Top Migration Lobbyist: Public Rejected Biden’s Border Policies Only Because of Bad Messaging

President Joe Biden’s mass migration reversed the nation’s positive view of migration — but only because his inflow was poorly managed by Democrats, says the top lobbyist for the nation’s leading pro-migration lobby.

 “The public completely rejected President Biden’s immigration agenda because … he never defined exactly what it was,” said Andrea Flores, the chief lobbyist at FWD.us, which was created in 2013 by West Coast consumer investors to expand migration.

“What really happened is Democrats didn’t come in” to support the migration, she said, adding:

It looked unmanaged: It was at the border, it was asylum seekers arriving in cities, it was mayors and governors asking the federal government for support that they didn’t get, it was long-time undocumented immigrants seeing new arrivals receive benefits that they had been waiting decades for.

“It was a complete narrative disaster to the public,” Flores lamented to an invited audience of progressives who gathered in a D.C. cinema on November 19.

RELATED: Texas Military, Troopers Turn Back Wave of Migrants at Border River Crossing

“They’re saying ‘We didn’t communicate the wonderfulness of our policies sufficiently,'” scoffed Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to reduce migration.

“The problem is not their messaging — the problem is the substance of their [pro-migration] policy and its consequences,” Krikorian said:

The administration and its allies in the media and elsewhere had almost complete control over shaping the way people perceive this [migration] phenomenon, and they’ve failed to do that [succesfully] because the reality overwhelmed their ability to dress it up.

There’s only so much you can do through press releases. If community centers are being shut down because they need to be filled with [more] illegal aliens, there’s no narrative that’s going to make that palatable to people. When somebody is released into the United States by the government, is put up in a hotel for free, and then is flown to Atlanta for free, and then goes and murders somebody, there’s no covering that up.

Flores’ message, he added, is “If we had only spent X times more money, we could have managed this more effectively and we wouldn’t have lost the election.”

“What these guys are doing is what the kids call ‘Cope,’ trying to make themselves feel better,” Krikorian added.

The theater conversation is important because Flores’ employer — FWD.us — has been the primary driver of migration policy in the Democratic Party since Trump’s 2016 win.

Mark Zuckerberg and a founding corps of West Coast consumer-economy investors created FWD.us to support the “Gang of Eight” migration expansion bill. In 2020, Zuckerberg — and his policy advisor, David Plouffe — helped Biden defeat Trump.

That helped ensure FWD.us got the pro-migration border chief it wanted, Alejandro Mayorkas. Since then, FWD.us has worked closely with Mayorkas to expand southern migration under a new narrative of “humane, orderly and safe immigration” via supposedly “legal pathways.” Since 2021, Mayorkas has imported roughly nine million inadmissible migrants to serve as consumers, renters, and workers for the U.S. consumer economy.

In March 2021, Kamala Harris deferred to Mayorkas’ FWD.us-approved policies when she rejected Biden’s request that she become the “border czar” above Mayorkas.

In 2024, David Plouffe became the campaign manager for the Harris campaign. Flores joined the campaign team, according to Vox.com. FWD’s leaders — and their West Coast business partners — provided a huge share of Harris’ funding. FWD.us — and like-minded progressive foundations — also funded many of the progressive groups in the Democratic Party’s base, ensuring far greater support for migration than in 2012.

RELATED: Border Patrol Chief Disagrees with Biden, Mayorkas; Admits No “Operational Control” Over Border

On the 2024 campaign trail, Harris did not break from Mayorkas’ migration policy. She quietly included it in her platform and used the same language pushed by FWD.us — even though Mayorkas’ migration was the second-most important issue in the race.

Since the November 5 disaster, many Democrats have tried to hide the political damage done by the FWD.us agenda.

Harris lost because “the political atmosphere was pretty brutal,” Plouffe rationalized in a PodSaveAmerica podcast on November 26 — without admitting how his FWD.us policies poisoned the political atmosphere for Harris.  “I think the political atmosphere, the desire for change … really presented huge challenges for us,” Plouffe evaded.

She did not change course on migration because “she had tremendous loyalty to President Biden,” claimed Stephanie Cutter, a top advisor in the campaign. She continued:

Imagine if we said, “Well, we would have taken this [alternative] approach on the border” …  it wasn’t going to give us what we needed, because it wouldn’t be a clean break [with the Biden/Mayorkas record].

“She was at negative 20-something [percent] on immigration,” added Quentin Fulks, a deputy manager of Harris’ campaign who has managed several other candidates’ campaigns. “We got that down to negative 10.”

That gain is small comfort to the many other Democratic interest groups and donors who now face Trump in the White House.

The Cinema Meeting

Flores and the president of FWD.us, Todd Schulte, spoke to their D.C.-based progressive allies on November 19. They met in a cinema at a showing of a new documentary “Separated” in a downtown theater.

“This film would not be out and you guys would not be seeing if it was not for the support of FWD,” declared NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff, whose book provided the basis for the documentary.

After the documentary was shown, the invited progressive audience listened as Flores explained the 2024 presidential defeat.

