On President Biden’s first day in office, he paused nearly all deportations. He vowed to end the harsh practices of the Trump administration, show compassion toward those wishing to come to the United States and secure the southern border.He achieved neither of those outcomes.
For Mr. Biden, it was a matter of principle. He wanted to show the world that the United States was a humane nation, while also demonstrating to his fellow citizens that government could work again.
[T]hose early promises have largely been set aside as chaos engulfs the border and imperils Mr. Biden’s re-election hopes. The number of people crossing into the United States has reached record levels, more than double than in the Trump years. The asylum system is still all but broken.That power comes bundled with money for optional wars. Republican populists want no part of the nation building in Ukraine. Democrat race hustlers want no part of the counterterrorism in Israel. The China Lobby wants no part of in-kind assistance to Taiwan.
On Friday, in a dramatic turnaround from those early days, the president implored Congress to grant him the power to shut down the border so he could contain one of the largest surges of uncontrolled immigration in American history.
That power to shut down the border? A chimera. Never mind what Democrat court intellectual Jay Kuo (via Maha) says.
The border is likely President Biden’s weakest issue. The economy? It’s improving fast, and consumer confidence is rising. Abortion? The Democrats have Republicans on the ropes. Crime? It’s fallen across the country. So that leaves the migrant crisis at the border, and Republicans have doubled down.Dementia Joe has the power to restore the Trump status quo. Does anybody really think that some average daily crossing count, which can be manipulated easily enough by public officials looking the other way, and coyotes slowing the roll of their clients across Central America and Mexico, is going to end the pressure on Chicago? Never mind Mr Kuo's deflections.
But here’s the catch: They have played up the crisis so much—running non-stop coverage of migrant crossings and overfilled shelters, and taking every chance to stage photo ops near the border—that voters have demanded a solution. Indeed, Republicans have been so gung-ho on the border that they insisted on delaying aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan unless the border crisis got fixed.
Okay, said the White House and Democratic Senate leadership. If that’s what you demand, let’s get it done. The draft Senate proposal contains many huge concessions to the Republican demands on the border. But one thing really sticks out: It reportedly would grant the president emergency powers to close the border whenever average daily crossings in any given week exceeds 5,000 people—and we are already there.
That’s why President Biden stated on Friday, in no uncertain terms, that he would shut down the border on the first day he signs the bill into law.
But all that posturing and politicizing could end if Biden simply shuts the border down under the new bill. Biden’s threat to do so was met with derision from the right, claiming, incorrectly, that he has the legal power to shut the border down right now.That's the kind of Washington-speak that conflates passing legislation with accomplishing something, and City Journal's Dave Seminara has heard it all before.
Trusting Biden to fix the border “quickly,” or ever, would be a bit like trusting a doctor who accidentally amputated your leg to sew it back on. But even as 55 percent of Americans view Biden unfavorably, according to the RealClearPolitics average, he knows he’s likely to face an opponent with roughly the same unfavorable score. The president can placate his base and try to shift the conversation back to issues he prefers—abortion, or “saving democracy”—or he can make a last-ditch effort to mitigate the border crisis and risk alienating progressives, already furious with him about the war in Gaza.Dementia Joe's willing accomplices at the Times, though, would rather contextualize his failures.
Some of the circumstances that have created the crisis are out of Mr. Biden’s control, such as the collapse of Venezuela, a surge in migration around the world and the obstinance of Republicans who have tried to thwart his efforts to address the problems. They refused to provide resources, blocked efforts to update laws and openly defied federal officials charged with maintaining security and order along the 2,000-mile border.Context or not, it's Bumbling Biden being Bumbling Biden.
[An] examination of Mr. Biden’s record over the last three years by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than 35 current and former officials and others, shows that the president has failed to overcome those obstacles. The result is a growing humanitarian crisis at the border and in major cities around the country. Many voters now say immigration is their top concern, and they do not have confidence that Mr. Biden is addressing it.The candor at the Times extends to the magazine, to the delight of Hot Air contributor John Sexton. "Migrants Keep Coming Because They Know They Can Stay." That realization, Donald Trump or not, leads to anger among Democrats. Although John Judis, in his role as Liberal Patriot stringer, concedes the contextualization outlined infra, he sees that the teeming borders and the overwhelmed sanctuary cities are losing propositions.
A veteran of the decades-long search for a bipartisan immigration compromise by the late Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, the president sought balance. He created legal pathways for migrants and began rebuilding the refugee system even as he embraced some of former President Donald J. Trump’s more restrictive tactics. But those efforts were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people arriving at the border, and at times Mr. Biden failed to appreciate the growing anger in both parties.
