Republican Donors Push Candidates to Talk About Migrant Deaths, Not Economics

by NEIL MUNRO 30 Aug 2022

A group of Republican women candidates will visit the border on Tuesday to denounce the harm done to illegal migrants by President Joe Biden’s easy-migration policies.

But the group escorting the candidates is backed by Republican donors who also want the candidates to downplay the economic harm done to Americans by the government’s immigration programs.

The GOP candidates can best help themselves for election day by spotlighting the harm to the migrants and to Americans, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies:

This is an easy way [for them] to talk about the border that won’t cause them trouble at the country club. But the harm to migrants — which is a real thing — should be part of a broader indictment of the Biden administration’s policy which recognizes the effect of that policy on working Americans, on American taxpayers, and the local border communities.

The organizing group, Winning for Women Action Fund, is backed by numerous investors, including Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of the Elliott Management hedge fund. He is a long-standing pro-migration investor who gains from any inflow of extra migrant workers, consumers, and renters regardless of whether they are legal or illegal.

The GOP legislators will use Tuesday’s trip to spotlight the damage done to migrants by President Joe Biden’s policies, Fox News reported August 27:
“Women and children who have been enticed into making the dangerous journey to our country are experiencing untold cruelty and suffering,” [Annie] Dickerson said in an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital ahead of the trip. “The women on this trip — from all different backgrounds and from all across the country — are linking arms to give these victims a voice and demand accountability,” she added.

Dickerson works as a political consultant for Singer. She formerly worked as Director of Major Donors for President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

The Fox News report said Dickerson’s group will include, “Rep. Mayra Flores, R-Texas, and congressional candidates Jen Kiggins, R-Va., Amanda Adkins, R-Kan., April Becker, R-Nev., Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., Cassy Garcia, R-Texas, and Tiffany Smiley, R-Wash.”

“I want people to come and see the seriousness of this,” Rep. Mayra Flores (R-TX) told Fox. “This is something that we need to all be working together on — to secure the border, to keep immigrants safe, and to focus on legal immigration and why legal immigration is so important.” [emphasis added]

“This is the kind of thing that we’ve seen from Republicans for decades … wanting to find a more politically acceptable way to criticize [weak] border enforcement” without alienating their pro-migration donors, said Krikorian. He continued:

This is why there’s always so much talk about fencing at the border … Republican politicians have long talked about stopping illegal immigrants on the border [while also] saying that businesses should have no responsibility to make sure they’re only hiring illegal workers.

Even more broadly, the exclusive focus on illegal immigration is the same kind [of dodge] where Republican politicians will say “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” Obviously, illegal immigration is bad, but it’s only one piece of immigration and letting in a million-plus people legally every year creates most of the same problems that illegal immigration creates.

The best policy for America, and the most popular strategy for politicians, said Krikorian, is to reduce “immigration of people who aren’t criminals or rapists, but whose admission is still having harmful effects on society in the labor market, and our health care system.”

It is a good thing for GOP candidates to criticize the huge harm done to migrants by President Joe Biden’s policy, he said, adding, “if you’re focusing just on [harm to migrants], you’re trying to take the easy way.”

Many polls show that Americans strongly favor tight-labor policies which pressure companies to hire, train and equip Americans with labor-saving, wealth-generating technology. Many polls also show that the GOP-leaning public sees the government’s Extraction Migration economic strategy as economically damaging to Americans and their communities, especially in the Midwest and South.

However, many GOP politicians are reluctant to criticize the government’s run-amuck immigration programs for fear their local media will portray them as mean-hearted critics of poor migrants, Krikorian said. He added:

Most immigrants are just regular people like anybody else. They’re not rapists or not any of that stuff.

They’re just ordinary working stiffs. Some a little good, some a little bad, just like everybody else. So it is difficult for people to critique [legal immigration when] it is often seen as criticizing immigrants … rather than criticizing the federal immigration program as a policy matter.

But some politicians are learning to disentangle policy from personal by focusing on the economic and pocketbook damage caused by the federal labor pipelines.

For example, the GOP’s Senate candidate in Alabama, Katie Britt, told Breitbart News in May:

Alabamians are disproportionately hurt by the immigration system right now. You’ve got two things going [from immigration]. First, continual driving down of wages. Second, the coastal elites are able to fill their workforce needs [with immigrants] and we lose the opportunity to allow our workers [in Alabama] to compete for those jobs [created by coastal investors].

Britt won the endorsement of Winning for Women.

Paul Singer is funding the Winning for Women group as well as many other pro-migration establishment political groups.

Most of Singer’s Winning for Women funding goes to the affiliated WFW Action Fund which can fund campaign advertisements. For example, the WFWAF group spent heavily in a failed effort to stop GOP reformer Joe Kent from beating incumbent, pro-migration booster Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler in the GOP primary in Washington state.

Still, the group’s money also helped Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) beat primary challenger Katie Arrington in South Carolina.

The group is backing Tiffany Smiley, a GOP Senate candidate in Washington state.

The group is backing many GOP House candidates, including Michelle Bond in New York, Jennifer-Ruth Green in Indiana, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert in Ohio, Cassy Garcia in Texas, Erin Houchin in Indiana, Esther Joy King in Illinois, Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado, and Lisa Scheller in Pennsylvania.

The group also helps to reelect other GOP legislators. They include Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK), Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), Rep. Young Kim (R-CA), Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA), and Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX).

The group is also backing Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) and Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL). Both Republicans have pushed various amnesty and cheap-labor migration bills that would make it harder for young Americans to get ahead, including for nurses in the midwest.

Winning for Woman did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.

Singer and Donald Trump have a long history of cooperation and hostility, which reflects politicians’ normal tactic of zig-zagging between voters and donors.

“Paul Singer represents amnesty and he represents illegal immigration pouring into the country,” former President Donald Trump said in November 2015.

“As you know, Paul was very much involved with the anti-Trump or as they say ‘Never Trump’ and Paul just left and he’s given us his total support and it’s all about unification,” Trump said in 2017 after he welcome Singer to the White House. “So, I want to thank Paul Singer for being here … He was a very strong opponent and now he’s a very strong ally and I appreciate that,” Trump added.

Extraction Migration

It is easier for government officials to grow the economy by immigration than by growing exports, productivity, or the birth rate.

So Washington, DC, deliberately extracts millions of migrants from poor countries and uses them as extra workers, consumers, and renters. This extraction migration policy both grows and skews the national economy.

It prevents tight labor markets and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that would allow Americans and their communities to earn more money.

This migration policy also reduces exports by minimizing shareholder pressure on U.S. companies to build up beneficial and complementary trade with people in poor countries.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

An economy fueled by extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives an excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.



This economic strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall-monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.

But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.

Progressives hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration helps migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

Similarly, establishment Republicans, media businesses, and major GOP donors hide the skew towards investors by ignoring the pocketbook impact and by touting border chaos, welfare spending, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs needed by young U.S. graduates.

This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.

Republican Donors Push Candidates to Talk About Migrant Deaths, Not Economics (breitbart.com)