China’s economic migrants are joining the global rush into America as President Joe Biden’s deputies widen legal loopholes in the southern border, according to a U.S.-funded news agency.
The route for China’s migrants goes through Ecuador in South America. Then the migrants take buses, taxis, and boats to reach the deadly Darien Gap jungle trail in Panama, where the United Nations helps them travel further north towards Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, according to a December 26 article by Radio Free Asia.
The article said:
1,028 Chinese citizens entered Colombia from Ecuador through unofficial channels between January and November 2022, 458 of whom did so in November alone.
Nearly all of them pass through Necoclí, the jumping-off point for the notorious Darién Gap people-smuggling route through the jungle from Panama to Colombia, in a bid to cross eventually into the United States.
According to two shipping companies that ship travelers to the trailhead in Panama, 122 Chinese people have bought tickets during the past week.
A pipeline of 122 people per week adds up to 6,300 a year — if the flow somehow stops growing.
The arrival of more Chinese reflects the growing global awareness that Biden is dangling the hope of U.S. jobs, homes, and lives to ambitious young people everywhere — whatever the huge economic and civic damage to ordinary Americans.
For example, the number of Indian migrants detained at the border rose from 20,000 in 2020 up to 64,000 in 2022. The Filipino inflow rose from 46,000 in 2019 up to 55,000 in 2022. In 2022, Biden’s border officials admitted 114,000 people from those two countries, regardless of the Title 42 barrier or section 212(f) in federal laws that allow the president to exclude any alien.
But Biden’s invite is also drawing more migrants from every corner of the world as poor people scramble to grab their slice of America before U.S. citizens can restore their borders with a new President. “The 2.4 million Border Patrol encounters with migrants in the 2022 fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 represented a record high,” the New York Times reported on December 29:
There was a nearly 2000 percent increase in the number of Colombians encountered during that period compared with the previous fiscal year; Indians increased by 607 percent; Cubans by 471 percent; Russians by 430 percent and Nicaraguans by 227 percent.
Overall, Biden accepted almost as many illegal, legal, and temporary migrants as there were U.S. births in 2022 — and he has deported fewer than 100,000 migrants.
The growing U.S. populations of legal migrants and of temporary visa workers — such as Indian H-1B visa workers — are also pulling in more illegal migrants for lower-skill jobs in ethnic districts.
The Chinese migrants are guided along their routes, and around legal obstacles, by maps posted online by prior migrants and American pro-migration groups.
There is no road between South America and Central America, so the global migrants must take a boat from Columbia, and then use boats and jungle trails to reach buses in rural Panama. The route is a shorter and safer version of the earlier Darien Gap trail — where thousands of migrants likely died in 2021 and 2022. The shorter trail was created by Biden’s zealously pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
The myriad migrants from all over the world are aided by rest stations that are funded by industry by U.S. taxpayers. For example, migrants are helped by a United Nations aid station in the Columbian port of Necoclí:
Near the jetty where the travelers will embark, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration has set up a tent, while the local government has its own tent facing it. A third canopy provides shade to people waiting to board the next vessel to Panama, who hail from Afghanistan, India, Latin America, the Caribbean, and, more recently, from China.
U.S. officials are trying to gain control of the travel routes.
Mayorkas’ goal is not to stop migration, but to sideline the cartels so international progressive groups can take over the lucrative business of recruiting and moving migrants into Americans’ jobs and housing.
The progressive-run network is helping the alliance of businesses and progressives because it reduces the risk of political embarrassments which might cause a public backlash against the migration policies that transfer wealth and power from ordinary Americans to the coastal investor class. Those embarrassments would include unwanted media descriptions of migrant deaths, or the televised arrival of too many migrants at the U.S. border.
…
Many migrants die — especially in the Darien Gap trail — because of the U.S. policy of extracting young people from poor countries for use in the U.S. service economy.
The huge scale of the migration, and the many deaths, get minimal publicity from American media outlets, which portrays migration as an international civil rights issue, not as a U.S. economic policy.
Economic migrants recognize this progressive perspective and mix in claims of persecution with their demands to be allowed to get U.S. jobs. For example, some of the migrants bring young children to get through the Flores loophole.
RFA.org interviewed a Chinese migrant who was released into the United States with his wife and family — and who is now unlikely to be sent home:
The family flew to Bangkok, then Istanbul, where they spent six months, then took a flight to Quito, where they boarded a long-distance bus to Tulcan on the border with Colombia. They rented a car from there, and drove it to Necoclí, before boarding a boat to the Panamanian jungle route via the Gap of Darién.
