers and workers are mortgaging their homes and land to fund their travel to get the government-arranged “catch-and-release” welcome which is being offered to migrants who bring their children.

The Washington Post reported:

[Dionel] Martinez said he paid 30,000 Guatemalan quetzals, about $2,500, to a “coyote” smuggling guide. It was a cheap rate, but it meant that he and his son traveled through Mexico in trucks, like cargo.

Across rural Guatemala, 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.

President Donald Trump’s effort to stop illegal migration has been blocked by judges eager to preserve catch-and-release policies set under President Barack Obama, by progressives who are eager to invite the world’s poor into Americans’ homeland, and by business-first Republicans who are eager to aid business and to avoid conflict with Democrats.

Trump initially pushed the cross-border flow down to 16,000 in April 2017. But the migrants — aided by the coyotes, cartels, and American immigration lawyers — have learned how to exploit the catch-and-release rules, which have been created for their benefit by Congress and the courts.

At every turn, this establishment alliance has blocked Trump’s efforts to close the loophole, deter migrants, build a wall, quickly process migrants’ asylum claims, deter stealth crossings, and bargain for political compromises.,

The establishment’s opposition to border protections provides extra cheap wage-cutting workers, imports more revenue-boosting consumers, transports more mothers onto U.S. soil, and busses more children into blue-collar schools, regardless of costs, crime and casualties.

The rising population of migrants also provides the establishment with more political chits they can play to minimize future border curbs, and also to prevent Trump from pushing his lower immigration/higher wage Four Pillars reform plan.

That reform plan was blocked in 2018 after Trump lost his political leverage by agreeing to sign a tax cut before signing an immigration reform. His appointees hide whenever his pro-American reform message needs to be declared before cameras and Congress.

Now the establishment pressure is turning Trump away from his 2016 mandate for pro-American immigration reform.

He is echoing business’s demand for “merit” immigration of foreign college graduates, partly because his “Hire American” policy is successfully pressuring employers to raise voters’ wages and to invest in American-made, productivity-boosting machinery.

“We need an immigration policy that’s going to be great for our corporations and our great companies,” Trump said at the March 3 CPAC convention. “Now, we want people to come in, we need workers to come in, but they’ve got to come in legally and they’ve got to come in through merit.”

Amid the border rush, Trump’s lawyers are still trying to overcome the 2015 Flores catch-and-release court decision, to quickly repatriate border crosses, and to quickly process asylum claims. Officials are still gradually extending the “Remain in Mexico” plan, which requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their claims are heard by judges, but that plan’s potential can be blocked by Mexican officials and California judges.

Central and South Americans include tens of millions of rational young men and women who know the border is being held open by Democrats and Republicans, judges and employers.

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 also 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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