Democrats did not properly prepare for Biden’s migration, said Flores, who worked in Biden’s White House for six months. “What really happened is Democrats didn’t come in,” she said, adding:

When President Biden was elected, there was a huge majority of public support to rebuild the asylum system, to make it more humane, more orderly. The majority of the public actually supported increased immigration to the United States. Four years go by, and that has completely reversed.

Breitbart News has closely tracked the growing public opposition to migration.

Democrats should have spent heavily to minimize the economic pain of the migrants’ arrival, Flore said:

I think that is not because people do not want the United States to be a place of refuge. I do not think that’s an anti-immigrant sentiment — I think that is an “anti-mismanagement of immigration” sentiment. I think that’s anti-chaos [sentiment]. I think that is the cost of not running systems that really center American communities who intake and welcome immigrants. There’s not a set of laws about what should happen when people come to the border and what happens after that point. There just isn’t.

The White House’s narrative failure allowed Trump to persuade voters that migration was tied to economics, inflation, and housing costs, Flores said:

Lack of [a pro-migration] narrative … led everyone to hear the consistent message that Trump had been saying for eight years … that immigration was the cause of every domestic problem, whether it was housing, whether it was the price of goods.

“I’m not sure I totally agree with all you said,” responded MSNBC host Jen Psaki, a former spokeswoman for Biden who hosted the cinema event. She added:

I actually think that part of it from what I’ve seen, at least in [polling] data, is that people in a lot of communities are concerned that the border is not secure.

Where Next?

After Flores spoke, FWD.us president Schulte set the direction for his progressives to counter Trump’s pushback against the huge migration inflow favored by the investors.

“We should build a much more welcoming and humane and orderly immigration system,” he told his invited audience of pro-migration progressives:

We’ve got to have an immigration system. It’s not about one built in the last century, but one that works for the next decades to come. We can do that, and it will be imperfect and challenging.

FWD.us is an advocacy group for wealthy investors — not for migrants who want green cards.

FWD.us has a very rational mission: migrants grow the economy, partly through their low-wage work, partly through their consumption and monthly rents, but also because they cause massive deficit spending that fuels more business and sales. The migrant-inflated economy grows the nation’s pool of profits — and every extra $1 of profit investors earn from migration adds roughly $20 to their stock values.

Unsurprisingly and rationally. The public does not want their wages cut, their housing costs raised, and their workplaces denied productivity investments. Nor do they want their limited civic assets to be overloaded, their personal security eroded, and their civic society distracted by strange voices and foreign demands for the benefit of wealthy investors.

In this fight over immigration policy, the progressives are serving the investors, Krikorian noted

The left really believes in open borders, and they think that they’re sticking it to the man, when, in fact, the Man is laughing all the way to the bank … The smarter ones, I think, figure, “Look, yes, this is serving the interests of capital — I get it and I don’t like it. But in the long run … it’s going to change politics.

In this long battle over power and money, Schulte and his allies lost their first-round “Gang of Eight” fight in 2014. But they fought Trump to a draw in the second round, from 2016 to 2020.

In round three, their allies — Mayorkas and Biden — scored very big by importing roughly 9 million extra economic migrants across the southern border, alongside an additional 4 million legal immigrants and visa workers.

Round four has just opened badly for FWD.us as Trump prepared to occupy the Oval Office and deport more than 1 million migrants.

During the cinema meeting with progressives, Flores described the FWD.us’ plan for massive resistance against Trump’s pro-American policies and against Americans’ civil right to secure borders and a national labor market:

What can people do? …FWD.us has been spending last year working with a lot of people in this room and building out what could be a modern way that we as the United States welcome displaced people, but also increase legal pathways to migration and to start talking about it. We’re going to be releasing it, and we’re going to be — even when Trump is doing what Trump is doing — we have to start putting out better policy solutions because our immigration system is so incredibly outdated, it is hard to justify.

I just think of so many families who came in under, say, President Biden, who used his humanitarian legal pathways, and who now will likely lose status. It could be as soon as January.

So I think it’s also about, one look out for your neighbors, work with your state and local governments and say “Do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement agreements.”

Resist the pressure to feel that this election meant that people support mass deportations ….The politics are hard that I don’t think the American people are both like I remember when Trump was left the first time in my hometown, the children vanish from schools, and that will happen again. And so I think that local organizing is really, really critical, and governors and mayors are going to be on the front lines … You’re going to see a state-by-state response, and … there’s many ways you can protect people,

Schulte stepped in to praise his progressive allies, and to recommend narratives and keywords — Chaos! — to use in the PR fight over migration.

But Schulte admitted, “I do think that where we are heading is really hard, and it’s going to be really challenging.”

A week later, his task got much harder.

One of the primary founding members of FWD.us, Reid Hoffman, suggested he would depart the United States because of Trump’s win, according to the New York Times.

Worse, FWD.us founder Zuckerberg went to mend fences with Trump in Mar-a-Lago.

“It’s an important time for the future of American Innovation. Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration,” the company said in a press statement.

Stephen Miller, who is Trump’s top deputy for migration and Schulte’s main enemy, claimed victory on Fox News:

[Zuckerberg] has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of, and a participant in, this change we’re seeing all around America and the world, with this reform movement that Donald Trump is leading.

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1861931743877722149

As Schulte told his progressive allies in the cinema meeting, “Where we are heading is really hard, and it’s going to be really challenging.”