From ... in Social issues — Jun 29, 2022

Media Whitewashes DHS Mayorkas's Role in Migrant Deaths

Reporters at establishment media outlets are whitewashing the U.S.

government’s role in the lethal decision by 51 economic migrants to climb into a trailer truck that would carry them to their deaths in San Antonio, 150 miles inside the United States.

The New York Times‘ June 28 article, for example, did not mention President Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, nor mention any of his border-opening policies that encourage economic migrants to risk their fortunes and lives to get U.S. jobs. Instead, reporters James Dobbins, Miriam Jordan, and J. David Goodman focused the blame on the cartels that make money by guiding and relaying migrants through the pathways opened up by Mayorkas. But their article admitted that the location where the truck was found “had been a spot for migrant drop-offs since at least the 1990s.” Mayorkas was also left out of The Washington Post‘s June 28 article which said, “The deaths come amid a record migration influx across the Mexico border, with the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures showing immigration arrests in May rose to the highest levels ever documented.” Without mentioning Mayorkas’s policies, the article by reporters Eva Ruth Moravec, Arelis R. Hernández, Nick Miroff, and Maria Sacchetti, sketched out the recent death toll:

The U.S. government does not maintain a comprehensive count of migrant deaths along the border, because bodies and remains recovered by local or state officials are not always added to federal tallies. At least 650 people died in 2021 attempting to cross Mexico’s border with the United States, higher than in any year since 2014, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration. Instead, the Washington Post article suggested that the rising deaths are caused by Americans’ popular and beneficial border-protection laws, saying: Greg Casar, the Democratic nominee to fill a congressional seat representing parts of San Antonio and Austin, said the United States can prevent deaths by creating safer ways for migrants, such as expanding asylum processing on the borders or passing an immigration bill so that their U.S. relatives can sponsor them for residency.

The D.C.-focused website Politico posted an article by the Associated Press, which also carefully ignored Mayorkas while reporting, “It was the worst tragedy to claim the lives of migrants smuggled across the border from Mexico.” The article made sure to blame Americans’ border laws, not Mayorkas’s policy of cutting migration paths through the border laws that protect the wages, wealth, and working conditions of American families: Some [pro-migration] advocates drew a link to the Biden administration’s border policies. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, wrote that he had been dreading such a tragedy for months. “With the border shut as tightly as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed into more and more dangerous routes,” he wrote on Twitter. Mayorkas got a passing mention in a June 28 article by RollCall.com, which said: “Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said late Monday that he had spoken with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose department is working to alert the families of the victims and investigate the incident.” But that article by Caroline Simon allowed Democrats to blame the border laws, not Mayorkas’s many loopholes, saying: “Democratic lawmakers blamed the public health directive known as Title 42, which has been used for more than two years to expel asylum-seekers, for causing migrants to turn to dangerous alternatives.” Mayorkas was not mentioned in USA Today‘s June 28 article about the 51 deaths by reporters Christine Fernando, Cady Stanton, Claire Thornton, and Celina Tebor. Instead, the newspaper allowed President Joe Biden to shift the blame to the cartels that carry willing, paid customers who rationally hope to get jobs in Biden’s economy — like at least one million other migrants who arrived in 2021: “While we are still learning all the facts about what happened and the Department of Homeland Security has the lead for the investigation, initial reports are that this tragedy was caused by smugglers or human traffickers who have no regard for the lives they endanger and exploit to make a profit,” [Biden] said. That rational hope for jobs is underlined by media reports about the migrants, including the report from USA Today: Authorities confirmed that one of the surviving Mexicans from the trailer was José Luis Guzmán Vásquez, 32, from San Miguel Huautla in the southern state of Oaxaca, according to Aida Ruiz García, director of the Oaxacan Institute for Migrant Attention. A cousin, Alejandro López, told Milenio television that the family worked in farming and construction and migrated because “we don’t have anything but weaving hats, palms and handicrafts.” Reuters also described the same motivations in a June 29 report from Oaxaca City, which is “a remote mountainous community in southern Mexico, where a single telephone connects a few indigenous families to the outside world”: The last time [Javier] Flores called his family was June 19, when he told them he had already crossed the border and was hiding in a house in Texas, according to Velasco. Flores’ family is now anxiously hoping for news that he is alive. “He told me he was going to look for a better life,” Flores’ mother, Virgilia Lopez, told Reuters. “To send his kids to school, help them get ahead and have a better future.” Metro.co.UK reported on June 29: Carla and Griselda Carac Tambriz – originally from the Colcajá canton, Nahualá, Sololá – died in the truck which may have been carrying as many as 100 people across the Mexican border into the US. One of the youngsters reportedly said before embarking on their journey: ‘Let’s achieve our dreams and also help our family.’ The girls’ identities were confirmed to Guatemalan-based newspaper El Metropolitano by immigration consultant Fernando Castro Molina on Tuesday afternoon. On Twitter, Border chief Mayorkaas posted a statement that admitted many migrants take the dangerous journey up to the U.S. border, through the many loopholes in the border he is supposed to guard: Mayorkas did not announce any plans to reduce the incentive for migrants to make the dangerous journey to U.S. jobs and homes. Migrants are dying at sea, on highways, in deserts, rivers, jungles, and snow while Mayorkas repeatedly declares his support for migration into the United States.

The “core founding principle” of the United States is “equity,” and he is building an immigration system built on “equity,” Mayorkas declared at an April 2022 meeting hosted by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. “We are building an immigration system that is designed to ensure due process, respect human dignity, and promote equity,” Mayorkas tweeted in August 2021, as he sketched out his plans for easy asylum rules that would encourage a mass migration of poor job-seekers into Americans’ homeland. “Justice is our priority,” Mayorkas declared at a November 2021 Senate hearing, adding, “That includes securing our border and providing relief to those [migrants] who qualify for it under our laws.” Illegals can remain in the United States to compete for jobs and housing, as long as they do not commit violent crimes, Mayorkas said in January 2022. “Unlawful presence in the United States, alone, will not be a basis for immigration enforcement action ... it is a matter of justice and equity as well,” he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington. Mayorkas described his “identity” as a champion for migrants in his speech to the 2021 American Constitutional Society (ACS) national convention: The element of dignity [and] the rule of law: Those are two foundational guideposts as I seek to lead an agency, as we, as servants of the law, seek to bring justice in whatever we do. And here in the Department of Homeland Security, I think that must guide everything that we do. Extraction Migration Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs. This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force. Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, equality-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The extraction migration economic policy is hidden behind a wide variety of noble-sounding excuses and explanations. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants” that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations. But the colonialism-like economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it extracts human-resource wealth from the poor home countries.

The migration policy also minimizes shareholder pressure on companies to build up complementary trade with poor countries.

The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another. .

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