mass immigration

Populist Swing State Voters Become Key Target for Democrats in 2022 Midterms

January 20, 2022 by John Binder Leave a Comment

A vital demographic of the American electorate, swing state voters in the heartland who side with economic populists against corporate special interests, are being sought after by a number of Democrats running for the United States Senate.

In October 2021, as Breitbart News reported, a pair of Democrat strategists detailed an analysis of the 2020 presidential election which found that American communities devastated the most by globalization and U.S. free trade policy have drifted from the Democrat Party and moved toward Republicans since 2012.

“The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care,” the New York Times reported at the time.

The ten states analyzed, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, have lost nearly two million manufacturing jobs since the year 2000. From 2012 to 2020, Democrats lost 2.63 million votes in the all-important “factory towns” of the various states.

Now, across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Democrats running for Senate are trying to pull these swing voters back into the Democrat Party — backing fiercely populist causes like banning Congress from trading stocks and striking with union workers against corporations vowing to close U.S. plants.

While Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has filed legislation to ban Congress from trading stocks, though no Senate Republicans have signed onto the plan, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) considers backing similar legislation in the House, House and Senate Republicans have ceded much of labor policy, outside of immigration, to the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and others.

Kellogg’s Cereal plant workers demonstrate in front of the plant on October 7, 2021 in Battle Creek, Michigan. (Rey Del Rio/Getty Images)

Most notable is Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) who is running for Senate. A spokesman for his campaign told Axios that they are “running an unabashedly working-class campaign.”

Fetterman, last year, raised money to support union workers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania whose jobs were being threatened with offshoring to Mexico by the left-wing Kellogg’s corporation. Only one Republican, Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, spoke out in support of the workers.

Likewise, Fetterman has rebuked anti-worker environmentalists in the Democrat Party, specifically after they helped get a $1.5 billion project by U.S. Steel canceled in the state in May of last year. The investment would have brought thousands of middle class union jobs to eastern Pennsylvania.

“[I] will never understand why I was one of the only elected officials who pushed for this major project proactively and enthusiastically, while so many others turned their back on the working men and women of the Steelworkers and Building Trades in Allegheny County,” Fetterman said.

Tom Nelson (D), running for Senate in Wisconsin, is touting his work with union workers in the past that helped save a paper mill in Outagamie County from shuttering. In Ohio, last month, Rep. Tim Ryan (D) won the endorsement of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the state’s carpenters union in his bid for Senate.

Even in cases where historically-GOP constituencies of union workers have protested left-wing corporations, House and Senate Republicans have remained silent. Democrats, on the other hand, have reached out to the workers.

For months, coal miners with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Alabama have been striking against Warrior Met Coal whose biggest shareholder is Wall Street’s $22 billion firm BlackRock.

House and Senate Republicans have been largely silent as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) have publicly backed the coal miners in their fight to win a better labor contract.

Last week, for instance, Warren, Baldwin, and Sanders called on BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — a donor to failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who celebrated President Joe Biden’s victory — to intervene in the labor negotiations.

Hundreds of members of the United Mine Workers of America march to the Manhattan headquarters of BlackRock, the largest shareholder in the mining company Warrior Met Coal on November 04, 2021 in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Similarly, in West Virginia, hundreds of union workers with the United Steelworkers have been striking against a company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett has supported a number of Democrats in the past, including Clinton in 2016 against former President Trump.

Again, as Republicans have kept quiet, Sanders has asked Buffett to intervene and help the union workers win a better labor contract with Precision Castparts Corp.

Though Democrats have stuck their necks out for American workers in labor disputes, they have drastically shifted toward an anti-worker immigration agenda that mimics the agenda of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, multinational corporations, real estate investors, Wall Street, and giant tech conglomerates.

Less than three decades ago, then-Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) — a fixture of the Civil Rights movement — garnered widespread support among elected Democrats for reducing legal immigration levels and hugely curbing illegal immigration to drive up wages and expand job prospects for America’s poor and working class.

The goal of the nation’s immigration policy, as Jordan argued and which the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) once advocated, ought to benefit the most vulnerable of Americans, not corporate special interests by inflating the U.S. workforce to cut the cost of labor for businesses.

