Biden owns the worst illegal immigration since records began
November 23, 2021 03:42 PM
Joe Biden is on target, with policies at once vapid and cynical, to allow more than 2 million illegal migrants across the southern border into the United States this year — the worst influx since records began 97 years ago.
In October, Customs and Border Protection officials intercepted 164,303 people crossing the Mexican frontier. They come from 150 different countries, increasingly from the Eastern Hemisphere, and most are simply economic migrants. People head here primarily for the understandable reason that they’d prefer to live in comfort in a rich country than in penury in the backward ones from which they come. They are now dispersed around the country.
They don’t make coherent, let alone plausible, claims to be refugees. For that, under a 70-year-old United Nations convention, they would have to have a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin. Few do, although like many time-honored phrases, the U.N. definition is frayed to the point of disintegration, having been picked apart assiduously by its detractors.
The open-borders crowd on the Left and in the Democratic Party, who regard legal niceties and established processes as impediments rather than as safeguards of democracy, brush aside the distinction between migrants and asylum-seekers. They don’t approve of national borders in general and the U.S. border in particular, for frontiers are essential features of popular sovereignty to which, in their post-national anti-Americanism, they are hostile.
The Biden administration abandoned the Remain in Mexico policy, which was one of the previous administration’s notable successes, and has failed to reinstate it despite successive federal court decisions dismissing the claim that it was illegal.
What we are watching in migrant crises all over the globe is at least partly the result of the world getting richer. To acknowledge that is not to trivialize the vile and often terrifying conditions that many migrants are fleeing. Who would not wish to leave Syria, Iraq, Haiti, several parts of Saharan Africa, and the crime-ridden hellholes of Central and South America?
But this does not change the fact that today’s migrants are not nearly as poor as the world’s most deprived people were a generation ago. Mass migration is due not merely to the unpleasantness of the places being fled but to the fact that even poor people now have the internet and can see clearly how the other half lives. Many can scrape together thousands of dollars to pay the exploitative private-sector criminals and rogue governments who make their journeys possible.
Rogue governments are no stupider than legitimate ones; indeed, their insouciance toward decency allows them often to be more smartly self-interested than those, such as ours in Washington, that still pay it lip service. They can see how modern communication and relative wealth stoke mass migration, and they exploit it to the dismay and disadvantage of their strategic rivals.
Thus, Belarus’s illegitimate president, Alexander Lukashenko, who after stealing the 2020 election necessarily became the puppet of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is pushing duped Middle Eastern migrants across the border into Poland to undermine the Warsaw government and democracy in general, both in Poland and in the wider European Union.
Putin and Lukashenko, like the human traffickers in Mexico, care nothing for human suffering and see it only as offering an opportunity — a profitable one, for they collect fees from the migrants — to discomfit democracies.
The democracies being imposed upon face a difficult choice. They can be accused of failing in their legal and humanitarian obligations if they refuse to let migrants in, penning them back unsheltered at the border as winter gathers pace. But if they provide food, shelter, and other benefits of a properly civilized society, they send a welcoming signal and encourage more migration against the wishes and interests of their own populations.
Former President Donald Trump was accused of failing in his legal and humanitarian obligations, although the law was usually on his side, and it is debatable whether encouraging migration can be regarded as genuinely humane.
Biden, concerned as he is always to do the opposite of Trump even when that means rejecting what works, welcomes illegal migrants with open arms and parades the administration’s humanity while nevertheless using the “cages” installed by former President Barack Obama and defying the clear wishes of most in the U.S.
“Tough love” is a phrase too glibly thrown around, but there must be a tough policy to deal with mass migration. A country that does not enforce its borders gives up on the idea of being a country. For many on the Left, that’s the point.
25 % have covid 19 are are allowed to run free in the US and 59 % have VD Wow that beats Kamala Harris friends she has sneaking in the White- House for nightly orgies with her and Jill Biden , Did you vote for Biden and Harris and Why?
