Advocates for more migration are exploiting the deaths of six migrant workers in the Baltimore bridge disaster to argue that more migration is essential for America.
“We know we can and we will rebuild,” said a statement from Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the Sri Lankan-born president of Global Refuge, an organization that is paid to help settle migrants in American communities. “The contributions of our immigrant brothers and sisters will continue to be essential in that effort.”
“Our hearts are with every person impacted by the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore,” said the United We Dream, a business-backed pro-amnesty group. “Among them, immigrant people–visionaries who are improving our communities every day and ensuring we have the freedom to move around our cities.”
Migrants mostly form Central America wait in line to cross the border at the Gateway International Bridge into the US from Matamoros, Mexico to Brownsville, Texas, on March 15, 2021. – It’s the new normal for migrant families under President Joe Biden, after the harsh “zero tolerance” approach of Donald Trump dashed the dreams of hundreds of thousands hoping to escape endemic poverty and violence in Central America. Biden’s pledge of a more humane approach though has sparked a new rush to the border, threatening to become a huge political liability. Republicans are accusing him of opening the country’s doors to illegal border-crossers and sparking a “crisis” on the US-Mexico frontier, marked in Texas by the meandering Rio Grande river. (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)
“They’re trying to make them seem like the NYPD rushing into the World Trade Center,” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
I’m not in any way being disrespectful toward them by saying that they were doing a regular blue-collar job. Most of the people who do this are Americans. In this case, for any number of reasons, these guys were immigrants … There’s just no [immigration] policy implications to draw from this [tragedy].
“There are personal tragedies that have [immigration] policy implications,” such as murders caused by the government’s reckless border policy, Krikorian added:
Riley Laken in Georgia was murdered [in Georgia] by somebody that this administration encouraged to cross the border illegally, took into custody, and then released. He was then protected from the consequences of his illegality by being in a sanctuary jurisdiction. Those are real policy implications that are separate from the personal tragedy tragedy. What are the policy implications [for migration] from this [bridge] loss?
The dead workers were “neither saints nor devils, they were just regular working stiffs,” said Krikorian, adding, “The whole thing is just kind of creepy, to be perfectly honest.”
Migration advocates argue that Americans should be grateful that migrants were on the bridge that night.
“American workers got to sleep in their beds and not get hit by a cargo ship because immigrant workers went to work to fill potholes,” tweeted David Bier, a pro-migration advocate at the Cato Institute. After their sleep, Bier added, the Americans “could commute to work going to jobs with better pay and working conditions.”
“This demonstrates that migrants go out and do risky jobs at midnight,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Wednesday. “For this reason, they do not deserve to be treated as they are by certain insensitive, irresponsible politicians in the United States,” he claimed in a transparent criticism of former President Donald Trump and other migration-skeptic politicians.
Obrador is playing a critical role in U.S. migration policy because Biden’s deputies do not want to enforce U.S. border law.
The Migrants
Eight migrant men were filling potholes on Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge when it was rammed by an Indian-crewed cargo ship. Six of the eight were killed, one was injured, and one walked away from emergency crews.
New reports described the men as “immigrants,” but did not claim they were legal immigrants.
The migrants were from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. They were “hard-working, humble men,” Juan Campos, a Spanish-speaking employee of Brawner Builders told reporters.
They were employed by a local company — Brawner Builders — under a government contract to maintain the roads through Baltimore City. Without those migrants, the work would have been done by fewer and better-paid Americans, usually with the aid of better machinery.
On Tuesday, Breitbart News asked Brawner if the company had posted a statement about the men’s legal status. “Not at this time,” the representative told Breitbart News.
“This tragic event was completely unforeseen and was not something that we could imagine would happen,” the company said in a statement that does not mention the employees’ legal status. A GoFundMe page also dodges the issue.
“There could be policy implications if they were not authorized to work,” Krikorian noted. However, “if that’s the case, then it’s the employers clearly who are on the hook. ”
Federal immigration law is deliberately complex to ensure that employers and their lawyers can employ foreign labor with very little risk that executives will face personal fines or jail time. For example, the federal government imports roughly one million foreign workers on temporary visas each year. It also provides work permits to people who submit fraudulent or irrelevant applications for green cards and political asylum, and it threatens companies who screen job applicants for fake fraudulent documents.
