On the menu today: One of the many, many reasons that the Democrats appear headed to a shellacking in the coming midterms is which issues command this administration’s attention. Democrats may not love the idea of tougher and more extensive enforcement of border laws, but they’re living with the consequences of a relentless surge in migrants, while the Democratic focus on forgiving student loans is the top priority of so few Americans that Gallup has a hard time finding anyone who holds that belief. Meanwhile, New Hampshire Democratic senator Maggie Hassan tries to reinvent herself as a border hawk.
The Border vs. Canceling Student Loans: What the Biden Team Prioritizes
Over in The New Republic, Daniel Strauss writes a piece with the headline, “Republicans’ Midterm Play: Scare Up Another Border Crisis.”
The thing is, though, the Republican Party doesn’t need to “scare up” a border crisis; there really is an actual, genuine border crisis that is apparently hard to see from the offices of The New Republic. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the southwest border jumped dramatically in March 2021, and have stayed high ever since.
If you live near the border, you probably think about illegal immigration and the consequences of it every day, or at least frequently, because you often see those consequences. If you live in other parts of the country — say, the well-off suburbs of a major northeastern city — you probably think about illegal immigration and the consequences of it much less frequently, or perhaps not at all. Our Carine Hajjar recently wrote a lengthy and detailed piece for the print magazine about life in Val Verde County, Texas, after riding along with border-patrol officials for a week:
Last month, Customs and Border Protection had 209,906 encounters — both expulsions and apprehensions — with migrants at the southern border. That number breaks a 22-year record. In March 2000, 98 percent of illegal immigrants were Mexican nationals. Last month, a record-breaking 39.5 percent were “long distance” migrants, meaning they were not from Mexico or Northern Triangle countries. Migrants far and wide are receiving a clear message: It’s easy to enter the U.S. illegally. And that message will only be reinforced by the termination of Title 42 in May. A Trump-era limit on asylum, Title 42 was invoked by the CDC in 2020 to mitigate the spread of Covid. The Biden administration has clung to it as its only remaining form of border control. But with the pandemic waning, it has become harder for the Biden administration to justify keeping Title 42. Without it, there will be a deluge. The Department of Homeland Security is preparing for up to 18,000 daily encounters.
“What we’re getting coming through here are the prior deports and criminals that have zero chance of ever getting any kind of asylum or paperwork to stay,” says a Kinney County officer while checking on Harris Ranch, where owner John Sewell manages over 30,000 acres with the help of his friend Jim Volcsko. The officer, who wished not to be named, mentions rape, aggravated robbery, and aggravated sexual assault of a child. Volcsko, a former CBP agent, chimes in: “There’s a lot of pedophilia.”
A trooper from the state’s department of public safety joins the conversation as we sit on the back porch of the ranch house: “For the most part, it’s all males. . . . They’re smuggling mostly people” (as opposed to drugs). Sewell speaks of an “unprecedented flow” in the last year. Just this morning, he had 15 migrants walk through.
Hajjar calls the current policy and circumstances at our southern border inhumane. “The lesson of all this suffering is clear,” she writes. “To have a truly humane border, and a system that keeps both migrants and Americans safe, there must be order.” The current chaos and widespread human trafficking isn’t good for the illegal migrants, they aren’t good for our border-patrol officers, and they aren’t good for our law-abiding legal immigrants and native-born citizens. It all seems to be working out pretty darn well for the coyotes and human smugglers, though.
Any commander-in-chief and White House staff worth their salt would look at the current U.S. border and see it as a dire and pressing crisis — particularly for a man who pledged “a presidency for all Americans.” Instead, there is a Mr. Magoo-like blindness, charging ahead with a policy that even loyal Democrats think could spell disaster. Senator Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.) seemed to suddenly remember that she’s facing reelection in six months and taped a video in front of the border fencing calling for more border-fencing construction. Back in 2018, she was not particularly enthusiastic about building additional border fencing:
Constructing a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border may not be the best barrier against the influx of drugs into Lawrence and New Hampshire communities, Sen. Maggie Hassan told reporters Monday.
Following a visit to both sides of the border last week, Hassan discussed the U.S. and Mexican governments’ efforts to stop drug cartels and the ferrying of drugs into the Granite State.
“In different situations, a physical barrier may be appropriate. There may be something they need first before that,” the senator said. “It is really clear from talking from to our border patrol agents that we need more tools are our disposal at the border to combat flow of drugs. We need more border patrol personnel, first and foremost, and we more infrastructure like roads for them to get to different portions of the border faster.”
It’s amazing what Senate Democrats discover in reelection years, huh?
Last week, Axios offered an unnerving report that even Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has privately told members of Congress he’s concerned with the Biden administration’s handling of its plans to lift Title 42 on May 23. Publicly, Mayorkas says Title 42 will end as scheduled.
You may have noticed that President Biden doesn’t talk about the southern border or migrants much. He discussed it briefly in the State of the Union Address, but on those rare occasions when he discusses illegal immigration, he prefers to focus on his plan to “allow undocumented individuals to apply for temporary legal status, with the ability to apply for green cards after five years if they pass criminal and national security background checks and pay their taxes. Dreamers, TPS holders, and immigrant farmworkers who meet specific requirements are eligible for green cards immediately under the legislation. After three years, all green card holders who pass additional background checks and demonstrate knowledge of English and U.S. civics can apply to become citizens.” Whether or not Biden is willing to call this policy an amnesty, it allows people who entered the country illegally to escape criminal prosecution and deportation and eventually become citizens. The prospect of amnesty is one of the factors that makes migrants in Central America conclude that trying to sneak across the border is worth the risk.
Contrast how the Biden administration sees illegal immigration, which worsened after it had been on the job for a month or two, to how the administration sees the issue of forgiving student loans.
The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas, formerly of Vox, offers a surprisingly clear-eyed piece on who worries about student debt and how high a priority it is for them:
Just 13 percent of the country carries federal student debt. Gallup frequently asks Americans what they believe is the most important problem facing the country today. According to the Gallup analyst Justin McCarthy, the pollster is unable “to report the percentage of Americans who have mentioned student debt or student debt cancellation because it hasn’t garnered enough mentions to do so.” In 2022 so far, he told me via email, Gallup has conducted four polls on the question and “just one respondent mentioned this as the most important problem facing the nation.”
And then Demsas offers this particularly astute observation:
Advocates of debt cancellation are trying to build a coherent narrative for why a diverse coalition, many of whom have never attended college, should be in favor of forgiveness.
College-educated voters are not just dominant within the Democratic Party; they also dominate the media and, naturally, academia — two institutions that have significant power over what issues are brought to the fore. Importantly, academia and media have also become notoriously unstable work environments lacking sufficiently well-paying jobs. The demographics and precarity of these fields are likely playing a role in the prominence of the student-loan-forgiveness debate.
Illegal immigration isn’t often on the minds of the Democratic Party’s chattering class, so the administration pays it intermittent attention. But repaying those student loans looms heavily in the minds of the Democratic Party’s chattering class, so that policy proposal gets pushed to the forefront. Demsas notes that this proposal is akin to certain Democrats’ support for lifting the cap on the state and local tax deduction, a move that would primarily benefit upper-middle-class and wealthy suburbanites in places such as California, New York, and New Jersey. As racially diverse as the Democratic Party is, the party’s agenda is largely set by economically comfortable professionals in media, academia, certain corners of corporate America, and government workers.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans for a “Disinformation Governance Board,” and you are forgiven if you read the name and initially thought it was a board designed to govern the Biden administration’s disinformation.