On that end of labor policy, no elected Democrats or those running for office are supporting reducing overall immigration levels to aid working and middle class Americans.

Republicans running for office, while many backing immigration reductions, have focused much of their messaging thus far around crime, the U.S.-Mexico border, and sanctuary city policies rather than as an economic and labor policy.

That messaging has come even as polling has shown that swing voters are most likely to back immigration reductions for the purpose of protecting U.S. wages and jobs. The most prominent policy solution that points to swing voters’ pro-worker stance is mandatory nationwide E-Verify where nearly 7-in-10 back fines and prosecutions for businesses hiring illegal aliens.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter here.

Biden's Agencies Dodge How Texas Terrorist Was Allowed to Enter U.S.

January 19, 2022 by John Binder Leave a Comment

President Joe Biden’s federal agencies are dodging the question of how 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram, the British terrorist behind a hostage standoff last weekend, was allowed to enter the United States from the United Kingdom.

On January 15 in Colleyville, Texas, Akram took four Americans hostage inside the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue. Following an 11-hour standoff, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Hostage Rescue Team was able to rescue all four hostages while Akram was shot and killed by agents.

Immediately, reports circulated as to how Akram — with a lengthy criminal record and who was being monitored by British intelligence agencies — arrived in the U.S.

“How was it that someone with an apparent criminal record and suspicious travel history was allowed into the United States to begin with?” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy asked in a news release on Tuesday.

To date, the only confirmed information states that Akram arrived in the U.S. on December 29 via a flight from the U.K. That flight landed at John F. Kennedy (JFK) Airport in New York City, New York. Investigators believe Akram stayed in New York City for a few days before traveling to Dallas, Texas, where he ended up in a homeless shelter before taking hostages at the synagogue.

Still unclear is how Akram was allowed to enter the U.S. A federal official who spoke anonymously to the Associated Press (AP) has said Akram was granted a B-2 tourist visa. British media, though, has reported that investigators believe Akram lied about his criminal record to secure a visa waiver as part of the Visa Waiver Program (VWP).

“Biden should proactively release entire immigration and [criminal] history,” former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official Jon Feere wrote in a statement.

The VWP allows foreign nationals from 40 different countries around the globe to come to the U.S. without having to secure a visa beforehand. Foreign nationals on the VWP are allowed to stay for up to 90 days, though thousands overstay and become illegal aliens.

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, presidents have routinely expanded the VWP. In 2019, for instance, Trump expanded the VWP to include Poland. In 2021, Biden expanded the VWP to include Croatia.

Malik Faisal Akram pictured at a Dallas, Texas homeless shelter. (AP Images)

In a letter to Biden’s top agency officials, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) asked whether Akram was given an in-person interview as part of his vetting procedures before securing a visa or clearance for the VWP, if federal agencies were aware of Akram’s criminal record at the time of his vetting, and on what basis did the federal government allow Akram U.S. entry.

“… this all could have been averted if your Departments had adequately vetted his visa application and stopped him at the airport,” Hawley writes:

The failure to adequately vet those entering our country is nothing new. The Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of Afghans into the United States. We now know that these individuals were not adequately vetted and did not undergo in-person vetting, as recommended by the 9/11 Commission. [Emphasis added]

As Breitbart News reported, Biden has openly disregarded recommendations from the 9/11 Commission that tout the importance of vetting all foreign nationals in in-person interviews before allowing them entry to the U.S. As a result, those seeking H-1B, L-1, O-1, H-2B, and F-1 visas do not have to undergo in-person interviews to obtain such visas.

Hawley says the policy is moving in the “opposite direction” when it comes to requiring “in-person vetting to avoid precisely the sort of terrorist incident we witnessed this weekend.”

“It is time to reverse this trend and begin enforcing our immigration laws,” Hawley writes. “A key step in this effort is understanding how your agencies allowed the terrorist who took hostages in Texas into this country despite his known background.”

Breitbart News has requested from DHS information pertaining to Akram’s immigration history in the U.S. but has not received any response at the time of this publication.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter here.

