Democrats made this mess themselves by dismantling the policies that the Trump administration had used to get a handle on the problem.
Democrats made this mess themselves by dismantling the policies that the Trump administration had used to get a handle on the problem.
P resident Biden has a knack for immediate disasters. This week’s end of Title 42, a pandemic-era measure designed to keep migrants from spreading Covid-19 into America, isn’t just the loss of one tool for enforcing the law. Under Biden, its expiration means the effective opening of the U.S. border.
Because Title 42 was rooted in public-health hysteria, it was the only rubric under which the Biden administration would rigorously enforce the border. All other laws and regulations that flow from the normal and necessary legal distinctions between U.S. citizens and foreigners who have no right to reside in the United Sates are — for Democrats — presumptively unjust and irrational. And so, the Democrats treat those laws with what they see as compassionate neglect.
Already the effect is deranging. The Border Patrol has announced it will begin simply releasing detained migrants into the streets of Yuma, Ariz., today. Daily records are already being set, where the Border Patrol is encountering more than 10,000 illegal border-crossers every day. Thousands of Haitians have gathered at the U.S. border across from McAllen, Texas. You read that right. These are migrants who flew from Haiti — the nearest thing in the Western Hemisphere to a failed state — and sought to cross the Mexico–U.S. border on foot.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the sharply increased use by migrants of the Darien Gap — a patch of treacherous jungle and mountains that effectively separates North and South America. There are no roads there, nor cellphone service, nor human settlements for hundreds of kilometers — just deadly snakes and poisonous frogs and billions of mosquitoes. Migrants use the gap to connect the easy travel-visa requirements of South America with the Mexican land border to the States.
It’s extremely dangerous. And yet, since I wrote that column, all observers have begun rapidly revising upward the number of people they estimate will make the dangerous journey. It was 100,000 in 2021. Early estimates started at 400,000 this year, but some observers expect that may climb to over a million. Through this route, the Globe and Mail reports that Panamanians, Colombians, and Venezuelans now walk alongside migrants from Afghanistan, Nigeria, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia, Syria, and even China. These migrants are exposed not only to the natural dangers of the jungle, but also the predations of drug cartels.
While acknowledging it will have administrative problems at the border, the Biden administration is still, insanely, arguing in public against the existence of borders altogether. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas blamed Congress for not passing comprehensive immigration reform. He said an “international partner” asked of him the following question:
What is the economic cost of your broken immigration system, since there are businesses that are desperate for workers? There are desperate workers in foreign countries looking for jobs in the United States, and send much-needed remittances back home.
Mayorkas thinks this is strong stuff, as if the mere desire of some businesses for “desperate” labor should open the border like saying “open sesame.” Why does he think it is self-evident that we should want American businesses to have so many “desperate” people, or that Americans like the idea of American wages being paid and shipped out of the country?
It seems not to occur to Mayorkas that businesses so desperate for workers could . . . raise wages and maybe take some of the prime-age men who have dropped out of the workforce in the last four decades back into the labor market.
Democrats made this mess themselves. They dismantled the policies that the Trump administration had used to get a handle on the problem. There is no need to blame Congress.
A rigorous enforcement of our laws and a few messages from the president to the effect that the border is closed, and that you will be sent home swiftly, would have a massive salutary effect of discouraging migrants from exposing themselves to drug dealers, cartels, or the natural dangers. Unfortunately the Biden administration does not care about the migrants themselves, as humans. Progressives encourage this disorder, chaos, and occasional death as their form of protest against the evils of nativism. If you look at the situation at the border and it occurs to you that it is “psychotic,” that’s because it is.