Politico Admits ‘Border Czar’ Harris ‘Resisted Taking Ownership of Immigration’

harris crisis
AP, White House
Neil Munro

Vice President Kamala Harris refused to help fix President Joe Biden’s border collapse in 2021, said the “head of news” at Politico, a pro-establishment media site in Washington, DC.

The useful admission was presented on August 10 by Alexander Burns, underneath a headline saying, “‘Smash the Gangs’: What Harris Can Learn From [left-wing UK Prime Minister] Keir Starmer.”

The article by the “head of news” admitted:

Harris, too, resisted taking ownership of immigration; when Biden charged her with managing the troubled Northern Triangle countries in Central America, Harris bristled at the implication that she had a direct role to play in fixing the border.

The admission is useful for voters because D.C. reporters are running away from their March 2021 cheerleading for Harris’s role as “border czar.” The formal job and title do not exist, but D.C. politicians, staffers, and journalists have long used “czar” to describe top officials who handle issues that cross many agencies.

Per Politico:

Biden pushed off a reckoning again and again, eventually issuing strict new border control measures just weeks before his campaign unraveled. Harris, too, resisted taking ownership of immigration; when Biden charged her with managing the troubled Northern Triangle countries in Central America, Harris bristled at the implication that she had a direct role to play in fixing the border.

 

President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are making the same border-czar “resisted taking ownership” point as they blame Harris for failing to stop Biden’s policies that have imported roughly 10 million legal, quasi-legal, and illegal migrants into Americans’ workplaces, housing, and politics. “They basically threw open the gates of our country,” Vance told ABC News on August 11.

Burns paired his admission with a quoted suggestion that Harris adopt a conciliatory message on immigration:

“The center-left needs to project a message of something like control and compassion,” [Christabel] Cooper said. “The feeling that migration is out of control is a really strong one, and just kind of dismissing it is not a good thing to do.”

But the U.S. immigration system is an investor-driven economic strategy designed to transfer vast wealth from ordinary blue-collar and white-collar Americans — and their children — to investors and Wall Street. That economic strategy is hidden by sentimental media coverage of striving, unlucky, impoverished migrants — often under the unseen guidance of unsentimental lobby groups.

Border Czar

At Politico, Burns wrote, “Harris … resisted taking ownership of immigration.”

Her 2021 resistance is visible on camera when Biden said:

I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the [other] countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border … When she speaks, she speaks for me. Doesn’t have to check with me. She knows what she’s doing, and I hope we can move this along. [Emphasis added]

“The vice president has agreed … to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders,” Biden told the cameras he had invited for the occasion. [Emphasis added]

Harris responded to Biden’s wide-reaching commission by focusing attention on the “root causes” of migration:

Well, thank you, Mr. President, and for having the confidence in me. And there’s no question that this is a challenging situation … And while we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law and that we also — because we can chew gum and walk at the same time — must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek, as the president has described, to come here. [Emphasis added]

The “border czar” directive came the day before Biden told reporters at a White House press conference on March 25 that he wanted many of the migrants to be sent home. “They should all be going back, all be going back. The only people we’re not going to let sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande by themselves with no help are children,” Biden said.

The media touted Harris’s 2021 promotion to “border czar,” but promptly backtracked since Harris was nominated to replace Biden.

The March 24 meeting included Biden’s border chief, the pro-migration, Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas. Biden assigned Harris the border task after Mayorkas dismantled Trump’s border defenses starting on January 20, 2021.

For whatever reason, Biden failed to force his March 25 policy reversal on Mayorkas. One likely reason is that Mayorkas is strongly backed by the party’s West Coast Wing of investors and donors. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group has strongly backed Mayorkas.

Since then, Harris has echoed the pro-migration language touted by Mayorkas as he used his legal skills and political backing to cut “safe and humane” quasi-legal pathways for migrants through the nation’s border and past the nation’s cautious judges. “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,” Harris said while standing beside Mayorkas in June 2021.

Media Silence

Burns urges Harris to adopt some of the immigration policies pushed in a March 2024 document prepared for the UK’s left-of-center Labor Party.

The document sees immigration as an opportunity to grow the government’s role in Britain’s economy and society, often via bureaucratic oversight of the nation’s commingled labor supply, wages, training, and investment.

“Migration, managed well, is a vital source of economic growth and supports the provision of high-quality public services (which are served by a large migrant workforce),” the report says adding:

Part of the problem is that current policies are not joined up. Decisions about migration are not integrated with broader policies on economic development, skills, public services, and welfare reform. Labour is right to look at how it can adapt the points-based system to better connect with wider policies, including training and skills, and public service workforce planning. New structures and working practices to ensure the Home Office works more effectively with other government departments would be an important first step to achieving this. To deliver a shift from insecurity to fairness, Labour will need to confront the deep-rooted problems that drive both economic insecurity and high migration.

“After years of flatlining productivity, and in the face of persistent high levels of labour market inactivity (especially post-Covid), population growth driven by net migration has been a key source of GDP growth,” the report said as it suggested that government-managed migration can somehow raise daily productivity and hourly earnings.

“A fair system would make migration part of the solution to economic insecurity, rather than part of the problem,” [emphasis added] the document said.

But Mayorkas’s policy blends progressive and business priorities in a very different fashion from the left-wing proposals in the Labor Party document.

For example, Mayorkas has allowed US CEOs to hire more than 400,000 selected foreign workers (but without their families) from poor countries via his “parole pipeline.” That program is similar to President George W. Bush’s 2001 “Any Willing Worker” policy that would have let managers import foreign workers instead of hiring Americans at market wages.

On many occasions, Mayorkas has endorsed Canada’s catastrophic business-first immigration policy. For example, he told the Senate in December 2022:

We look to our partner to the north that has a much more nimble immigration system that can be retooled to the [business] needs at the moment. For example, Canada is in need of 1 million workers and they have agreed that in 2023, they will admit 1.4 million … immigrants to fill that labor need that Canadians themselves cannot. We are stuck in antiquated laws that do not meet our current needs. And the [laws] haven’t been working for many, many years.

Mayorkas pairs his subsidy for Wall Street with a globalist “equity” agenda, ensuring a massive shift of wages and housing wealth away from ordinary people towards his investor allies and their new workforce and consumer base of impoverished migrants.

Mayorkas has repeatedly explained that he supports more migration because of his migrant parents, his sympathy for migrants, and his support for “equity” between Americans and foreigners.

He also justifies his welcome for migrants by saying his priorities are above the law, and claiming that the “needs” of U.S. business are paramount — regardless of the cost to ordinary Americans, the impact on U.S. children, or Americans’ rational opposition.

This Mayorkas policy has a name: “Extraction Migration.”

And Harris has the West Coast donations to fund a 2024 campaign message to hide that economic policy. For example, her first immigration ad focused viewers on the subordinate issue of border security:

Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border. As Vice President, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades, and as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.

So, the Democrats have two messages — one for investors, one for voters — yet Burns at Politico said “American Democrats … do not really have a message on immigration at all.”

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 — even as China has dashed ahead with a low-migration, high-productivity rival strategy.

The U.S. 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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