Black Caucus Director: Mass Immigration Spurring 'Staggering Inequality' Among Black Americans

January 18, 2022 by John Binder Leave a Comment

Mass immigration to the United States is partly responsible for the nation’s “staggering inequality” among black Americans, the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation says.

For decades, about 1.2 million legal immigrants have been admitted on green cards annually while another 1.5 million foreign workers have arrived every year on temporary visas to take American jobs that would otherwise go to American citizens.

In an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, former Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Executive Director Frank Morris Sr. writes that such high immigration levels have been devastating for black American wealth and driven “staggering inequality.”

“The median white household owns over 10 times as many assets as the median Black household — a gap that has actually widened since the civil rights victories of the 1960s,” Morris writes:

But one of the biggest — yet most underexplored — culprits is America’s immigration policy. Throughout our nation’s history, employers have preferred to hire newly arrived foreigners, who will often work for rock-bottom wages, instead of Black workers. [Emphasis added]
…
That massive [immigration] influx harmed the most vulnerable Americans — especially Black people. In fact, one Harvard economist found that from 1980 to 2000, immigration “reduced the wage of black high school dropouts by 8.3%, reduced the employment rate by 7.4 percentage points and increased the incarceration rate by 1.7 percentage points.” [Emphasis added]

For wages and jobs prospects to rise, Morris writes that legal immigration levels must be reduced as “a matter of racial and economic justice for black Americans.”

Construction workers work with steel rebar during the construction of a building on May 17, 2019, in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“Politicians in both parties pay lip service to helping Black Americans,” Morris writes. “If they were truly sincere, they’d listen to generations of civil rights leaders who’ve all recognized that the best way to boost Black Americans’ fortunes is to ensure tight labor markets. That requires stemming the influx of foreign workers.”

Joe Guzzardi, with Progressives for Immigration Reform, blasted the Congressional Black Caucus for failing to demand a pause on immigration to hugely boost the wages, job prospects, and quality of life for black Americans.

“If the powerful Caucus, 58 members strong, would demand an immigration pause, black Americans could close the earnings gap between them and other ethnic groups, mostly whites, that has plagued them for at least seven decades,” Guzzardi wrote:

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has abandoned its constituency, choosing to support foreign nationals. Instead of helping struggling blacks, the CBC actively hurts them. The caucus accepts without criticism the current illegal alien border surge which will eventually loosen the labor market when the aliens are paroled with work permits. The caucus votes as a block in favor of immigration-expansion legislation including amnesty for millions, and it promotes paths to citizenship for deferred action and temporary protected status holders. American blacks are excluded from CBC’s progressive agenda which guarantees that, for years to come, the wage gap between African-Americans and whites will remain unchanged. [Emphasis added]

Analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has concluded that “immigration reduces labor force participation of the least-educated black men” and that “blacks are more likely to be in competition with immigrants than are whites.”

“There are a number of studies indicating that immigration is harming the labor market prospects of black Americans … if one is concerned about less-educated workers in this country, it is difficult to justify continuing high levels of legal and illegal immigration that disproportionately impact the bottom end of the labor market,” CIS Director of Research Steven Camarotta has testified to Congress.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter here.

Civil Rights Icon Barbara Jordan's Legacy, 26 Years Later: Protecting Americans from Mass Immigration

January 18, 2022 by John Binder Leave a Comment

On this day in 1996, Civil Rights icon Barbara Jordan died just weeks before Congress and then-President Bill Clinton were set to advance her reforms to illegal and legal immigration focused on protecting poor and working class Americans from waves of job-killing and wage-crushing mass immigration.

Jordan, a Democrat, became a fixture of the Civil Rights movement after becoming the first black American state Senator in the nation since 1883 and the first black American woman elected to the Texas State Senate. Later, in 1972, Jordan became the first black American woman to preside over a legislative body in the U.S. when she was elected president pro tempore of the Texas State Senate.

That same year, Jordan was elected to Congress. Her election marked the first time a black American woman would represent the state of Texas in Washington, D.C.

“For Martin Luther King, Jr. … he was fighting for jobs and fair pay for African Americans and that’s what Barbara Jordan was doing,” NumbersUSA President Roy Beck told Breitbart News.

