Mexican Ambassador: Let’s Restart Mass Migration into United States

The United States should reopen itself to migration, amnesties, refugee inflows, asylum seekers, and more temporary contract workers, according to Mexico’s ambassador to the United States.

The U.S. immigration system “has to be based on facts and realities,” Ambassador Martha Bárcena Coqui told a forum arranged by the National Immigration Forum (NIF). She continued, “The facts and realities is the need to protect the most vulnerable, the need to keep open the generosity towards refugees, the need to recognize the complementarity of labor markets and demographic profiles, the need for temporary workers in the United States.”

The United States should not view migration as a security threat, she said, adding, “If you conceptualize migration as a national security issue, if you [push for] securitization of migration, and what is even worse, if you criminalize migration, then your approach always be policing, contentious [and] reduction of migration. So what we need is really to conceptualize migration …  as an economic and social and political phenomena.”

“With all due respect to Madam Ambassador, she should mind her own country’s business, not ours,” responded Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The Mexican ambassador is going to tell us what is in the best interest of Mexico,” responded Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA. “But that doesn’t mean we have to do it — we have to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. of American, of Americans and legal immigrants,” she told Breitbart News, adding:

You know we have the pandemic still raging, we have economic lockdowns still going on, we have unemployment way too high. We have underemployment way too high. We have American citizens hurting. We absolutely do not need to reopen mass immigration — and certainly don’t need to give amnesty and taxpayer benefits to people who came here illegally. If Mexico thinks its plan is to just open up its own southern borders in the hopes that America will open our southern borders, that’s just going to reignite the caravans. I hope that the Biden administration is planning for that because that’s not going to go well, and 2022 is not going to go well for Democrats.

More migrants are coming, the ambassador said, even though the coronavirus crash has blocked the northward flow for the moment:

The root causes of these migrations have [not] disappeared. On the contrary, we are seeing pent up, building pressure. People cannot move now because of the restrictions on movement because of the pandemic. But the root causes are still there, [for example], the drought in Central America  … a hurricane in Nicaragua and Honduras that have totally flooded Honduras.

The United States should amnesty many illegal migrants from all over the world, she said, and also import more migrants by accepting asylum applications at U.S. embassies, so the world’s migrants will not have to travel through Mexico. “What we would like to see, of course, is that the U.S. embassies in Central America could process even more of these requests for asylum, instead of having people crossing through Mexico and asking for asylum at the border.”

The ambassador was invited to speak by the NIF, which is a business-funded activist group that promotes cheap labor migration into jobs needed by lower-skilled Americans and by legal immigrants, and also into jobs that can be automated.

Roughly three million migrants have flooded over the southern border since the rules were loosened by Congress in 2008 and by President Barack Obama’s deputies in 2011. Trump stopped the flow in 2020, but few of the migrants — or of roughly 300,000 younger “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — have been sent home because they are being protected by pro-migrant immigration lawyers, by pro-diversity progressives, and cheap labor employers in sanctuary cities.

The large U.S. population of illegal immigrants helps to push down wages for Americans, push disadvantaged workers out of the labor force, reduce corporate investment in technology and training, and spike corporate sales and profits. The large population also shifts the U.S. politics from a focus on Americans’ jobs and wages, and then towards a politics focused on business demands and the 1950’s claim by elites that the United States is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” not a cooperative nation for all Americans.

The flood of cheap labor that is being promoted by the ambassador would be a disaster for Americans, Jenks said. “They would absolutely destroy the employment opportunities for lower-skilled Americans, particularly for minorities and legal immigrants. It would reduce wages among the people who can least afford reduced wages and put downward pressure on everyone else’s wages. The people who would benefit from it, of course, would be the elites who can hire nannies, maids, and housekeepers, and who go stay at resorts and so on, while the rest of us suffer.”

The ambassador’s statement, Krikorian told Breitbart News, “suggests that the [President Donald] Trump really was getting Mexico to change its behavior [after 2018] and that once Trump is gone, the Mexican approach these issues will revert to form, and they will again usher large numbers of third-country illegal aliens into our country.”

But if Mexico is concerned about the migrants coming up from the South, it can take its own defense measures, said Krikorian.

“As far as refugees and asylees go, Mexico is a signatory to the U.N. Convention on these issues. Mexico is about half the population, maybe a little less, of the United States. It doesn’t take a nearly proportionate number of asylum seekers or refugees [as the United States. So, “Physician, heal thyself,” would be my first response.”

Also, Krikorian added, the ambassador may be overstating the view of the Mexican government. “Whatever the ambassador said, it is an open question whether Mexico will truly open the floodgates again. The country has its own interest in limiting this transit migration because Mexican citizens are getting sick of the migrations. And many of these people end up staying anyway, applying for asylum in Mexico, or just hanging around illegally, and that undermines the job prospects of Mexicans in the same way that it can undermine Americans’ job prospects.”

“The United States is a sovereign nation that should and can have complete control over its borders,” said Jenks. “Regardless of what our neighbors may think, our government owes it to the American people to have an immigration system that benefits America. Period. Full stop.”

Overall, open-ended migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants help transfer massive wealth from American wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.