Border Chief Mayorkas: Equity Is U.S. 'Core Founding Principle'

Neil MunroApril 8, 2022

Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief says the “core founding principle” of the United States is “equity,” and that he is building an immigration system built on “equity.”

“It is all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country,” Alejandro Mayorkas declared at a meeting hosted by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

“We, as a Department of Homeland Security [DHS], are your Department of Homeland Security as much as anyone else’s and we need to live that in the equity that we demonstrate,” he told the mostly black audience.

“Equity” is a vague term being used by activists to call for government-controlled redistribution of wealth, jobs, and status throughout the United States’ increasingly diverse, chaotic, unequal, and divided society. For example, the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the term as “Equity is often related to justice or proportional fairness … Equality differs from equity in that it relates more to sameness or equal distribution.”

Mayorkas’s embrace of “equity” — not equality, or color-blind enforcement of Congress’s laws — seems to be shaping his policies at the DHS, including his selective enforcement of the nation’s popular immigration laws.

Mayorkas described a minor example of equity — his efforts to help poor black communities get access to federal aid:

Just a few weeks ago, I was in Detroit, Michigan, meeting with faith leaders — predominantly African American faith leaders — in talking about our grant program, our nonprofit Security Grant Program, which is designed to protect nonprofit organizations, to enable enabled them to secure themselves against an increasing threat landscape. And what I learned was that our grant program is very complicated. It is very difficult in some respects to access. And some of these just as much in need, and perhaps in greater need of the funds that we have to distribute, don’t have the resources to [hire] a grant-applicant professional … How can we break down those barriers? … How can we build for them the capacity that they might not otherwise have?

But Mayorkas’s promise of equity goes far beyond equal access to government funds — he is also applying “equity” to help foreign migrants take jobs and wages from lower-skilled Americans.

“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.

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“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.

Many advocacy groups are using “equity” claims to accelerate the inflow of non-white migrants and sexual diversities into Americans’ homeland, and also to reduce non-white deportations. “Just as Black people are more likely than white people to be targeted by police, research suggests that Black immigrants are also disproportionately vulnerable to immigration enforcement,” said an October 2020 statement by Vera.org.

Mayorkas is a wealthy, pro-migration zealot and is unlikely to feel any economic damage from the policies he inflicts on ordinary Americans. He is also wrapping his equity agenda for foreign migrants under the cloak of U.S. vague racial claims, saying in his Friday speech on equity:

The greatest terrorist-related threat that we face in the homeland is a threat of individuals drawn to violence because of ideologies of hate or false narratives propagated on social media and other online platforms. And the most prominent threat is a threat of white supremacists. And that came quite clearly to the surface when we saw over the past several months [threats against] historically black colleges and universities. We reached out in the department to the presidents of the HBCUs and requested that we be allowed to sit around the table with them to listen to what they were confronting, to understand the gravity of the threat that they face … its impact on their communities — the communities of students — and to be able to respond as they needed us to do, to have them around the table.

Mayorkas did not explain “ideologies of hate or false narratives.”

But the economic impact of the government’s extraction migration strategy has deeply damaged millions of Americans — and especially lower-skilled black and white Americans who have lost wages, jobs, and homes to a wave of imported replacement workers.

U.S. government policies — including loose borders — have extracted at least 15 million young, hard-working people from Mexico and Central America. Once transferred to the United States, the migrants are used as workers, consumers, and renters for U.S. investors. That population transfer hinders economic trade with the United States and makes it more difficult for the migrants’ home countries to grow out of poverty and chaos.

Mayorkas’s pro-migration policies are increasingly unpopular and politically dangerous to Joe Biden’s diverse and divided coalition.

For example, independent swing voters strongly oppose Biden’s decision to lift the Title 42 border barrier in late May, according to a Morning Consult poll of 2,003 registered voters. “With the political environment now in a much more dire state for Democrats due to persistent inflation, immigration threatens to transform the upcoming midterm elections from a defeat into a catastrophe,” according to an April 6 report by Morning Consult.

“Mayorkas needs to remember that his salary is paid for by American taxpayers, and it is his job to serve Americans and their best interests,” said a November 2021 post by Pawel Styrna, at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Instead, he chooses to focus primarily and, in fact, solely, on the desires and needs of foreign nationals,” he added.

“His is a textbook case of a government official openly and brazenly flouting his duties – and that has nothing to do with the classic Western understanding of justice,” Styrna wrote.

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations — for example, “Nation of Immigrants” — to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

The self-serving 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’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.

An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, splits foreign families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.

The extraction migration policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the United States from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-led empire of competing identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he insisted.

Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls.

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.