Hoist By Their Own Petard

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, no foes of expanding immigration, are dismayed at the situation the Biden Administration has fomented at our southern border:

The White House on Saturday dispatched the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the southern border, tacitly acknowledging the growing humanitarian crisis as migrants surge to enter the U.S. Stephen Miller, the restrictionist adviser to Donald Trump, could not have devised a better way to undermine the prospects for immigration reform.

FEMA typically addresses unpredictable calamities like hurricanes, but this border mess is man-made. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported nearly 397,000 encounters with migrants on the southwestern border in the first five months of fiscal 2021, which began in October. That’s about 25% more than in the same period in 2019.

In 2019 the surge of migrants led to “dangerous overcrowding” at border control stations and detention facilities, in the words of the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Covid and social-distancing requirements have further reduced capacity at government facilities and nonprofit shelters.

Unaccompanied children are arriving in droves, with CBP reporting nearly 9,500 encounters in February, a 61% increase over January. The Washington Post reports that more than 8,500 migrant children are at facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services, while another 3,500—“the highest figure ever”—are stuck at CBP stations waiting for a spot to open at the shelters.

The wait times for children stuck at CBP facilities now often exceed the 72-hour legal limit, and the Post says unaccompanied children are “waiting in cramped and austere holding cells with concrete floors and benches” where the “lights remain on 24 hours a day.” Remember in 2019 when the media and Democrats called similar conditions a moral catastrophe?

They conclude:

President Biden has backed himself into this box canyon by failing to heed political and economic reality. Americans want to be generous to immigrants, but they also reject the view that the U.S. can finance the healthcare and education of anyone who breaks U.S. law to get here. That should be clear enough from the immigration reform failures going back to George W. Bush in 2007.

I think they misread the election returns. There was no full-throated rejection of the net effect of Trump’s immigration policies although there was rejection of some of the strategies he used to get there and of the man himself. I think the editors’ characterization is about right: Americans want to be generous as long as it doesn’t inconvenience themselves too much. The Biden Administration’s policies is inconveniencing Americans too much, particularly Americans who live adjacent to our southern border.