There’s big money in illegal immigration.
“Here’s What All the Best Charities for Helping Undocumented Immigrants Have in Common,” reads the website of Impactful Ninja, a trendy consulting firm devoted to “systemic change on a global level.” Its list of common attributes includes the following: “They promote ways to integrate immigrants into society—legally and otherwise—so that all immigrants get the chance to become full members of society. Just as they deserve to be.”
Were they just mangling the English language? It’s quite possible; under the heading “Conscious Eating,” we find the observation, “You recognize that what you eat has a big impact on how ethical & sustainable you life.” Or was this really an affirmation of charities that break our laws to prevent deportations?
The firm’s corporate philanthropy partner is the San Francisco-based Pledge 1%, which in 2021 announced that “$2 billion in new philanthropy has been unlocked for good since the launch of its CEO Equity Playbook in the summer of 2020,” and that Pledge 1% is “well on its way toward a goal of unlocking $5 billion in new philanthropy by 2025.”
Matt Oppenheimer, CEO of the Seattle-based online international cash-transfer service Remitly—which recorded nearly $257 million in revenue in 2020, has a market capitalization approaching $8 billion, and is listed on Nasdaq—loves the outfit.
“Pledge 1% has helped provide tools we need to transform our philanthropic objectives into impact,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. “Now, the funds we’ve dedicated to invest in the financial, economic, and social inclusion of immigrants and their families can grow in lockstep with our company’s success.”
Lockstep indeed. The more illegal aliens with a permanent foothold in the United States, the more millions of dollars that Mr. Oppenheimer’s firm rakes in, as those who broke the law to come here wire U.S. dollars across the border back home. Remitly’s profits come from taking advantage of the difference between the cost of its transactions and what it charges those using its service. In total, there was $1.5 trillion sent home by immigrants in 2020.
Transfer services that cap the amount of a transaction, such as Remitly, are perfect for the newest forms of money laundering conducted by Mexican drug cartels, which have been exploiting recent surges in remittances from migrants to send the cash they generate killing Americans with opioids via the recruitment of multitudes of cash-strapped ordinary Mexicans as wire-transfer mules.
As one news report put it, “The scheme takes advantage of the extensive legal network of firms that facilitate transfers from migrant laborers to their families.”
Some Republican congressmen agree completely that charities are finding ways to integrate illegal aliens “into society, legally and otherwise.”
Alarmed at how nongovernmental organizations fuel illegal crossings, Reps. Lance Gooden and Jake Ellzey of Texas, Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, and Andy Biggs of Arizona in December claimed that “Catholic Charities is violating federal law and regulation, placing migrants and American communities at risk, and subjecting local communities to unreasonable burdens.” In a letter to the organization—whose revenue, according to Forbes, was $4.7 billion in 2022, $1.4 billion of which came from government—the lawmakers warned it “to preserve all documents, communications, expenditures ... electronic information and metadata” pertaining to government monies received “related to migrants encountered at the southern border.”
Despite its name, this is an entity that’s no longer Christian, but socialist. As City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson put it: “[Beginning in the 1960s,] Catholic Charities rejected its long-standing emphasis on personal responsibility and self-reliance and began to blame capitalist society rather than individual behavior for poverty and crime. It now looked to the welfare state to solve all social problems.”
As former New York state Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey described it: “[Catholic Charities is] hauling in millions in taxpayer dollars—your money—under government contracts to facilitate illegal immigration. It’s money laundering. Democratic politicians want to maximize illegal immigration, but they don’t want their fingerprints on it.”
When from behind the steering wheel, you see the approaching sign of a Best Western, a Comfort Inn, a Hampton Inn, or a Holiday Inn, you may breathe a sigh of relief that you and the family will soon be tucked into bed at your temporary abode after an exhausting vacation drive. Except that you might be mistaken.
Hotels near the border in Arizona and Texas bearing those very corporate signs were taken over two years ago by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide accommodations for migrant families released from Border Patrol custody, at a cost to the taxpayer of tens of millions of dollars.
This means that some of the United States’ most iconic hotel chains are making a fortune facilitating the overrun of the country by the hordes crossing illegally from the south, giving them a bunk and a bath financed by U.S. taxpayers.
This is only a fraction of the ways businesses make money from illegal immigration. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in its glory days of the Reagan era boasted supply-side pioneer Richard Rahn as chief economist.
“Because America cannot accommodate all of those who wish to become U.S. citizens, the best thing it can do is continue to admit those who will benefit the country,” Mr. Rahn said, as usual a beacon of common sense.
The once-great Chamber of Commerce, on the other hand, wants the gates at the border left wide open to admit anyone and everyone, allowing a cascade of government-subsidized labor to pour in in the form of millions of low-skilled and government-dependent immigrants, reducing wages and increasing welfare costs. One ultimate effect is to depress business—the very opposite of the chamber’s supposed mission. Plus, the low taxes and lessened regulation the chamber officially wants is not what the vast proportion of the newcomers will be voting for, when and if they can vote.
Prominent tech companies and others use the H-1B visa program to lay off thousands of employees and replace them with visitors who can be paid less. Amazon, for example, hired 6,400 new H-1B employees last year and nearly 6,200 in 2021. But at the same time, Amazon is laying off or preparing the sack more than 27,000. Google and Meta hired more than 3,000 H-1B workers last year, while they together laid off 33,000 of their employees. Meta even established a lobbying group, FWD.US, dedicated to getting Washington to issue more of these visas.
Big H-1B visa employers Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and Qualcomm are also executing mass layoffs. Beyond tech, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey recently hired more than 1,000 new H-1B workers while laying off more than 5,000. Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Starbucks, and Uber are pushing for more H-1Bs; Uber recently canned 1,000 employees over 10 weeks as it doubled H-1B visa workers for management, marketing, and tech. Disney even fired scores of its employees, but not before forcing them to train their foreign replacements.
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), condemns the abuse of guest worker schemes and “the vociferous lobbying on the part of business interests for unfettered access to guest workers in the midst of the greatest unemployment crisis in living memory” during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Such abuses, Mr. Stein argues, “undermine American labor and send our technology to countries whose interests are inimical to ours.”
We haven’t even touched on the restaurant and agricultural industries’ self-interested use of the illegal alien cheap labor pool, or how convenient it is for the wealthy to hire off-the-books gardeners, landscapers, and maids.
A corporate enemy within is using a mass illegal immigration invasion across the border to transform the country into a place where corporate activities, business, and entrepreneurship will one day be close to impossible. In the meantime, the crime and cultural dislocation so many businesses have allowed to be imported wreak havoc with the customers who made these firms rich.