Politics and Policy
Advocates for more migration routinely promote their cause by citing examples of individual migrants, regardless of migration’s macroeconomic impact on wages, housing, families, trade, professionals, innovation, productivity, and cities.
As anti-immigrant bad actors try to divide our cities, building walls & fueling hate, immigrants like the ones in Baltimore are building bridges, making sure we stay connected as neighbors. In Baltimore and across the country, immigrants are inherently part of our communities.
— United We Dream 🍊 (@UNITEDWEDREAM) March 26, 2024
“This is actually kind of macabre that they’re trying to use the deaths of these [bridge workers] to argue for essentially unlimited immigration and no enforcement,” Krikorian said.
Advocates for more migration are also eager to smear advocates for less migration, Krikorian said:
Our model is “fewer immigrants and a warmer welcome” … [but] they impute an ill motive because they lack the imagination to understand that calling for tighter migration and lower levels has nothing to do really with the [character] quality of individual people … [Policy should recognize] the impact on assimilation, and the impact on security, the impact on the welfare state, and numbers [of migrants] are the issue there because if numbers are low enough, then [policy debates] are not even that important.
Hot new Cato Institute argument for mass migration dropped:
Letting unskilled wage slaves working under third world conditions die from preventable accidents is actually a good thing and saving lives.https://t.co/ZZql1BFV99
— Misheru Katorin 🇳🇱 (@MKatorin) March 27, 2024
National outcomes, not personal character or individual gains, is the critical issue, Krikorian argued.
“Most of the [migrants] are just regular people — good and bad — like everybody else,” so their migration status has no significance for policymakers worried about transport and bridges, said Krikorian.
Extraction Migration
Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.
This policy floods the labor market and so shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to older investors, coastal billionaires, and Wall Street. The flood makes it difficult for Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.
The 6 construction workers presumed dead in the Baltimore bridge collapse included Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants. https://t.co/MGqtqQqL5O
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) March 27, 2024
Six immigrant workers are presumed dead after Tuesday’s bridge collapse in Baltimore. Journalist @maximillian_alv says the disaster shows the crucial role of immigrants in many dangerous jobs. “We are not coming to this country to ruin it,” he says. “We’re workers just like you.” pic.twitter.com/QAQHLUfDAq
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) March 27, 2024
Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that allowed Americans in the 20th Century to grow their personal and national wealth.
This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.
The tragedy of the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse is heartbreaking. Our thoughts are with the families affected.
As right-wing politicians try to vilify and dehumanize immigrants, this is a reminder that immigrants are our neighbors. https://t.co/hmkamwPQjp
— Immigrant Justice Network (@ImmJustice) March 26, 2024
Still thinking about the six guys who died on the Key Bridge today while working the overnight shift filling potholes.
Immigrants providing for their families. Salt of the earth, doing a thankless job. Those are the types of people we should look up to in this country.
— Rich Luchette (@richluchette) March 27, 2024
Outside government, migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.
Regularly relied upon, called essential, but rarely protected. Immigrant workers often take difficult and dangerous jobs exposed to great risks for the promise of opportunity. I’m grieved and heartbroken to hear the six missing workers on the Key Bridge are presumed lost. I sent…
— Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (@repdeliaramirez) March 27, 2024
It is being reported that the missing workers are immigrants from Latin America who were doing construction on Key Bridge.
I am thinking of their families and the many immigrants who have encountered tragedy working in the country they came to seeking a better life. https://t.co/UNiNkJPg3V
— Congressman Chuy García (@RepChuyGarcia) March 26, 2024
This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
Immigrants like these are the backbone of this country. Donald Trump wants to deport millions of people just like these heroes – who stopped traffic onto/off bridge before collapse – and Joe Biden supports an immigration bill that would increase incarceration + build Trump’s wall https://t.co/V05PG4F5Oy
— a they/them in stem (@chorizanthe) March 26, 2024
The tragedy and symbolism of immigrants dying in Baltimore harbor while working on a bridge named for the man who wrote the national anthem as trump campaigns on closing america to the world is crushing
Baltimore bridge collapse: Father of 3 among victims https://t.co/LbyQPoR2cx— Luke Zaleski (@ZaleskiLuke) March 27, 2024
Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
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