Kamala Harris Channels Mayorkas at the Border: More Migrants, Less Chaos
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Kamala Harris went to the southern border on Friday and channeled the phrases, policies, and promises of the current pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
She embraced Mayorkas’s strategy of reducing the deaths and chaos of illegal migration by simply opening more doors for those migrants to enter the United States, legally or not. “We understand that many people are desperate to migrate to the United States. Our system must be orderly and secure, and that is my goal. That is my goal,” she said without saying if she wants more or less migrants to enter the United States.
Her phrases match the language used by Mayorkas as he exploits loopholes and judicial deference to encourage more than ten million legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and temporary migrants since 2021.
The disastrous results of his “orderly and open” policy include housing inflation, wage cuts, technology slowdowns, more crime, civic uproar, and bitter political conflict that may see the return of former President Donald Trump to the White House.
Harris used the speech to woo swing voters who are worried about her weak border record and also to get television-ready photos of herself looking tough on the border:
Unsurprisingly, establishment media outlets portrayed her speech as “tough,” downplayed the contradictions, and hid the underlying economic strategy of cheap-labor migration.
“Vice President Kamala Harris delivered one of her party’s toughest speeches on immigration and border policy in a generation,” said the New York Times.
“Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign on Friday proposed new border restrictions that would go further than the emergency rules the Biden administration deployed in June,” the Washington Post reported, adding:
Harris will propose a lower daily threshold for crossings and says that it must be met for a longer period before opening the asylum system, according to a campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a plan that had not been formally announced. The official declined to provide specifics.
The asylum change has been taken to court by the ACLU, and it likely needs approval from Congress, where Democrats have pushed hard to dramatically expand the asylum inflow.
Harris did not criticize the massive pocketbook, civic, and political costs of Mayorkas’s elite-backed policies. Instead, she promised to continue Mayorkas’s delivery of cheap labor for the Democrats’ “Bidenomics” economic strategy while she plagiarized Mayorkas’s speeches and statements:
The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them, and I take that responsibility very seriously. We are also a nation of immigrants. The United States has been enriched by generations of people who have come from every corner of the world to contribute to our country and to become part of the American story. And so we must reform our immigration system to ensure that it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger.
…
We must ensure that our country remains strong and competitive, which includes fixing our broken immigration system. And let me be clear, I reject the false choice that suggests we must either choose between securing our border or creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly and humane. We can and we must do both. We must do both. And we need clear and legal pathways for people seeking to come into our country. And we must make our current system work better. For example, it can take years for asylum claims to be decided. Well, this is a problem we can solve, including by hiring more asylum officers and expanding processing centers in people’s home countries.
Harris’s cooperation with Mayorkas’s business-backed, pro-migration stands in contrast to Trump’s increasingly populist messaging on migration. On Thursday, he spoke to reporters in New York, saying:
They flooded the job market with low-wage migrants. But in many cases, migrants also have criminal records, murder, drug dealing, so many different things, a lot of human traffickers, and it’s mostly human trafficking in women [for prostitution]. Last month, American-born workers lost 1.3 million jobs.
…
[Migrants] are taking jobs of the black population at levels that they’ve never seen before. Hispanics also are suffering, and the families are suffering. They go out, they have a job, and they’ve lost a job to an illegal migrant.
At the border, Harris repeated her campaign promise to post an additional border agent for every five miles along the 2,000-mile border even as she also promised to welcome more legal migrants, stating, “I strongly supported the comprehensive border security bill written last year, written last year, as you know, by a bipartisan group of senators. … That bill would have hired 1,500 more border agents and officers.
She promised to set a policy that would narrow asylum rights at the border, even as she also promised to sign the Senate’s border security bill, would create a fast-track asylum route to jobs and citizenship for an unlimited number of migrants:
I will take further action to keep the border closed. Between ports of entry, those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from reentering for five years. We will pursue more severe criminal charges against repeat violators, and if someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry and, instead, crosses our border unlawfully, they will be barred for serving asylum.
On fentanyl smuggling, she declared, “We must tackle this issue from every angle because our highest charge must be to protect the lives of our people.”
But, like Mayorkas, she pointedly refused to threaten the Mexican or Chinese governments that allow the mass manufacture and delivery of fentanyl poison into Americans’ communities:
RELATED — CNN’s Tapper: Harris Took a Different Border Stance When She Thought It Was Politically Beneficial to Do So
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