President Donald Trump’s deputies are shutting down a semi-secret federal program that moves wage-cutting labor from Central and South America into American and European workplaces.
The Safe Mobility Initiative sought to create many Safe Mobility Offices in foreign countries where low-wage foreigners could apply for visas to live and work in the United States and Europe.
CBS News reported on January 23:
The Trump administration is shutting down processing offices in Latin America that the Biden administration set up to give migrants legal immigration options and dissuade them from crossing the southern border illegally, according to internal government documents obtained by CBS News.
The offices, established in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Guatemala, had allowed certain migrants living in or passing through those countries to apply for programs that would allow them to enter the U.S. legally.
“The internal State Department documents said the Trump administration is ceasing operations … as part of a “broader effort to assess how the United States manages migration processes to serve U.S. national interests,” the report added.
More than 30,000 migrants have been moved through the pipeline since 2024, via a variety of legal and quasi-legal routes, such as H-2A and H-2B work visas, parole loopholes, and asylum claims.
The plan was the brainchild of President Joe Biden’s zealously pro-migration border czar, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Biden’s pro-migration Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
In turn, their deputies rolled the plan into a larger migration treaty — dubbed the LA Declaration — with multiple South American, Central American, and European countries, including Spain.
“The number of refugees that we have committed to accepting [in 2025] from this hemisphere is 35,000 to 50,000 [and] 125,000, globally,” Mayorkas, Biden’s Cuban-born migration chief, told a September 2024 meeting in Washington D.C.
“If you ask me, from the perspective of my personal story, those numbers should be far greater, far greater,” he added.
“I think the goal, and something that we have been personally pushing from the White House, is the potential … to really take on the concept of ‘Labor Neighbors,’” Marcela Escobari, a Bolivian immigrant appointed to Biden’s National Security Council, told a September 16 meeting hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
She added:
What I see around this table is an emerging “Coalition of the Brave” — governments making hard decisions for the good of their countries, and our region, and in rejection of xenophobia and the politics of hate . . . Our joint progress should be a source of pride and continued collaboration for the good of all our citizens.
Escobari helped start the international “Labor Neighbors” program in 2024 to quietly help U.S. and European employers hire many more migrants from South America.
The program became part of the multinational Los Angeles Declaration bureaucracy that sought to create migration pipelines from South America.
“There are millions of people that can really be … allowed to restart their lives [in the United States and Europe],” Escobari told the Carnegie meeting.
The program was similar to George W. Bush’s wealth-shifting “Any Willing Worker” program.
“New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country,” Bush announced in January 2004. “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job,” he said.
Congressional Democrats quietly funded the Safe Mobility Initiative program, despite the 1990 law that caps migrant inflow at roughly 1 million per year.
The funding moved from Congress into the program via multiple agencies, including Mayorkas’s Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of State, and the United Nations.
Migration advocates knew their goal was increasingly unpopular, so they minimized the political visibility of their plan.
“Someone said ‘We don’t want to make immigration sexy — we want to make immigration really boring,’ [so] let us take the political heat out of it,” Amy Pope, Biden’s U.N. appointee told the Georgetown meeting:
This is why I’m emphasizing the importance of engaging stakeholders who are not traditionally around the table, and by the way, that also very much includes the faith community … [which is] fulfilling the basic needs of the people that they are either sponsoring or serving, and in a way that brings a human focus to the work …
It also is important to bring the private sector into the conversation because it the private sector who is saying behind closed doors “We desperately need a sustainable workforce, and without migration, we will not have a sustainable workforce.” The private sector does have the credibility to make that case in a way that an NGO or a U.N. organization may be able to make it.
In May 2023, Pope claimed that migration could “revitalize” Americans’ communities:
We know as Americans, that migration has actually led to tremendous benefits in our own country. We know even recent evidence shows that migration has revitalized communities that have been dying. In fact … I was born in Cleveland, grew up part of my life in Akron, then in Pittsburgh. All of those cities have benefited from migration.
Biden’s Department of State under Tony Blinken pushed and celebrated cheap labor and diversity migration:
However, the pro-migration policy helped President Donald Trump beat the Democratic coalition in November. His Department of State chief, Marco Rubio, now opposes mass migration and champions Americans first:
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