It was a concession of sorts that President Biden gave a speech Thursday addressing the border crisis that he has alternately denied or blamed on his predecessor.
The answer, according to the president, is to work to legalize the flow of illegal immigrants. This is border enforcement by redefinition and can be expected to work about as well as the current Biden approach to the border, which is to say not at all.
The president presumably felt compelled to speak because everyone acknowledges that the end of Title 42 — currently before the Supreme Court — could bring a tidal wave of new illegal immigrants, and even some Democratic mayors have been balking at the strain of the flood of new arrivals.
The administration says it’s going to continue to make use of Title 42 as long as it stands, but in his speech, Biden set out an alternative regime that the administration will begin implementing right away and will supposedly pick up the slack if and when Title 42 goes away.
The catchphrase is creating “safe and orderly” pathways to the United States. There’s a reason that that sounds a lot like Bill Clinton’s famous “safe, legal, and rare” line about abortion. Just as Clinton was using a euphemism for unrestricted abortion, the administration has come up with an anodyne way to describe largely unconstrained entry into the United States.
The idea is that by allowing would-be migrants to come in legally it will stop people from showing up at the border illegally. So, the administration is going to allow up to 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti into the U.S. every month, provided they follow a formal process and apply from their home countries.
On the other hand, the administration is warning that anyone from these countries who shows up at the border will be ineligible for the new program and quickly expelled to Mexico, which has agreed to take in up to 30,000 migrants a month from these countries.
There are a couple of problems with this. One, the administration is making an implicit concession that the migrants coming here as supposed asylum-seekers are really economic migrants looking for work. This strengthens the case for excluding them, not further distorting our system to allow them entry.
Will this at least diminish the numbers coming to the border? The administration points to its experience with a pilot version of this program just for Venezuelans. There were indeed fewer apprehensions of Venezuelans once there was a legal pathway, but it’s not clear that the Venezuelans not able to avail themselves of the legal avenue didn’t just join a surge of so-called “got aways” who came across the border and either weren’t caught or didn’t turn themselves in to authorities.
The Biden admin did this with Venezuelans late last year, and called it a major success because the number of Venezuelans turning themselves in at border dropped significantly.
However, the number of known gotaways has skyrocketed, with more than 70,000 per month recently.
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 5, 2023
Then, there’s the matter of expelling migrants from these countries who don’t apply legally. If Mexico really takes 30,000 a month, what happens to migrants over and above that number?
In addition, the administration talks tough about using “expedited removal” for illegal crossers, but if they say they have a credible fear of persecution, they are going to be able to exploit all the same loopholes and irrationalities to get and stay in the country. There’s a reason that the percentage of migrants subject to expedited removal who claim credible fear went from 5 in fiscal year 2010 to nearly 50 percent in fiscal year 2018.
As Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies points out, the way around this would be either to detain the migrants until their asylum claims are adjudicated, as is supposed to happen under the law, or to compel them to stay in a foreign country while their claims are considered (as Trump did, successfully, with Remain in Mexico). The Biden administration has no interest in either.
It offers this latest scheme instead. We don’t need “safe and orderly” entry into the United States so much as “swift and certain” removal from it. Biden might succeed in reclassifying a portion of the influx of illegal immigrants as something else, but that shouldn’t qualify as border enforcement, sound policy, or honest accounting.