Following President George H.W. Bush’s Immigration Act of 1990, which blew open the door for today’s mass immigration levels, Jordan chaired the United States Commission on Immigration Reform.

“We think about 1965 having restarted mass immigration, but it was the 1990s that just shut the door on upward mobility for all Americans in the underclass,” Beck said. “It was just an abandonment of the underclass.”

The Jordan Commission’s recommendations revolved around a single mission — serving the national interest. In that framework, the commission recommended:

Cutting legal immigration levels in half to about 500,000 admissions a year, ending the process known as “chain migration” where naturalized citizens can sponsor an unlimited number of foreign relatives, ending the Diversity Visa Lottery that randomly gives out 55,000 visas a year, mandating E-Verify nationwide to screen out illegal aliens from the hiring process, ending low-skilled immigration, and massively curbing illegal immigration with increased border enforcement and swift deportation.

Jordan told a crowd in 1995 at Ross Perot’s United We Stand America conference:

We have concluded that a properly regulated legal immigration system is in the national interest. Immigration is not a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to anyone in the world who thinks they want to come to the United States. Immigration is a privilege granted by the people of the United States to those we choose to admit. [Emphasis added]
We are a country of laws … we disagree with those who would label any effort to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is not acceptable. [Emphasis added]

…

The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser-skilled and unskilled workers in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force. Many American workers do not have job prospects and they are not improving. With welfare reform, many unskilled American workers were in the labor market. We should make their task easier to find employment not harder by prioritizing unskilled foreign labor. [Emphasis added]

C-SPAN

Mere weeks before Congress and Clinton were set to take up the Jordan Commission’s recommendations, Jordan died just short of her 60th birthday from complications with pneumonia.

Beck, who published Back of the Hiring Line which chronicles the nation’s history of immigration and its negative impact on black Americans, said Jordan’s dream for an immigration system that benefits Americans seemingly “died when she died on that day.”

“Barbara Jordan’s legacy is that she was one of the last Democrats to stand just tall and courageous for that part of the traditional Democrat Party,” Beck said.

“It was the force of her character and her personality and logic and her moral platform that was pulling a lot of people what was doing good for most Americans as opposed to helping their special interest donors,” he continued.

RJ Hauman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) described Jordan as an “extraordinary woman, passionate about pursuing justice for all Americans” which was embodied through her immigration reforms.

“Jordan stands alongside Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, A. Philip Randolph, and Coretta Scott King — civil rights leaders who fought for the economic well-being of African Americans and understood the negative effects of mass immigration,” Hauman told Breitbart News.

The Jordan Commission recommendations, Hauman said, have long since been “swept aside in the Democratic Party’s effort to obscure the long history of Civil Rights leaders who believed that immigration policies must serve the national interest.”

To that effect, Beck said Jordan “really epitomized something in the Democrat Party which was having a special responsibility looking out for the working man and woman.” Immigration for Jordan, Beck said, was a labor issue, adding:

Whenever she spoke about struggling black Americans, she almost always spoke for all struggling Americans. That’s a legacy, especially in a time with identity politics. She was, in a way, one of the last great advocates of a more pluralistic kind of politics that looked at all Americans altogether.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas speaks to the press at Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday, July 12, 1976. (AP Photo/John Duricka)

In today’s Democrat Party, no elected Democrat holding office in Washington, D.C. has expressed support for the Jordan Commission’s recommendations. Instead, the party has drifted to support huge inflations in the labor market with amnesty for illegal aliens and increased legal immigration levels.

Though there’s silence from Democrats in Washington, D.C. over the Jordan Commission’s recommendations, Beck said there are rumblings from black Americans online who are looking to a political figure to embrace tight labor markets.

“Who’s going to replace her? We’ve been looking for decades and the whole nation is looking for that kind of leadership,” Beck said.

Jordan’s immigration reforms are seemingly more timely today than in 1995.

Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants on green cards and another 1.5 million foreign nationals on mostly low-skilled temporary work visas. The U.S. population has hit a record 331.9 million, driven predominately by legal immigration, which includes a record 46.2 million foreign-born residents.

