Parsing Immigration Podcast: Bensman Field Work Breaks Two Stories South of the Border

Parsing Immigration Policy, Episode 86

By Mark Krikorian and Todd Bensman on January 5, 2023

Krikorian: “What to me is most remarkable is no one else has been reporting on this. I mean, you’ve been doing some really great reporting on this but why hasn’t the LA Times or Reuters or AP or the New York Times been writing about this. It’s really kind of remarkable and it sort of underlines how the media bias isn’t so much how the stories are biased… it’s more like the choice of what to write about and what questions to ask is one of the things that seems to me is the way you see media bias happen and my sense is that writing about this would be seen as somehow punching down or what have you and that immigrants are a protected class so too much inquiry into what’s going on would be problematic.”

In a sense, the job of reporting is to find things that are happening in the dark and to bring them out into the light. And if big newspapers and the big wire services … they have lots of people and they have the wherewithal to have uncovered these stories, if they were interested, and it’s pretty clear to me they weren’t interested and more power to you to have sniffed out these stories and reported them.

Bensman: “Well, as you know, I was a reporter for a couple of decades and, if you cover immigration…if you’re an immigration reporter for any of the major newspapers, this whole thing is like the moon landing, you know.. the numbers that are coming across. If you cover the aerospace industry, you know, this is like the invention of intercontinental flight. This is the biggest story of your entire life. And so I’m always surprised that I don’t see any immigration reporters down there writing about it.”

Summary

The Center’s Senior National Security Fellow, Todd Bensman, traveled to Mexico to investigate rumors about a shelter in Tijuana serving only Muslim migrants and about thousands of illegal immigrants being funneled into the United States through ports of entry under a questionable program that makes border crossing legal. His trip took him to Tijuana and Mexicali.

Given the large number of “special interest aliens” (SIAs), U.S.-bound immigrants from countries where Islamic terrorist groups operate, on the FBI terrorism watch list, Bensman wondered about the national security implications of Mexico’s first Muslim immigrant shelter, which shelters mostly SIAs. He visited the shelter and conducted the first interview of its director, who has never been contacted by American officials, about the sensitive national security issues the operation raises for the United States.

While in Tijuana Bensman discovered that with the help of non-profit advocacy groups, the Biden administration has been operating a secretive new “humanitarian parole” program that legalizes intending border crossers in Mexico and then allows Mexican authorities to discretely hand them off to American authorities at the border for resettlement. The administration’s parallel immigration system is a work-around to evade court-ordered expulsion policies and appears to be funneling immigrants into the United States through ports of entry out of the sight of news drone cameras, invisible to the American public, and absent from the border apprehension statistics.

In Mexicali, Bensman found the same soaring demand for the expanding system of Mexican shelters that gradually feed their occupants through American ports of entry with temporary legal status and opportunity to make the big move permanent.

In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, contrasts the United Arab Emirates’ “emiratization” program, which incentivizes employers to transition jobs from foreign workers to citizens, with U.S. policy, which actually subsidizes the employment for certain foreign workers. Krikorian says that foreign worker programs should have as their goal the elimination of the programs by replacing the workers with Americans.