Joe Biden’s Border ‘Shutdown’ Preserves Massive Loopholes

By NEIL MUNRO

President Joe Biden’s much-touted pre-election border “shutdown” preserves multiple loopholes that allow unlimited mass economic migration into Americans’ workplaces and housing.

• At 2:00 p.m., Biden is expected to tout the made-for-TV policy, which allows — but does not require — curbs when more than 2,500 migrants rush across the open border and through the unfinished wall every day for a week.

  This means his border “shutdown” policy accepts the inflow of 75,000 illegal migrants per month — 900,000 migrants per year.

  That planned inflow of illegals adds up to roughly one illegal migrant for every four American births and is in addition to the inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants and 750,000 temporary workers allowed by Congress’s 1990 law.

  Yet the Biden plan also exempts a huge number of extra migrants who enter via his border loopholes. Those exemptions are already delivering at least 85,000 migrants across the border each month — or one million migrants per year — without approval from Congress.

  This means Biden’s border shutdown policy will allow the inflow of roughly 3.5 million legal, illegal, temporary, and quasi-legal migrants per year. That inflow adds up to roughly one extra migrant worker, renter, and consumer for every American birth.

  This nation-changing, wealth-shifting economic policy is very unpopular, even though it is strongly supported by investors, CEOs, and Wall Street.

  President Donald Trump’s campaign recognizes the pocketbook damage of migration. Biden’s unpopular policy is “flooding America’s labor pool with millions of low-wage illegal migrants who are directly attacking the wages and opportunities of hard-working Americans,” said a May statement from Trump’s campaign.

  White House officials briefed favored reporters about the new policy. Politico reported on January 14, shortly before the Biden speech:

  There will still be a number of exceptions, including for unaccompanied children, some victims of trafficking, migrants facing acute medical emergencies or imminent threats to their safety. Migrants who also have an appointment at a port of entry via Custom[s] and Border Protection’s smartphone app will still be processed. The Biden administration is currently processing roughly 1,500 migrants a day at official ports, and the president’s actions will not affect his humanitarian parole pathways established for certain migrants.

  In 2023, Biden allowed 138,000 migrants in via the “unaccompanied children” exemption. This door is kept open even though most of the “children” are youths seeking jobs in the American economy. The remainder are the left-behind children of illegal migrants, and their government-hand off to the migrants encourages the migrants to stay in the United States.

  The “victims of trafficking” exemption likely refers to girls and women who are being used as prostitutes in the nation’s population of at least 13 million illegal migrants. However, Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, may also use it to welcome more adults who are being trafficked by labor brokers.

   

  

  Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

   

  The third exemption — “migrants facing acute medical emergencies or imminent threats to their safety” — is likely small, but it provides an opening for U.S. non-profits to smuggle vulnerable migrants — such as women with sick children or pregnant women — through the border.

  The fourth exemption is huge —”1,500 per day” — and easily expanded. It covers “migrants who also have an appointment at a port of entry via Custom and Border Protection’s smartphone app.” That monthly “CBP-One” inflow is already 45,000 per month, and, if it is doubled to 90,000 per month, it will add another one million economic migrants per year.

  The fifth exemption is also huge and open-ended: “The president’s actions will not affect his humanitarian parole pathways established for certain migrants.” That quasi-legal inflow allows 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela via the narrow “humanitarian parole” exemption, as well as additional family reunification” migrants from several South American and Latin American countries.

  The reports do not mention the huge inflow of “gotaways” who sneak across the poorly guarded border. In 2023, about 670,000 migrants sneaked across Mayorkas’s mostly open border.

  

  

  The “shutdown” policy also ignores the growing population of white-collar workers who overstay their visas to keep working at Fortune 500 subcontractors.

  Very few illegals are sent home because Mayorkas has directed enforcement officials to mostly ignore illegals who do not commit felony crimes.

  The Biden policy reportedly does not provide any instructions to deport the rising population of unregistered gotaway illegals in the United States.

   

  Extraction Migration

  Since at least 1990, the federal government has quietly adopted a policy of extraction migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.

  The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, white-collar graduates, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.

  The rarely mentioned economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.

  The secretive economic policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.

  The colonialism-like policy has also damaged small nations and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.