When they reached the United States, “Cheng’s family was released after just one night in detention because they had a young child with them.”
Few Chinese migrants are sent home, partly because China’s government refuses to accept even their own migrants who have committed crimes against Americans. In response, U.S. officials do nothing for fear of disrupting U.S. business deals in China.
Since 1980, China has grown its economy by investing in Chinese manufacturing and workers.
In contrast, since 1990, the U.S. government has operated an economic policy of “Extraction Migration” which pulls human resources from poor countries and uses the imported consumers, renters, and workers to grow the service economy and investors‘ stock values.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages, boosted rents and housing prices, and shriveled coastal investors’ interest in heartland towns. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors.
It has also reduced native-born Americans’ clout in local and national elections, so helping the coastal elites to regain power after the shocking electoral success of Donald Trump’s 2016 lower-migration, higher-wage promises.
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Rising housing inventory will accelerate a 20% plunge in home prices as a meaningful recovery ‘is still miles away,’ Pantheon Macro says
- rise in housing inventory will accelerate a 15% to 20% plunge in home prices over the next year, according to Pantheon Macro.
- The firm said as existing home sales continue to fall, a rise in supply “will accelerate the speed” and “the depth of the decline.”
- Higher monthly mortgage payments suggest “that a meaningful recovery in sales is still miles away,” Pantheon said.
A 15% to 20% decline in home prices is likely as housing supply rises and consumers continue to feel the squeeze of higher monthly mortgage payments, Pantheon Macro said in a Wednesday note.
Existing home sales fell for the 10th straight month in November, down 7.7% to 4.09 million. That’s below consensus estimates of 4.20 million, and represents a cumulative decline of 37% since January.
Pantheon said a collapse in housing demand has led to the continued decline in existing home sales, and that means the supply of homes for sale will likely rise.
“The scale of the collapse in demand over the past year is enough by itself to drive home prices lower from here, but a rise in supply will accelerate the speed of adjustment and, potentially, the depth of the decline,” Pantheon economist Kieran Clancy said.
Driving the lack of consumer demand for homes is higher mortgage rates, which have doubled from about 3% at the start of the year to more than 6% today. Clancy estimates that monthly mortgage payments for a median-priced existing single family home are up 53% year-over-year, supporting Pantheon’s view that “a meaningful recovery in sales is still miles away.”
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Disgraced Crypto Billionaire and Top Democrat Donor Sam Bankman-Fried Met with Biden Officials at Least 4 Times, Including in September
Top Democrat donor and disgraced crypto billionaire, Sam Bankman-Fried, met with Biden officials at least 4 times in 2022 including a meeting in September with White House advisor Steve Ricchetti.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX cryptocurrency exchange, announced in May that he would donate “north of $100 million” and up to a “soft ceiling” of $1 billionfor the Democrat candidate running against President Donald Trump in the 2024 race.
Bankman-Fried donated over $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections.
FTX was laundering money from Ukraine and moving millions to donate to Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
It was a nifty trick by Democrats to get some easy campaign cash.
Earlier this month Elon Musk said suggested that donations to Democrats were likely much larger than the $40 million declared and as high as $1 billion!
The truth is likely somewhere in between the two numbers.
Ukraine funneled millions, if not billions, of international donations into FTX, Bankman-Fried’s company before it went belly-up.
The Daily Mail reported:
Disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried met with four Biden officials this year before the collapse of his FTX empire and his arrest in the Bahamas.
The Democratic donor, 30, awaiting trial for what prosecutors say is one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history held talks with senior White House advisor Steve Ricchetti on September 8, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
He has had at least two other meetings with Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12 and another with top aide Bruce Reed.
Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabriel also participated in a meeting on his own on May 13.
The latest report is further evidence of the deep ties Bankman-Fried had with Washington before he was charged with swindling investors out of at least $1.8 billion.
