Is the Biden Administration Anti-Immigrant?

In a post at The Nation Hilary Goodfriend lambasts President Joe Biden for his anti-immigrant policies:

The Biden administration rode into office vowing to roll back Donald Trump’s notoriously cruel immigration policies. Instead, the humanitarian disaster at the US-Mexico border has only intensified and extended steadily southward.

When not actively worsening the harm, the administration’s approach has been feckless. Biden moved to cancel Trump’s so-called Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), which forced over 70,000 asylum-seekers to await their hearings in Mexico, where they face the threat of extortion, kidnapping, sexual assault, and death. But the program was reinstated as litigation made its way to the Supreme Court.

Over five thousand people have been returned to Mexico under MPP since the program resumed in 2021, mostly from Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela. Those who do manage to pursue their cases are all but summarily rejected. Under Trump, fewer than 1 percent of MPP asylum seekers’ claims were successful. Under Biden, those odds have increased — to a miserable 2.4 percent.

The grounds on which Ms. Goodfriend bases her case

• All those people who died in a semi in San Antonio when the air conditioner failed.
• More people are being apprehended at our southern border than under Trump.
• Most of the asylum requests are summarily dismissed, just as under Trump
• The Biden Administration has continued to try to persuade Mexico to reduce migrant movement through their territory

Lest there be any ambiguity Ms. Goodfriend favors open borders:

These are long-term, distant goals for addressing long-standing relations of domination, exploitation, and extraction. But we have to imagine a future in which the world’s working class can make their lives where they choose and cross borders as freely and as safely as capital does today.

Now there’s an anti-immigrant policy.

A right to emigration is accepted at least notionally by every country that is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I know of no country that accepts a right of immigration. Would you like to know what a pro-immigrant policy would look like? I think it would look a lot like the immigration policies I’ve argued for here which, not coincidentally, resembles those of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Under such conditions the wages of low-wage immigrants would rise. Additionally, people who entered the country illegally would not be under the thumbs of organized crime.

I don’t believe that Joe Biden or his administration are anti-immigrant. Indeed, I think that’s nonsense. I think they’re trying clumsily to be pro-immigrant but, conditions being what they are, even the best of intentions have ways of backfiring. It’s not for nothing that the administration’s policies are known as “La invitación” in Mexico and Central America. There is a tremendous temptation when the White House changes parties for the incoming president to want to do everything the opposite of his predecessor. Running afoul of circumstances isn’t that unusual.