The Biden administration is divided into two camps on immigration, the Wall Street Journal reports. One side believes “policies aimed at deterring migrants from crossing the border don’t work,” and those on the other side “favor deterrence strategies.”
The Journal soft-pedals how radical the pro-migration wing of the Democratic Party is. Read the article yourself, and see if you can identify a single migrant that this wing of the party ever believes should be deported or turned away at the border. You can’t. The far-left radical open borders wing of the Democratic Party doesn’t believe any migrant should ever be turned away.
Say what you will about open borders, but it is at least a coherent worldview.
The same can not be said for the enforcement wing of the Democratic Party. Which illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States and which should be turned away at the border? The enforcement wing of the Democratic Party has no principled answer for this.
Witness the saga of how the Biden administration constantly flip-flopped on Haitian migrants this summer. From the Journal:
Others countered that the country was too unstable to receive migrants and pushed instead for all Haitians present in the U.S. illegally to be shielded from deportation through a mechanism known as Temporary Protected Status, as Mr. Biden had said he would provide for Haitians during the campaign.
Ultimately, officials decided to follow two tracks: Haitians in the U.S. illegally before July 29 were allowed to stay, but new arrivals could be deported.
Note that there is nothing legal or special about July 29. It is just a random date the Biden administration came up with. There is no moral difference between a Haitian who illegally crosses the border on July 28 and one who illegally enters on July 30. But in order to appear tough, the random July 29 date was chosen.
Back to the Journal:
Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, signed off on the deportations, people familiar with the matter said. But he reversed the decision and ordered them released after immigration advocates flagged that the migrants were eligible for deportation protection since they arrived before July 29, the people said.
News of their release spread on Haitian social media. A month later, about 30,000 Haitians crossed the border near Del Rio, Texas, with thousands crowded under a bridge. Those later arrivals, who didn’t qualify for the temporary deportation relief, were subject to a large-scale deportation campaign. The U.S. sent 58 deportation flights to Haiti in September, up from two the previous month, according to public flight tracking data.
The Journal overstates how many Haitian migrants were sent from the border to Haiti. Many thousands of them were allowed in. The standard for choosing who got in and who was sent to Haiti seemed completely random. It appeared that the only reason the Biden administration tried deterrence at all was because the situation was becoming a political nightmare. And that is exactly what happened, the Journal reports:
The deportations have helped dissuade Haitian migrants. Border Patrol agents made 1,083 arrests of Haitians in October, down from nearly 18,000 in September.
The immigration policy equilibrium in the Biden administration seems to be a default toward open borders right up until it becomes absolutely politically necessary to switch to deterrence. But as soon as the immediate political crisis is over, the default open borders policy resumes.
Until centrist Democrats can articulate an answer to the question of who should be allowed to enter the country and who should be turned away, all future Democratic administrations will be doomed to repeat this cycle.