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Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok’s Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted
Accusations of Chinese tyranny are often based on demands from Beijing that Google and Facebook comply with their censorship orders as a condition for remaining in China. Reports over the years suggested that these firms typically comply: Google was building a censored search engine suited to Chinese demands; The New York Times has claimed Facebook developed a censorship app as its entrance requirement to the Chinese market, and Vox accused Apple of succumbing to Chinese censorship demands by banning an app from its store that had been used by protesters in Hong Kong demanding liberation from control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
But now the tables appeared to be turning when it comes to U.S. censorship demands and TikTok. Threats to ban or severely limit the Chinese-owned-and-controlled platform from the U.S. have been hovering over TikTok’s head through both the Trump and Biden years. The most common justification offered for the threat is that TikTok’s presence in the U.S. empowers China to propagandize Americans, a concern that escalated along with the platform’s massive explosion among Americans. Since early 2021, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app both worldwide and in the U.S. In August, Pew Research conducted a “survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17” and found that “TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey.”
Concerns over China’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing’s interests. Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order. “TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” warned The Guardian in late 2019.
Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests. TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals to allow TikTok to stay in the U.S.
Among those concessions is that TikTok is now outsourcing what the U.S. Government calls “content moderation” — a pleasant-sounding euphemism for political censorship — to groups controlled by the U.S. Government:
TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S. government, including an agreement for Oracle Corp to store the data of the app’s users in the United States and a United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions. It has spent $1.5 billion on hiring and reorganization costs to build up that unit, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Perhaps one might view as reasonable U.S. concerns that China can weaponize TikTok to propagandize Americans and destabilize the U.S. through its power to censor the platform. Note, however, that this is precisely the same concern that countries like China, Iran and Russia all invoke to justify censorship compliance as a condition for U.S. internet companies to remain active in their country. Those countries fear that American tech companies — whose close partnership with U.S. security agencies has long been well-documented — will be used to propagandize and destabilize their populations and countries exactly the way that the U.S. Security State is apparently concerned that China can do to the U.S. via TikTok.
Of course, when all of these governments claim to be worried about “destabilization” and “propaganda,” what they mean is that they want to retain the power to propagandize their own citizenries. By “national security” and “national interests,” they do not mean they want to protect the welfare of their citizens but rather seek to preserve their foreign meddling in other countries and their ability to quash criticism of national leaders. If that was not what they meant, they would simply ban all censorship from these platforms, rather than demand the right to control what is prohibited.
These moves by the U.S. Security State to commandeer censorship decisions on TikTok, accompanied by the hovering threat to ban TikTok entirely from the U.S., appear to be having the desired effect already. When we launched our new live nightly show on Rumble, System Update, our social media manager created new social accounts for the program on major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, etc. Each day, she posts identical excerpts from the prior night’s shows on each social media account.
For Monday night‘s show, I devoted my opening monologue to documenting how reporting by mainstream Western media outlets on Ukraine and President Zelensky completely reversed itself as soon as Russia invaded in February. When one reviews the trajectory of how these media outlets radically reversed everything they had been saying about Ukraine and Zelensky, one can see the Orwellian newspeak — we have always been at war with Eastasia — happening in real time.
For years, for instance, mainstream news outlets in the West repeatedly warned that the Ukrainian military was dominated by a neo-Nazi group called the Azov Battalion, that the Kiev-based government was becoming increasingly repressive and anti-democratic (including ordering three opposition media outlets closed in 2021), and that Zelensky himself was not only supported by a single Ukrainian oligarch but he himself had massive off-shore accounts of hidden wealth as revealed by the Pandora Papers. And the U.S. State Department itself, in 2021, had documented a long list of severe human rights abuses carried out either with the acquiescence or even active participation of the Zelensky-led central government.
One of the video excerpts from our program that was posted to all social media sites, including TikTok, was this indisputably true and rather benign review of how media outlets, including The Guardian, had previously depicted Zelensky as surrounded by corruption and hidden wealth. To be sure, the excerpt was critical of Zelensky, but there is absolutely nothing even factually contestable, let alone untrue, given that the whole point of the clip is to show how the media had spoken of Ukraine and Zelensky prior to the invasion as opposed to the fundamentally different tone that now drives their coverage:
Shortly after posting this video, we were notified by TikTok that the video was removed by the platform. The cited ground was “integrity and authenticity,” namely that the video, for unspecified reasons, had “undermine[d] the integrity of [their] platform or the authenticity of [their users].” The warning added that TikTok “removes content and accounts that…involve misleading information that causes significant harm.” In a separate communication, TikTok notified our program that our “account is at high risk of being restricted based on [our] violation history” (the sole violation we were ever advised of was this specific video). As a result, TikTok warned, “the next violation could result in being prevented from accessing some feature.” A more ambiguous warning could scarcely be imagined.
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