During the 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden said he would be an antidote to his predecessor’s anti-immigrant approach. But he has presided over a fierce struggle inside the White House between advisers who favored more enforcement and those who pushed to be more welcoming. That debate played out as the country also shifted. After years of inflation, economic suffering and political polarization, the public is divided about whether the United States — which is home to more immigrants than any other nation — should absorb more.
The essay also includes a lengthy breakdown of the procedural tangle that immigration, whether legal on work permits or student visas or family ties, or quasi-legal with the hope of asylum, or the current muddle, has become. We will revisit the procedural tangle another day. Today's focus is on the Jarrett regency tripping all over itself.
There are two things worth considering about this controversy. First, America’s immigration system is a mess and has only gotten messier under Joe Biden's presidency. Illegal immigration has soared in the last two years, a result in part of undocumented immigrants claiming asylum and of the Biden administration granting what’s known as “parole” to hundreds of thousands of aspiring migrants. Democratic mayors have joined Republicans in demanding that the federal government do something about this situation.Donald Trump was your last warning, according to the hotheads. They have no reason to disagree with Mr Judis's verdict: "America's borders have been de facto open during the first three years of the Biden administration." I bet you'll find a few of them saying "Told Ya So."
Second, the current immigration debate in Congress represents a first salvo in the 2024 presidential and congressional campaigns. Republicans and the Republican nominee for president are going to blame the Democrats for the border crisis—and they’ll have a point! If Democrats don't find a credible way of addressing the crisis, they and the country could have to endure another four years of you know who.
It is time, though, for cooler heads to prevail. In Tablet, Michael Lind suggests that the open borders are the last gasp of a dying Democrat establishment.
Between the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993 and that of Joe Biden in 2021, the Democratic Party morphed into a new party of elite, college-educated white professionals, Black Americans, and mostly Hispanic immigrants concentrated in a few big cities in a few populous states like California and New York. Many Democrats have called this new, big-city political machine “the coalition of the ascendant,” confident that the growth in the share of nonwhite voters fed by immigration, combined with increasing social liberalism, will lead to inevitable one-party rule by a hegemonic Democratic Party.That's the forlorn hope of an Emerging Democratic Majority, one that its heralds, including the aforementioned Mr Judis, have abjured. And it's high time for people who disagree with Democrats, particularly those claiming to be Republicans, to abjure that replacement talk. Mr Lind's thesis is intriguing.
In reality, however, the Democratic Party is an alliance of interests threatened with long-term demographic decline—declining industries, declining states, declining cities, declining churches and nonprofits. These civic downtrodden have united around the hope that they can reverse the unpopularity of their offerings among U.S.-born Americans by importing new citizens en masse.Right. Keep claiming that Democrats are importing refugees to vote for more welfare, to do scut work for those degreed professionals, when, as even the Times admitted, it's people fleeing the socialist paradise of Venezuela contributing to the Jarrett regency's troubles, and you're not adding to your coalition of the productive. Let's follow Mr Lind for a few more paragraphs.
A politics founded on this idea—namely, that if not enough American voters like what you are offering, you should compensate by importing supportive voters—may seem like something from Alice in Wonderland. But that’s exactly what the leadership of the Democratic Party is doing, by refusing to enforce existing immigration laws and preventing states from securing their borders—while counting on the Democratic bureaucrats and judges to enforce the dubious legality of such moves.
Today’s immigration debate is over unskilled immigration, not skilled immigration. While programs like the H-1B visa have been exploited by Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms that prefer easily intimidated foreign guest workers to citizen workers and legal immigrants with greater rights, there is a bipartisan consensus that the U.S. can benefit from highly educated immigrants who are unlikely to be burdens on the welfare state. The controversy is over less-educated immigrants who enter the workforce in the U.S. by various means: family reunification, indentured servant “guest workers” used by agribusiness, illegal immigration and now—under Biden—quasi-legal “parole” status.That paragraph provides a bridge to that future post on the procedural tangle. When it takes longer to get a student visa approved than it does to prepare a dissertation proposal; when it takes longer to get permanent residency approved than it does for the faculty hire to obtain promotion and tenure; that's the process problem. There might be a research paper on the effect of cheap labor being available affecting the labor-intensity of invention and innovation. But would somebody at least consider making it easier for Venezuelan farmhands to buy their own dairy farms and herds?
The beneficiaries of mass immigration of less-educated workers are low-tech, low-wage industries with firms that are unwilling either to raise wages or invest in labor-saving technology as long as there is a constant influx of cheap labor from abroad.
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