The contrast between the two parties on illegal immigration couldn’t be sharper. Donald Trump erected a wall. Joe Biden erected a pole. Oops. Sorry. That should be “poll.” And Biden didn’t erect it. He was skewered by it.
Very few people think President Biden is doing a decent job at the southern border. More than twice as many think he has created a full-scale disaster. Those poll numbers aren’t just underwater. They’re headed for the Titanic in a flimsy submersible.
Faced with this disaster, Biden finally did what he has said for three years he had no authority to do. He issued some Executive Orders to close the border… .well, sort of, partially, maybe, under certain circumstances. It’s unclear why he thought he could issue orders demolishing Trump’s effective border policies during the first weeks of his new presidency but couldn’t issue others to restore tougher measures as the crisis unfolded.
And a crisis it is. Since Biden entered office, US Border Patrol has totaled some 8 million “encounters” with illegal immigrants at the southern border, overwhelming the agency’s manpower and the courts’ ability to hear cases. These migrants aren’t just coming from Mexico and Central America. They are coming from around the world, including America’s most dangerous enemies.
Once they touch US soil, these migrants are effectively home free for several years. They can available themselves of an extensive panoply of legal rights, which make deportation slow, cumbersome, and expensive.
Most immigrants have learned to say the magic words, “political asylum,” since that phrase ensures a long wait before deportation hearings. The real engine of migration is poverty, high crime, and political oppression, but those are losers in court. So the migrants ask for political asylum. Since there are no courts to hear their cases, they are simply released into the US “on parole” and asked to return for a hearing in a few years. That’s going as well as you might expect.
This influx of 8 million illegal immigrants would be bad enough. But they aren’t the only ones coming. Several hundred thousand more have entered the US secretly during the Biden presidency but escaped contact with border patrol.
These “gotaways” are not a random sample of all illegal immigrants. They are a particularly dangerous bunch, who have powerful reasons to escape contact with law enforcement. They are bringing in vast quantities of fentanyl and heroin, trafficking young girls for prostitution, setting up spy networks, and assembling terror groups to attack America’s cities and military bases. That’s the conclusion of FBI director Christopher Wray, who has issued that warning repeatedly to Congress. The threats posed by illegal immigrants, he says, are unprecedented in scale and scope, and many seem well-coordinated.
None of this is news to the Biden White House. The crisis has been building since the first week of his presidency, when the president began dismantling America’s borders. Voters shouldn’t be surprised, either. They voted for it. Biden promised these “progressive” changes when he campaigned in 2020.
Why is he issuing new orders now? Because his pollsters and political advisors have seen what voters think. They aren’t just unhappy about illegal immigration; they are furious. They rank illegal immigration alongside the economy as their top concern, and they blame Biden for the mess.
With only five months until the election, the White House has decided it’s time to at least look like they care enough to act. That signal will be particularly important if there is a terrorist attack associated with the open border.
The goal of these Executive Orders is the oldest one in the politician’s playbook: CYA. The orders are meant to solve a serious problem at the ballot box, not a serious one at the border. In fact, they don’t even try to close the border, only diminish the massive surge of daily arrivals. Stronger measures don’t take effect until more than 2,500 illegal immigrants arrive each day. Why not 250? Why not zero? Because the left-wing of the Democratic Party is fuming that the number is as low as 2,500. They would prefer no limits at all.
Biden and his advisors have genuflected to that wing of the party for three years. Now, they are looking at dreadful poll numbers and realizing that Bernie Sanders, AOC and George Soros are not the entirety of the party. They certainly aren’t representative of centrist, swing-state voters, the ones Biden needs to win.
The big political question is whether these Executive Orders will sway those undecided voters. Will they see them a strong action. Or will they see them tepid half-measures they can summarize in just four words, “Too little. Too late.”
