In his regular Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley remarks on President Biden’s policy on immigration:
Beltway elites are reluctant to acknowledge it, but Mr. Trump had his ear to the ground on immigration. Voters didn’t always like his tone—and polling suggested they didn’t share his wall fixation—but his prioritization of border security resonated with millions, including many who typically vote for Democrats. Even Democratic strategists have acknowledged that deference to progressives, who by the way are now raising state income taxes to finance five-figure Covid-relief checks for undocumented workers, played a role in the party’s underperformance among Hispanics last year. Mr. Biden ignores all this at his peril.
By the time Mr. Trump left office, he had limited to 15,000 the number of refugees admitted annually to the U.S. In February, President Biden said that he would increase the cap to 125,000, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken later reduced to 62,500. Now the administration is having second thoughts about even that lower number, and for good reasons. The number of apprehensions along the southern border in March, more than 171,000, was the highest since 2006.
Now those statistics are somewhat miselading. “Encounters” as they’re called were reduced to 15,000 per month or thereabouts during a pandemic in which the U. S. was faring worse than Mexico. And various explanations have been put forward for the jump in encounters. We’ll kn9ow better in a month or so.
According to the U. S. Customer and Border Protection agency, the number of encounters in 2021 so far has exceeded those in 2019 on a month-by-month basis and jumped sharply in March. We’ll know in a month or so what’s actually happening but to all appearances it does appear as though something had changed. Whatever the cause of the jump, the number of unaccompanied children and teenagers has caused the Office of Refugee Resettlement to exhaust its annual budget and we’re only six months into the fiscal year.
Mr. Biden is already getting pushback on his approach to immigration from all sides—not just the nativists and restrictionists but immigration activists as well. Mr. Filey continues:
At some point, Mr. Biden will have to decide if his interest in immigration policy goes beyond political posturing. Our immigration laws need updating. Should the U.S. de-emphasize family ties and put more weight on the education and skills of newcomers, and how do you strike the right balance? What should we do with the millions of undocumented people who already live here? What are the economic and humanitarian costs of deporting them? And if you let them stay, how do you do so without encouraging future illegal entries or making immigrants who play by the rules look like saps?
These are questions worth debating openly and in depth, but serious debates are less likely to happen while hordes of foreign nationals are exploiting our laws or attempting to force their way into the country, and while the White House pays little more than lip service to trying to stop them.
It probably hasn’t sunk in yet, either for the president or Democrats more generally but the common experience of presidents is that, whatever their hopes, dreams, or goals, they are inevitably overtaken by events. We won’t end up judging the Biden presidency based on his promises or aspirations but on how he responded to those events.
Two concluding observations. Unless the teenagers and adults who cross the border illegally already speak. read, and write English fluently the odds are that they never will. That’s not judgmental; it’s just stating the facts. And public money will be lavished on them from the CBP to the OFRR to public schools, public safety, and health care and the jobs they’ll be able to secure will never be able to defray those costs.
Immigration, resulting in “melting pot†demographics, has been an enriching asset to this country’s cultural diversity. However, management and moderation, are the keys to making policies, governing the ground rules of any governmental department, workable and successful. Such “keys†have been foolishly absent in the Biden Administration’s approach to anything to do with border policy. Instead, the driving factor has been to eliminate any agreement or solution arising from the previous administration, without consideration as to how satisfactory or not it served to solve problems at the border.
Even though the circumstances at the border may seem overwhelming today, it will only become more problematic as the ramifications of Biden’s rudderless management unfold, manifesting themselves in schools, communities, crime, welfare systems and so on.
IOW, the worst is yet to come!
Trifling concerns to a truly transformational leader armed with the certainty that The Arc of History Bends Towards Justice.
The oppressed of Latin America will bloom like a sea of wildflowers in an awesome spectacle of loving diversity, freed from the need to market narcotics they will become artists, poets, community organizers.
Reading nightly to their children from the ever growing selection of autobiographies produced by The One Who Has Come to bring Hope, and Change to the dark hued peoples of the earth, they will realize why they are here. To end at last, at the ballot box, the most evil civilization that ever existed, built on the blood of slaves, the massacre of peaceful, welcoming dark skinned tribal people, Pallid legions, using reason as rational, have ravaged the peaceful earth until the globe itself gasps for breath, much like the gentle giant, lying in a golden casket, his wisdom stilled forever by evil men in crisply starched uniforms.
Joseph Biden, to his credit, knows his place, painfully aware of the stain of his ancestry he goes as he has always done, for direction, to The One.