According to White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, the U.S.-Mexico is being shut down by migrants from Central America because the border officers are being forced to process the migrants instead of transporting them in trucks. “Why are we talking about closing the border? Because not for spite and not to … undo what’s happening but to simply say look, we need the [officers] from the ports of entry to go out and patrol in the desert where we don’t have any wall,” said Mulvaney.
Mulvaney has put the blame for the upcoming closures on the Democrats, and he has stated that the president has no choice but to make these steps, even though he’s been receiving resistance from big business. Mulvaney said: “We hate to say we told you so but we told you so. We need border security and we’re going to do the best we can with what we have. The Democrats will not give us any additional money to do this, they won’t give us any additional people, and importantly, they will not change the law that is acting as this giant magnet for people from South and Central America to come into this country.” He continued by saying: “It is clear that Democrats are not going to help us. So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that we’re turning to what some folks might think extreme measures. Because the way it’s supposed to work is not working. We’re supposed to fix this by changing the laws. Democrats won’t do that so we’re looking at cutting off aid [to Central American countries] and closing the borders,” continued Mulvaney.
In an interview with Fox News, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said: “Congress can fix the problem of immigration they failed to fix. We are in a meltdown. We are at the breaking point. Congress must act … and we need to send a message back to these countries too.” These statements come after Trump threatened to close the border on Friday.
This month, approximately 100,000 migrants are supposed to legally turn themselves in at the border, which includes roughly 50,000 children. It’s expected that there will be additional migrant men that will attempt to sneak past the border guards in order to obtain the coveted blue-collar American jobs. According to border officials, they fear that more than a million migrants will take Washington up on their offer to live and work in America. The implied invitation comes from Washington as they refuse to shut down the border, or even eliminate some of the numerous loopholes that make it easy for migrants to seek employment in the United States. These loopholes allow asylum-seeking migrants to look for employment once they are released. The loophole applies to those that have a slim chance of winning asylum, as well as those that tell officials at the border that they’re migrating to look for better job opportunities. According to data gathered from a 2018 Gallup survey, there are five million Central Americans that are expected to accept the invitation.
Democrats are set on preserving the loopholes, leading them to refer to the migration as a humanitarian crisis, even though the migrants have claimed that they’re looking for work and the crime rate has decreased in Central American countries. In an effort to preserve the loopholes, Judges that support open-border policies are knocking down new reforms for the border even before the benefits are discussed during a trial. They’re also slowly walking through the legal process to avoid getting rid of the loopholes. Business groups and investors are also pushing to preserve the loopholes because the migration allows them to have more workers, renters, and consumers.
The uneducated and poor migrants are rushing to the blue-collar jobs, neighborhoods, and schools, but the media tends to focus on the migrant children and their stories. The migrants looking for labor adds to the incredible number of people who end up staying in the United States on their visas for too long. They also add to the one million legal immigrants in the country, as well as, the one million migrants that have visas, which includes the H-2B laborers and H-1B graduates from college. These two million illegal and legal workers will allow employers to avoid paying more wages in 2019, even though Trump’s 2018 low-immigration “Hire American” policy created a 4% boost to blue-collar raises in 2017 and 2018. Even though Trump has the authority to put an end to legal migration, he hasn’t done anything about it, most likely because it would make his necessary business donors angry.
Mulvaney is also putting pressure on Mexico to help stop the neverending chain of people moving through Mexico. “We need Mexico to solidify its southern border, we need — we need the — the northern triangle countries to do more about not allowing their people in Mexico. They could help us. We need them to do that. If not, it makes very little sense for us to continue to send them aid,” said Mulvaney. As it seems, The Mexican president will be offering his cooperation. On Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said: “We are going to help, to collaborate. We want to have a good relationship with the government of the United States. We are not going to argue.”
According to a Sunday report from The Washington Post, protests from business groups against the closure of the border are quickly approaching. According to the president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, Lance Jungmeyer: “First, you’d see prices rise incredibly fast. Then . . . we would see layoffs within a day or two. This is not going to help border security.”
Elected officials and business leaders from Laredo, Texas held conference calls over the weekend in regards to the threat of the border being closed. The executive vice president of the international division of Laredo-based IBC bank, Gerry Schwebel, has said that the traffic between the U.S. and Mexico has been restricted at times, but not for long periods and only when there has been an emergency, such as security checks or national disasters. He has said that even a slowdown at the border could cause shortages of services and goods, which would lead to consumers paying more money. “If you want to create an economic crisis, then shutting down the border will create an economic crisis,” said Schwebel.
Approximately four million young Americans join the workforce every year after they graduate from school. Then, the federal government adds about 1.1 million legal immigrants, 1.5 million white-collar guest workers, 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, as well as eight million illegals into the mix. Because of the catch-and-release rules created by Congress, the government will most likely allow 350,000 migrant workers into the country in 2019 to look for jobs, while approximately 500,000 migrants attempt to sneak past Border Patrol or overstay their visas. Using legal and illegal immigration to boost the economy for investors causes wealth to be shifted from young people to older investors by flooding the market with cheap labor. This policy forces American workers to compete for even the low-paying jobs, it reduces investments in technology, widens wealth gaps, increases the number of burdens on local and state taxes, harms education, and pushes Americans from seeking employment in high tech investments.
