Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says the nation’s unemployment rate is being raised by Alejandro Mayorkas’ huge inflow of migrants.
The statement acknowledges the extraordinary political power accumulated by the Cuban-born Secretary of Homeland Security.
Mayorkas’ ability to raise and lower the migration rate makes him the nation’s de facto “Labor Czar” and gives him extraordinary influence over Americans’ employment rates, wages and housing, and even their interest rates.
Mayorkas insists he has the legal power to set blue-collar and white-collar immigration rates as he sees fit, regardless of migration numbers set by Congress in 1990, or the wishes of ordinary Americans.
“That is a phenomenal level of power to give to the federal government period, regardless of whether it’s one guy or not,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said. “Even the President shouldn’t have that power,” he told Breitbart News.
On Wednesday, Powell explained his decision to reduce interest rates, and he was asked by a reporter if some Americans would need to lose their jobs to help reduce wage gains that contribute to inflation. Powell responded:
On the job creation, it depends on the inflows, right? So if you’re having millions of [migrant] people come into the labor force, and you’re creating [only] 100,000 jobs [per month], you’re going to see unemployment go up. So it really depends on what’s the trend underlying the volatility of people coming into the country.
The current inflow is raising unemployment, he added: “We understand there’s been quite an influx across the borders, and that has actually been one of the things that’s allowed the unemployment rate to rise.”
Powell welcomed the rising unemployment rate because it helps reduce wage raises and so reduces inflation.
Mayorkas’ Economic Policy
In early September, Mayorkas repeated his wish to skew the U.S. labor market to ensure that CEOs can get all the workers they want without having to recruit Americans with offers of higher wages:
We look to the north, with Canada. Canada takes a look at its market needs, and it says, “You know what? We need 700,000 foreign workers to address our labor needs domestically.” And, so, they build a visa system for that year to address the current market condition. And they say, “We’re going to bring in a million people.” And it’s market sensitive.
We [in the United States] are dealing with numerical caps on labor-driven visas that were set in 1996. It’s 2024. The world has changed. It is remarkable how there can be agreement that [the visas system] is broken and not have an agreement on a solution. The country is suffering as a result of it.
That statement is at least the fourth time Mayorkas complimented Canada’s supercharged migration system, even though Canadians’ expanding poverty, declining productivity, and poll-tested anger are likely to push Prime Minister Justin Trudeau out of office by the fall of 2025.
On September 18, Trudeau announced he would partly reverse his super-charged immigration system:
Since 2021, Mayorkas has imported roughly 10 million migrants, via various legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and temporary routes, as part of the Democratic Party’s big-government “Bidenomics” economic strategy.
In June, he claimed the power to admit more migrants via his legally contested “parole pipeline.”
“The number of appointments that are permitted through CBP One [parole app]— approximately 1,400 to 1,500 a day — are based on the capacity of our ports of entry,” he said. “They are antiquated ports of entry that are also in need of funding to modernize them.”
Mayorkas’s flood of migrants has pushed down wages, spiked real estate prices, reduced exports, slowed innovation and productivity, fuelled chaotic diversity, pushed up auto insurance rates, killed numerous Americans, and turbocharged Donald Trump’s 2024 bid for the White House.
His “Extraction Migration” economic policy has also funded dictators and killed at least 5,000 migrants.
Bidenomics and the Democrats’ 2024 Campaign
Mayorkas’s flood of migrants also allowed Democrats to claim rapid job growth under President Joe Biden.
Because of Mayorkas’s welcome, companies created many low-wage jobs for the government-funded migrants. That claim, for example, is being used to rebut GOP criticism of the Haitian migration to Springfield, Ohio.
Paul Krugman, an economist at the New York Times, insists that policy is good for Americans. He wrote on September 16:
By fostering overall growth in a city’s economy, immigrants often increase employment among the native-born. Why? Because they spend much of their earnings where they live and work, helping create local jobs; one 2015 study found that “each immigrant creates 1.2 local jobs for local workers, most of them going to native workers.”
“These newly arrived immigrants are the main reason the U.S. economy has defied pessimistic forecasts, with 200,000 jobs added a month, real growth in gross domestic product at 3% in the past year, and an inflation rate that has fallen dramatically in the past few years,” a former Obama economic advisor — Jason Furman — wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June 2024.
Mayorkas’ Power in the White House
Mayorkas has accumulated enormous power in Biden’s administration.
He has survived a House impeachment, even after he risked the Democratic Party’s White House 2024 election prospects by spiking migration to unprecedented levels.
Mayorkas is powerful because he is backed by much of Wall Street, and Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group for West Coast consumer-economy investors. He is also strongly supported by many progressive leaders — including former President Barack Obama — and by officials who filled top jobs in Biden’s administration.
Biden’s labor secretary ceded his power to Mayorkas: “The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people?” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told Fox Business in December 2022.
In March 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have shirked responsabilites inherent in Biden’s invitation to take over part of Mayorkas’ realm.
Mayorkas has also taken on a huge foreign policy role. For example, he has been making deals with dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela that muted U.S. support for democracy movements in exchange for better binational management of migration to the United States.
He has also played a central role in relations with Haiti, Panama, and Ecuador, which have allowed his chaotic flood of migrants into the United States.
In December, he helped craft a deal with Mexico for temporary 2024 curbs on migration. The price of the Mexico deal is unclear — but Mayorkas has put no visible pressure on Mexico over drug smuggling or on trade disputes as he has worked to streamline many migrants’ transit through Mexico and into U.S. communities.
He now pushing for curbs on free speech because of his role in national security. For example, in his September interview with the Texas Tribune, he seemed to advocate speech curbs amid the divisiveness caused by his very unpopular migration policy:
The divisiveness in our country’s political life is preventing progress that our country desperately needs, and that’s not only with respect to immigration. What I will say about the divisiveness is: A divide speaks of a chasm; it speaks of space, a vacuum, if you will, and that vacuum tends to be filled, and it is filled by our adversaries. Our adversaries, adverse nation-states, exploit that divide. And I consider the divisiveness in our country to actually be a homeland security issue.
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 suggesting his priorities are above the law and appearing to claim 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.
In May 2023, he explained his motivation in a graduation speech to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy:
My drive has been defined by a very clear purpose. My mother’s and father’s life journeys were defined by displacement. My mother was twice a refugee, first from war-torn Europe and, 19 years later, with my father, my sister, and me from the communist takeover of Cuba … They are the primary engine of my drive, and the primary reason why I work so hard, my purpose.
Mayorkas is very sympathetic toward migrants and told the Texas event, “I resist the conflation of people seeking a better life with criminality and the smuggling of drugs.”