DHS's Alejandro Mayorkas Builds Escalator for Asylum Migrants

Neil MunroMarch 25, 2022

President Joe Biden’s border chief has released draft rules that will allow low-level officials to quickly and quietly award the huge prize of asylum and citizenship to myriad economic migrants, without oversight from judges or Congress.

“What they’re doing is giving low-level bureaucrats authority equivalent to Congress as a whole to decide how many foreigners should move to the United States and become American citizens,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Officials “say it’s streamlining the process, which it is truly not,” Krikorian said. “The goal of the regulation is to dramatically increase the number of people successfully getting asylum and to speed that process up as much as possible.”

In 2021, Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, allowed more than 1 million economic migrants across the southern border, alongside the legal inflow of myriad visa workers and roughly 1 million legal immigrants. The inflow adds about two million people to the nation every year, as approximately 4 million Americans begin searching for jobs.

He is a Cuban-born, pro-migration zealot. The regulation is the centerpiece of his bureaucratic campaign to build a network of new migration pathways that operate outside the numerical limits set by Congress, and alongside the labor-trafficking networks run by the drug cartels.

The 512-page March 24 regulation converts the preliminary “Credible Fear Interview” process for new arrivals into a fast-track, full-scale asylum hearing, where migrants can get political asylum in a face-to-face interview with a low-level agency official.

Under current rules, migrants can ask for a Credible Fear Interview. If approved, they can stay in the country for a few years while a courtroom judge decides if their evidence justifies the award of asylum. The award of asylum is a huge prize — it allows migrants the right to take jobs, rent homes, become a citizen, and bring relatives into the United State via chain migration.

“This will only encourage more illegal immigration and fraudulent asylum claims, which is the Biden administration’s end goal,” said a statement from Dan Stein, the president of the Federation of American Immigration Reform.

The mass inflow cuts Americans’ wages and pushes up rents, but it grows Wall Street values for the business groups that fund the pro-migration advocacy by progressives.

The new rule likely will face a lawsuit by advocates for Congress’ authority over immigration policy.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) persuaded corporate reporters to portray the new border doorway as a modest streamlining of the current process.

The New York Times reported March 24:

Under the new policy, which the administration released on Thursday as an interim final rule, some migrants seeking asylum will have their claims heard and evaluated by asylum officers instead of immigration judges.

The goal, administration officials said, is for the entire process to take six months, compared with a current average of about five years.

The Washington Post reported March 24:

“There will be a very careful, slow ramp-up of cases into this system,” said a USCIS official who briefed reporters on the condition that the official would not be identified. “We do not anticipate having a large number of individuals placed in this process in the first weeks and months as well make sure the process functions the way we anticipate that it should.”

CBS reported:

According to people familiar with the deliberations, the administration has considered erecting campus-like processing centers to screen asylum-seekers in a more humane setting than Customs and Border Protection holding facilities, which are not designed to house migrants past three days. No such facilities have yet been erected.

But “this is pushing the authority further down in the bureaucracy to decide who gets to live permanently in the United States,” said Krikorian. He continued:

Granting asylum is an awesome power because it represents an end-run around [Congress’] legal caps on [annual legal] immigration, and giving that power to relatively low-level bureaucrats, is really problematic.

It will be hard for them to resist the temptation to grant asylum profligately, because of the psychic rewards they’ll get from it. They’ll be able to they’ll get a warm and fuzzy feeling by approving far more asylum claims than they should be approving.

The pending asylum-award process will be adjudicated by pro-migration advocates in DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency (USCIS).

The new process does not significantly curb or shrink other avenues towards asylum, Krikorian said. For example, if a migrant fails to persuade the USCIS worker, they can still use the existing multi-layered process to ask judges for asylum, and can then appeal a judicial rejection, he said:

They can still then go to a judge because it’s basically a “Heads I win, tails you lose” regulation.” It is an extra bite at the apple — and the initial bite by USCIS asylum officers will not be an adversarial process the way it is in an immigration court. It will be just a “Hold my hand and tell me where the bad man touched you” interview.

“It’s set up to maximize the share of people getting asylum,” he said. “This is yet another way anti-borders forces can pry open the borders of the United States.”

Pro-migration groups are pushing asylum rules far beyond their original goal, Krikorian said:

Asylum is a profound even existential threat to developed countries. It is a 70-year-old institution that has that was created in a completely different world, at the beginning of the Cold War … when it was only applied to a handful of Russian ballerinas.

But Mayorkas and others are using asylum law to expand migration into the United State, beyond the annual numbers set by Congress in 1990. For example, Mayorkas is reportedly drafting a regulation to expand the justifications for getting asylum to include a fear of non-political crime.

Mayorkas’ regulations are “an attempt to bypass Congress and administratively turn the Emma Lazarus poem into law,” Krikorian added.

The 1883 poem by Lazarus has no legal status but is championed by open-border progressives. It says:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

Only about one-third of Americans accept the “Nation of Immigrants” narrative.

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“We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” said a Mayorkas ally, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA). He told the New York Times on March 21:

Why are [our politics] so polarized? I believe it is that we [progressives] are trying to do something remarkable. When my parents came to the United States, the Immigration and Naturalization Act had just passed. Before that, they didn’t let Indians basically come to America. Immigration was 90 percent European. Today it’s about 15 percent European. We’re a country that is 60 percent white non-Hispanic. We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world. And you’re telling me that was going to be some [peaceful] linear line from [President Barack] Obama onwards? Give me a break. It is hard what we’re doing.

So we’re polarized because we’re fighting about different ways of life. We’re fighting about different cultures, what should America be? And it’s a tough time, and it’s time we’re [also] stress[ed] with economic dislocation, with jobs going offshore.

The new regulation “clearly imposes a cost on Americans because it’s it’s increasing immigration,” Krikorian said.

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations 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 harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and shoves tens of millions of Americans out of the labor force.

Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, reduces their political clout, undermines U.S. 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 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, splits foreign families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.

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.

East Montgomery county Texas. Folks out here are living in poverty. Open sewer into ditches. Thing is @RepKevinBrady @JohnCornyn @SenTedCruz represent these people, and have done nothing for these citizens. Vote for @CongressLaura @mjhegar Democrats in 2020 #GOPCorruption pic.twitter.com/uxoZprmYjY

— James Wilson (@Wilson11Sr) February 4, 2020