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Opinion | The Border Crisis Could Still Be Biden’s Opportunity


What is the best way to honor and preserve America’s traditions of welcoming immigrants? Treat them like stage props, as Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida did last week by bringing about 50 unsuspecting Venezuelan refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, right – even if the progressive response exceeds that imitation: If Edgartown felt the strain of hosting a few dozen unexpected guests in a day, how would residents in places along the border feel about the thousands of uninvited people that came every day?

However, as difficult as DeSantis’ stunt was, it was politically successful because it reacted to a policy of see-no, admit-no-fault, denial-of-consequence and border policies. blame-is-the-last. Maybe it’s time for the government to start doing something better.

To get a sense of the current situation, consider Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent conversation on immigration with NBC’s Chuck Todd:

Todd: “Do you call the border secure?”

Harris: “I think it doesn’t matter that we do what the president and I have asked Congress to do. The first request we made, passed a bill to create a pathway to citizenship. Safe border. But we also have a broken immigration system, especially in the last four years before we arrived and it needs fixing. “

Todd: “We’re going to have two million people cross this border for the first time. Are you confident that this border is secure? “

Harris: “We have a secure border, that’s a priority for any country including us and our administration.”

Is this some bold semantic attempt to redefine the concept of “safety frontiers”? In calendar year 2019 (the last pandemic year of the Trump administration) there are about 921,000 “encounters” between customs agents and migrants at the southern border, according to government data. By 2021, that number has grown to about 2 million. In 2022, as of the end of August, it has reached about 1.6 million. Many of these encounters lead to immediate deportation, but other migrants are released to await hearings they will likely never attend. hundreds of thousands more Sliding across the border undetected.

The authorities want to blame the turmoil in Central and South America, especially Venezuela, for the recent rise. But the refugee crisis in Venezuela has dragged on for years. Covid conditions are unmistakably worse across Latin America, but that’s not a convincing explanation either: There have been economic, political and social hardships in the region for centuries. , and an increase in migration before, but nothing on the scale that we are seeing now.

A better explanation is that the Biden administration that came to power heavily touted the fact that it wasn’t Donald Trump, which is why the surge started almost the day Biden took office. Sensing the change in tone and approach after Trump’s defeat, the migrants once again fled poverty, violence and devastation left by storms and headed north to America,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Michael D. Shear of The Times Report in March 2021.

This is not an accident of policy. That is an intention. Biden running for president promises to end Trump’s “Stay in Mexico” policy. In office, he immediately signed an executive order suspended build the wall. He proposed legislation that promised a path to citizenship. His administration struggled to end Title 42, the most effective tool border agents had to immediately deport the migrants they detained. The overall message raised migrants’ expectations over the roof, triggering a predictable crisis at the border within a week of Biden taking office, as The Times’s Kirk Semple reported at that time.

This is political negligence on many levels.

The crisis at the border has strained frontline communities to the point of breaking. It strained faith in the rule of law. It mocks the legal immigration system and the players that follow its exacting rules. And it creates a mockery of people like Vice President Harris and others who are fooling themselves by trying to defend a policy that is clearly failing.

The crisis is an invitation to nationalists. That’s Trump’s ticket to the White House and possibly DeSantis’s as well. It alienated ideological Republicans, who believed in the benefits of managed migration but were defeated by the lawlessness argument. And it weakens the case for the path to citizenship, as opponents of the act could rightly argue that the path to solving illegal immigration is less than creating incentives for a new problem.

The crisis is a failure of liberalism, classical and contemporary. It raises questions about a Democratic president’s ability, or willingness, to resolve a fundamental law and order problem when it conflicts with progressive accords. And it raises a deeper question about maintaining civic identity in a country where so many people are not even citizens.

There is a solution for this. It requires us to be much more stubborn at our borders – as by finishing the wall – so that we can be more lenient with those who try to get over them. It’s not too late for the president to seize the opportunity to do just this.



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