Vice President Kamala Harris’s first migration-related campaign advertisement touts her claimed record as a “tough prosecutor” but says nothing against President Joe Biden’s high-migration, wealth-shifting border policy.
“She’s trying to hoodwink voters [and] she’s assuring her supporters …. that she’s going to continue and expand the open borders policies that have been going on for the last three years,” Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
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The ad shows she is “pretending to crack down at the border while also letting in hundreds of thousands of inadmissible migrants through these improper [“orderly and humane”] pathways, and then leaving the states and local governments to pick up” the mess, Vaughan added.
The ad says:
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.
Does this convince any American that what we all witnessed for the past 4 years never happened? That somehow the millions of illegal immigrants who came (and are still coming) into the U.S. under the Biden-Harris Administration don't exist? https://t.co/bYut1qjHgq
— NumbersUSA (@NumbersUSA) August 9, 2024
The ad echoes the bait-and-switch claims in Harris’s stump speech. For example, she told attendees at her July 30 rally in Atlanta, Georgia:
So, I was the attorney general of a border state. In that job, I walked underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico on that border with law enforcement officers. I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk.
Since early 2021, President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, has welcomed more than 10 million legal, illegal, and quasi-legal economic migrants, at enormous cost to Americans’ wages, housing costs, tax bills, home prices, and civic peace.
In response, Biden gave Harris the task of “stemming” migration through many countries in a March 2021 White House event. “When she speaks, she speaks for me, doesn’t have to check with me,” Biden told Mayorkas, the cameras, and his international audience.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas speaks during a press briefing on July 15, 2024, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Oliver Contreras)
Harris responded to Biden’s wide-reaching commission by focusing on the “root causes” of migration. “[We] must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek,” she said.
Since then, Biden has effectively let Mayorkas supercharge the nation’s Extraction Migration economic strategy.
Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot, and he has opened many quasi-legal loopholes for millions of economic migrants to cross into the United States. He and his Extraction Migration policies are backed by the same networks of California investors, employers, and donors that are also backing Harris.
Mayorkas rejects any criticism of his deadly and wealth-shifting policies. “We cannot have the rights and the needs of individuals who are seeing humanitarian relief in the United States be exploited for political purposes,” he told ABC News on January 1.
Mayorkas also helped write the February 2024 border bill that is being touted by Harris and their media allies. “Here is my pledge to you: As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law,” Harris said in Atlanta.
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The Mayorkas border bill enables supercharges migration by allowing the border to run a so-called “Asylum Corps” at the border, whose members would have the unreviewable power to grant green cards to economic migrants who offer “clear and convincing” claims for asylum. Five years after getting a green card, the migrants can become citizens and vote in national elections.
“The border never closes … This allows for a more a more orderly, humane asylum processing system,” declared a leading Democrat who helped negotiate the border bill.
Harris’s advertisements and speeches do not mention Mayorkas and his pro-migration policies. But in June 2021, Harris echoed pro-migration themes touted by Mayorkas, saying, “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.”
The Democrats who backed the Mayorkas “orderly, humane” border bill also rejected the House’s comprehensive H.R.2 immigration reform package.
The poll-tested tone of Harris’s campaign was reported by Reuters on August 7, under the headline, “Kamala Harris talks tough on border security”:
Harris has made the border security bill a centerpiece of her platform, and a digital campaign ad has cast the election as a choice between “the one who will fix our broken immigration system. And the one who’s trying to stop her.”
Harris’s claim to being tough on the border is also bogus, Vaughan added:
First of all, as a prosecutor in California, she was notorious for going easy on Transnational gang members like MS-13 and 18th Street, by participating in a program to let gang members off the hook by escorting them to the airport to fly them back to Central America. Also, while she was Attorney General of California, she pushed sanctuary policies on all the law enforcement agencies and discouraged them from cooperating with ICE to remove criminals.
She is “lying continually to make people believe [her] lie,” Vaughan said.
In contrast, Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance (R-OH), are spotlighting the civic and pocketbook damage caused by Mayorkas’s welcome for millions of migrants.
Harris has “been the worst border czar in history,” Trump said on August 8. “Twenty million people came over the border during the Biden-Harris administration … Now you have people dying financially because they can’t buy bacon, they can’t buy food, they can’t buy groceries, they can’t do anything, and they’re living horribly in our country right now.”
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.
