Gov. Tim Walz on Illegals: ‘This Country Owes Them a Debt of Gratitude’
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is a cheerleader for mass migration and for illegal migrants, just like his partner at the top of the 2024 ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“This nation owes [migrants] a debt of gratitude,” Walz said in a 2021 letter to the Democratic Leaders of the House and Senate. “Provide a clean pathway to citizenship for … Dreamers, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders, and their families,” he wrote.
He championed migrants as a moral and business cause in his 2022 election, claiming that his more cautious GOP rival “is 100 percent wrong morally, and he’s 100 percent wrong economically and culturally.”
Walz blends the progressives’ moral claims and the Chamber of Commerce’s business arguments for the importation of more poor, low-productivity, welfare-dependent migrants. He wrote in a 2019 letter to President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State:
Refugees strengthen our communities. Bringing new cultures and fresh perspectives, they contribute to the social fabric of our state. Opening businesses and supporting existing ones, they are critical to the success of our economy. Refugees are doctors and bus drivers. They are entrepreneurs and police officers. They are students and teachers. They are our neighbors.
The government should welcome migrants as partners, alongside U.S. citizens, Walz told SahanJournal.com, a pro-migration media site. “If it’s [a relationship] of welcoming, if it’s one of partnership, if it’s one of optimism for the future—that sends a really strong [welcome] message both to the community, but also to the state as a whole.”
Immigration “is the fabric of our life,” Walz told a talk radio show during his 2022 re-election campaign. “It’s proven by the data that we know that the community pays in and gives far more back than they take out,” he insisted, after accepting 1,200 Afghan migrants.
In March 2023, Walz signed a law allowing illegals to drive cars, so helping illegals compete for wages that otherwise would go to Minnesotans. “As a longtime supporter of this bill, I am proud to finally sign it into law, making our roads safer and moving us toward our goal of making Minnesota the best state to raise a family for everyone,” he said.
The two-fisted approach is pushed by Kamala Harris. In June 2021, Harris said, “The President and I are absolutely committed to ensuring that our immigration system is orderly and humane, and I do believe that we are making progress in that regard.”
Since 2021, Harris’s colleagues in Biden’s administration have pulled in more than 10 million legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants.
Migration is deeply unpopular among voters for very practical reasons. It damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents, It also curbs their productivity, worsens inflation, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture.
Americans in Harris’s adopted state of California have suffered enormously from the huge inflow of migrants.
Walz’s Minnesota
Minnesota has a population of roughly 500,000 migrants, including at least 81,000 illegals.
Overall, migration has added roughly 330,000 migrant workers, or roughly one migrant worker for every 10 Minnesotans. The population has grown Harris’s peers in the Biden administration have added many thousands more since 2021.
Minnesota’s migrant households earn an average of $58,000 — often with multiple earners — which is far below the state-wide average of $90,400. Many of the households are poor because the often hard-working migrants are imported from culturally undeveloped, low-productivity nations, including Somalia, Burma, Ecuador, Laos, Kenya, and India.
“Like everybody else here, when a car stops and try to pick up a guy, we all run and try to get there first and get picked, but that doesn’t happen all the time,” a migrant from Ecuador told CBS News in March 2024. “The last time I had a job here, was more than a month ago,” he said.
Many migrants depend on welfare. “I got potatoes, onions, milk, cooking oil,” a woman told CBS. “These groceries last for one or two weeks because my family is 12.”
Harris’s migrants have also crowded into the state’s homeless shelters, so pushing poor Americans elsewhere. “One-third of the 452 families in homeless shelters run by Hennepin County are newcomers to the United States,” the StarTribune reported in October 2023. The site added:
Hennepin County is one of a handful of jurisdictions in the nation with a “shelter all” policy, though that does not extend to single adults. It budgeted $9.7 million for family shelter this year. By March, the county approved an additional $17 million to meet the exploding demand in 2023, and it expects to spend $22.5 million next year.
The state’s welcome for migrants ensures less investment and attention for Minnesotans, many of whom are fleeing the state. “Since the last national census (April 1, 2020) through July 1, 2023, Minnesota has lost a net 46,000 people to other states,” a left-wing group reported in December 2023.
State officials are using migrants to cover up their economic failures, and to replace Americans who fall out of the workforce or who die from drugs.
From 2019 to 2023, roughly 4,100 Minnesotans died from opioid deaths. The death toll was 400 in 2019, but flattened at roughly 1,000 a year from 2021 to 2022, partly because officials provide Narcan recovering devices.
“We rely on those [migrant] individuals to help with loss of population,” Edmundo Lijo, who works on migrant issues in St. Paul, Minn., at the city attorney’s office, told SabanJournal.com. “We rely on those individuals to come and build businesses, to work, to become part of this community,” Lijo said. “They bring so much to us culturally, economically, civically.”
Roughly 20 percent of the St. Paul population are migrants.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the federal government has quietly adopted a policy of Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.
The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, white-collar graduates, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.
The little-recognized economic policy has loosened the economic and civic feedback signals that animate a stable economy and democracy. It has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.
Donald Trump’s campaign team recognizes the economic impact of migration. Biden’s unpopular policy is “flooding America’s labor pool with millions of low-wage illegal migrants who are directly attacking the wages and opportunities of hard-working Americans,” said a May statement from Trump’s campaign.
The secretive economic policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.
The colonialism-like policy has also damaged small nations and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.
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