Without any changes to the nation’s illegal and legal immigration levels, the U.S. is projected to hit a record nearly 70 million foreign-born residents by 2060 — all the more reason that reformers point to Jordan, still, as a trailblazer on immigration policy.

“Barbara Jordan had the national interest at heart. Today is an important day to revisit what she had to say on the immigration issue to put the current debate in proper perspective. Her legacy lives on,” Hauman said.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter here.

MLK's Wife Coretta Scott King: Illegal Immigration Undercuts 'American Jobs and Living Standards'

January 17, 2022 by John Binder Leave a Comment

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s wife, Coretta Scott King, once declared that barring illegal aliens from taking jobs in the United States is necessary to “stopping … the undercutting of American jobs and living standards.”

In 1991, as a group of Republican and Democrat Senators sought to eliminate fines for U.S. employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, Scott King joined forces with a coalition of black American and Hispanic advocacy organizations to urge against such a plan.

Former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) led the effort in Congress while co-sponsors included then-Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM).

Their plan, as proposed, would have eliminated the fines that the federal government is allowed to slap employers with when they are found to be employing illegal aliens over American citizens and legal immigrants. Hatch and Kennedy claimed that the fines had spurred workforce discrimination, which opponents said was exaggerated.

A similar plan was introduced in the House, sponsored by Reps. Edward Roybal (D-CA), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and John Lewis (D-GA), among others.

At the time, Scott King authored a letter to Hatch, warning him that allowing a flood of illegal aliens to take jobs in the U.S. economy would have a particularly devastating impact on black Americans and newly arrived legal immigrants who remain the most likely to compete for jobs against illegal aliens.

“We are concerned, Senator Hatch, that your proposed … elimination of employer sanctions will cause another problem — the revival of pre-1986 discrimination against black and brown U.S. and documented workers, in favor of cheap labor — the undocumented workers,” Scott King wrote:

This would undoubtedly exacerbate an already severe economic crisis in communities where there are large numbers of new immigrants. [Emphasis added]
Finally, we are concerned that some who support the repeal of employer sanctions are using “discrimination” as a guise for their desire to abuse undocumented workers and to introduce cheap labor into the U.S. workforce. America does not have a labor shortage. With roughly seven million people unemployed, and double that number discouraged from seeking work, the removal of employer sanctions threatens to add U.S. workers to the rolls of the unemployed. [Emphasis added]
Additionally, it would add to the competition for scarce jobs and drive down wages. Moreover, the repeal of employer sanctions will inevitably add to our social problems and place an unfair burden on the poor in the cities in which most new immigrants cluster — cities which are already suffering housing shortages and insufficient human needs services. [Emphasis added]

Scott King continued, writing that although fining employers for hiring illegal aliens is “not a panacea for the nation’s illegal immigration problems” they are a “necessary means of stopping the exploitation of vulnerable workers and the undercutting of American jobs and living standards.”

Flanked by her children Martin Luther King III (R) and Rev. Bernice Albertine King (L), Coretta Scott King speaks during the 36th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Service at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church January 19, 2004 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)

Other signatories were Jack Otero of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, Walter Fauntroy of the African American Action Alert Communications Network, Parren Mitchell of the Minority Business Legal Defense and Education Fund, William Lucy of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Norman Hill with the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, Dr. Ramona Edelin of the National Urban Coalition, Richard Hatcher of the R. Gordan Hatcher Association, and Daisy Wood of the National Pan-Hellenic Council.

With the help of Scott King, and opposition from lawmakers like Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) as well as unions like the AFL-CIO, the effort failed in both the House and Senate.

In recent decades, fines on employers who hire illegal aliens have dropped off significantly — spurring a growing number of lawmakers to back mandating nationwide the government’s E-Verify program, which screens illegal aliens out of the hiring process.

The drop-off in workplace immigration enforcement has come as the nation’s illegal alien population has boomed to anywhere between 11 to 22 million. Today, it is estimated that at least eight million illegal aliens hold U.S. jobs.

President Joe Biden, last year, announced that his administration would halt immigration raids of employers suspected of hiring illegal aliens over American citizens and legal immigrants.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter here.