Mainers For Responsible Immigration

 Mark Morgan, former Director of ICE, and Customs and Border Protection addressed a Maine delegation recently and discussed the dismal situation on the southern border of the United States. He titled his talk

“Biden’s Border Crisis – Why Every State is a Border State”

Highlights of Mark Morgan Comments:

• Migrants from 157 of 195 countries of the world have been “encountered” at the southern border.
• This year there have been 2.5 million “encounters,” with an estimated 600,000 avoiding apprehension by the Border Patrol. and 400,000 apprehension, most of whom were released to the interior. So that totals 3.5 million people attempting illegal entry across the southern border.
• Criminal cartels have benefited by $96 billion
• 95% of fentanyl comes across our southern border
• 80% of Border Patrol agents time is spent on processing administrative requirements, not on enforcement.
• Title 42, which prohibits entry into the United States when the Director for Disease Control believes “there is a serious danger to the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States, is scheduled to be terminated May 23, 2022.
• Recent policy allows immigration officers to determination asylum cases, instead of immigration judges, which is ILLEGAL.
• “President Biden has abdicated his constitutional duties to protect the country.”

Sen Collins visited the southern border on May 26 to view, first hand, conditions there and the chaos that exists at the border.  She was with a group of U.S. senators, one of whom, Mike Braun of Indiana, tweeted: “When we had the Remain in Mexico policy we [had] 45 year record lows for border apprehensions.  Now, due to President Biden’s policies, the surge of illegal migrants at the border is the worst in 20 years.”

In its May 2021 report, Customs and Border Protection reported it had “encountered 180,034 persons attempting entry along the Southwest Border.”  This projects out to more than two million annually, far surpassing the 1.3 million apprehended in 2004, which was the highest number for the last two decades.

Sen. Collins commented that the “Border Patrol is overwhelmed, overworked and discouraged by the new policies.”  Those new policies include accepting into the country any, and all, unaccompanied alien children or UAC, who claim amnesty.

Sen. Collins’ final comment on the Border Patrol was that they are “putting themselves in danger each and every day to help secure our borders.  They need our help.  They need better policies from Washington.”

Better policies from Washington?  She is one of these denizens of Washington responsible for policy.  Is that the best she can do?  Those policies, as mentioned by Sen. Braun, are the reverse of former President Trump’s policies.

Why doesn’t Sen. Collings appeal to President Biden, and start demanding border security enforcement, and not the “Welcome Wagon” approach of this administration?  Disgraceful.

Representatives from the Maine Service Employees Association are demanding the state pay its workers a minimum wage of $15 per hour. They are right to want a living wage for workers at the bottom of the labor market. For too long employers under-cut the bargaining power of American workers by importing foreign workers through the many visa programs, and recently through the so-called refugee programs. The owners of capital – landlords, business owners – have gotten rich by flooding Maine communities with strangers, destroying social capital and culture.

The recent proposal by the White House to increase the time that asylum seekers have to wait to get a work permit caused an immediate reaction.

The proposal, announced by Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, would increase the time asylum seekers would have to wait to get a work permit, after filing a formal application, from 150 days to 365 days.

Cuccinelli commented that the current system was causing “delays for legitimate asylum seekers in need of humanitarian protection.” As the Press Herald has reported, Rep. Chellie Pingree and Sen. Angus King, along with local officials, were quick to criticize the proposed rule.

Thomas D. Homan, former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified last month to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee: “Even though over 85 percent of all Central Americans that arrive at our border claim fear, less than 10 to 15 percent get relief from our courts because they simply don’t qualify for asylum, or they don’t show up for their case. He also said those rates have changed little since 2015, and also testified that only about 1.6 percent of those denied asylum actually leave the country.

Taking in asylum seekers may seem to be the compassionate thing to do, but unrestricted entry is difficult to justify considering the low approval rate and the disruption to an already overloaded immigration system.

John Derbyshire’s recent essay regarding the increasing influence and coming dominance of China’s commercial, technical, and cultural power includes this gem:

It helps that the ChiComs have avoided the major stupidities of American and European governments this past twenty years. They have not squandered trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on futile wars in places of no importance. They have not opened China’s borders to tens of millions of foreigners selected on no rational principle, swamping the nation’s ethnic core, generating resentment and rancor.

It is interesting to note from newspaper reportage the amount of rancor generated by dealing with increasing diversity in our schools and workplaces. Most of this diversity comes from careless immigration policies and romantic insouciance about those policies. So rather than focusing on the 3Rs, our time and our children’s youth are wasted on endless wrangling over how to deal with the demographic disruption we’ve not only allowed, but continue to celebrate, despite daily evidence of its corrosion of societal progress and cohesion.

‘Welcoming’ Governor Digs Deeper Hole in Maine

The local newspaper highlighted the story of an immigrant entrenpeneur. His business is not anything that serves the needs of the larger community, nor brings some new technology or service. Rather it sells ethnic food to immigrants brought in to provide cheap labor to failing businesses.

This is not uncommon. A usual feature on the news is some immigrant who is providing services to other immigrants. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone.

It is difficult not to admire these individuals, but they really provided no benefit to the people of Maine. Contrary wise, they help support policies that suppress wages, fragment communities and strain natural resources. If there were a moratorium on immigration, eventually their businesses and services would not be needed.

So, naturally, these same industrious immigrants are advocates for more immigration.

There are businesses throughout Maine that continue to exist only because of a constant influx of cheap foreign labor. These businesses are the loudest about not being able to find enough workers. They can’t pay attractive wages because their product and market position is too weak to sustain increased costs. They need to keep wages low, and can’t afford to improve working conditions, so they lobby for refugees and impoverished immigrants who willingly work hard for low wages and long hours.

It would be better for all Mainers, especially for “working-class” Mainers, if the flow of cheap labor was shut-off and those business were allowed to fail, or forced by the market to increase wages. If and when they failed, the legacy workers would be available to more viable businesses. The labor shortage should be self-correcting, and should be a boon to workers. Lax immigration policies have distorted the workings of the Market, to the benefit of Capital and the detriment of Labor. Instead of increasing wages and a rising standard of living, we have stagnant wages and a declining quality of life.

Aside from the baleful economic consequences of mass immigration, all these new people degrade community trust and cohesion, drive up rents and taxes, increase congestion, consumption, litter and environmental degradation. Ultimately, quality of life should be measured not by GDP, but by human happiness. We would all be happier with fewer businesses in Maine, and a more stable and sustainable future.

Timothy Carney, in his book Alienated America states “Cohesive communities and regular work-place are both institutions of civil society. Institutions of civil society provide material resources such as pay and a support structure, but they also provide more abstract resources such as a sense of security and a sense of purpose. If pay and family stability go together, it’s because both depend on the the same thing: social capital.”

Mass immigration of the past fifty years has eroded pay and cohesive communities – the building blocks of the American Dream. It has depressed wages, while increasing the price of rent, tuition and other limited resources. What little sense of community remains is the small balance of social capital remaining from a balance saved by a stable demographic over a hundred years. If trends in mass immigration continue, we will be a society of untrusting strangers, conniving to grab what can be gotten, rather than building for future generations.