America Last For Biden
By Joe Guzzardi
For the roughly 70 million disappointed America First voters, dark clouds have already formed over Capitol Hill. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s Attorney General and Department of Homeland Security Secretary candidates, rumored to be on his short list for those critically important posts, have political philosophies far afield from the mainstream.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is a leading contender to become the U.S. Attorney General. Before replacing AG Kamala Harris in Sacramento, Becerra was a 17-term U.S. Representative who represented Los Angeles, and at one time chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. During his tenure as California’s A.G., Becerra has sued the Trump administration over 100 times. Becerra’s primary anti-President Trump litigation targets have been immigration related, and are issues that are well within the administration’s legal authority – primarily federal law enforcement, sanctuary cities, amnesty, refugee resettlement, the southwest border wall and deferred action for childhood arrivals.
Becerra advocates for decriminalizing illegal immigration, and once said that unlawfully present foreign nationals don’t act “violently or in a way that’s harmful to people. And I would argue they are not harming people indirectly either.” Such a statement is an emotional defense of illegal immigration and ignores the well-documented crimes, many of them violent, that aliens have committed in California, and the U.S. worker job displacement that their presence represents. Illegal immigrant workers are covered at taxpayer expense by all the protectionsstate and federal law provide statewide for all employees. California employers have hired an estimated 1.6 million aliens, the majority of which work in nonagricultural industries. In addition to his previous 100-plus lawsuits against the Trump administration, Becerra has promised to sue over any lame duck executive orders the White House may issue.
The irony is that Becerra and Gov. Gavin Newsom have repeatedly violated 8 U. S. C. §1324, a felony to “encourage or induce an alien to come to, enter, or reside” unlawfully in the U.S. For decades, the toothless federal government has allowed California and its local authorities to violate immigration law, and go unpunished. Should Becerra ascend to the U.S. Attorney General’s office, expect even more tolerance of illegal immigration.
In another sobering announcement, Biden’s transition team appointed Ur Mendoza Jaddou and Cecilia Muñoz to its staff. Jaddou was once U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services counsel under then-President Barack Obama, and is currently the DHS Watch Director at America’s Voice. America’s Voice is one of Washington, D.C.’s most influential pro-immigration lobbies, and advocates for giving the nation’s illegal immigrant population, estimated from 11 million to 30 million people, a full path to citizenship. The establishment media cites the 11 million, but a more knowledgeable source, Mexico’s former ambassador to the U.S., puts the total at 30 million.
Before serving in the Obama White House, Muñoz spent two decades as the National Council of La Raza’s Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation. La Raza, now called Unidos US, has promoted loose borders and amnesty legislation since 1968.
Becerra, Jaddou and Muñoz are surely jockeying for a high-level Cabinet appointment. But even if Biden selects others, those three will have significant influence over the final choices. Immigration expertise isn’t required to predict the Biden team’s disastrous consequences on border security and enforcement. Among the first of President Trump’s America improvements to go may be his Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) wherein Mexico agreed to hold asylum seekers from countries other than Mexico until U.S. federal immigration courts adjudicated their claims.
When nationals from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and figured out that often-fraudulent asylum claims wouldn’t automatically mean release into the U.S. interior, they returned home. Analysts foresee a huge border surge that the coronavirus, deteriorating Central American economic conditions and the presumed lax Biden border policies have precipitated. Until President Trump, previous administrations had been unable to effectively manage border surges.
Biden’s immigration agenda is good for cheap labor-addicted employers, Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires who want no cap on H-1Bs, as well as other employment-based visas. The population increases that open borders create lead to more job competition, more school overcrowding, more urban sprawl and, for all but the 1% elite, a diminished quality of life. In Biden’s White House, corporate money will come first; Americans will finish last.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
